Still getting emails from your old job? You're not alone

The last day of a job has a familiar routine. The laptop goes back to IT, the badge lands on a manager's desk and the final paycheck is on its way. Then, a few nights later, the former employee's phone buzzes with a work email about next week's team meeting.

That kind of lingering access is common. According to the 2026 Sagiss Managed Security Report: Employee Offboarding from Sagiss, a Dallas-based managed IT and cybersecurity provider, 79% of former employees say at least one work account or access point kept working after their last day. The findings are based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults who left a job involving computers or company systems in the past five years, conducted with Pollfish in September 2026.

Email was the most common loose end: A third (33%) could still log in to their work email, and 25% say it kept syncing to a phone or computer. Nearly half of all former employees (44%) had three or more accounts or access points still working. Each of those is a door into company systems that nobody locked, and the company is often the last to find out.

Turning In the Laptop Doesn't Turn Off Access

Collecting equipment was the most common offboarding step in the survey, but even that happened for only 28% of former employees. Among those who handed back a laptop or other equipment, 82% still had at least one account working afterward, and 35% could still log in to their work email.

After email, the accounts most often left open were shared files (25%), meeting invites and calendar updates (24%) and company AI tools (24%). One in three former employees say their employer took none of the offboarding steps the survey listed.

On their last day, 62% of former employees were completely or very confident that their accounts had been shut off. Among that confident group, 78% later found something still working, nearly the same rate as everyone else.

Customer Data and Payroll Stay Open to Ex-Employees

The open accounts often led somewhere valuable. Sixty-four percent of former employees could still see or reach at least one category of sensitive company information, including customer or client information (29%), financial records or payment systems (26%) and employee or HR records (22%). Another 17% still had admin accounts or shared company passwords. A regular access audit that deactivates former employees' accounts is one of the basic cybersecurity best practices for small businesses.

Respondents described client databases, company credit cards and payroll systems they could still open. "I could have set up my own company with that information," one wrote about a customer database. For any business that holds client data, that exposure poses a critical risk.

For 30%, access lasted more than a month, and for some, it hadn’t ended.

Flagging Lingering Access Leads to Nowhere

Most former employees didn't go looking. Among those with lingering access, 60% found out because notifications kept arriving, they logged in out of habit or a former coworker added them to something.

Forty-one percent told their old employer. Only 21% of them saw their access shut off the same day, and 31% say it was still working more than a week later. Another 40% said nothing, most often because they assumed the company would figure it out.

Forty-seven percent have used a former employer's systems after leaving, even briefly, most often to see what was still there (16%) or to grab personal files or contacts (14%).

Laid Off, Contract Over, Still Logged In

At companies with fewer than 250 employees, 82% of former employees had lingering access, compared with 70% at companies with more than 1,000. Former employees of those smaller companies were also more likely to still have access to sensitive information (67%, compared with 51%).

Abrupt endings didn't speed things up. Among workers who were laid off or let go, 59% say their access stayed active until later that day or longer after they were told their job was ending, and 27% say it lasted more than a week or never stopped. Contract and temporary workers had the highest rate of all: 89% had lingering access.

The number of logins mattered, too. Former employees with seven or more work logins had lingering access 87% of the time, compared with 71% for those with one to three.

Employee Offboarding Needs IT Engagement

A third of former employees (33%) say it wasn't clear who was responsible for shutting off their access, or that no one seemed to be handling it. Those who could name someone split almost evenly among their company's IT team (19%), HR (18%) and their manager (17%).

For smaller companies, handing offboarding to a managed IT provider can put one team in charge of the full account list and the same-day shutdown. That list should cover company AI tools, vendor portals and shared passwords along with email and shared drives, and for layoffs, the shutdown should be planned before the conversation happens.

Taking back a laptop is the easy part of an exit. Closing every account is the part that often gets missed. Until each account has a named owner and a shutoff date, the person who handed back that laptop may still be able to get into the company's systems.

This story was produced by Sagiss and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.