How to transfer ownership of your Google Domains to another Google Account

Though Google has sold off its Domains service to Squarespace, and users will be automatically transitioned over to the competition in due time, I wanted to cover something important – transferring your domain from one Google Account to the other. I figured that while you can transfer ownership of domains to other email addresses on Squarespace, you’d probably want to clean house a bit beforehand. Today, I’m going to show you how to do just that.

Just swap out domain managers

To get started, visit domains.google.com on the source account, and click on the domain you want to transfer. Then, click on the ‘Registration settings’ tab on the left, and scroll down to about the middle of the page. From there, you should see a ‘Users’ section that lists your email address. Click the ‘Add user’ button just below that which appears in blue text, and add the email address of the receiving account.

Here’s the cool part. Once you’ve visited your alternate Chrome profile and verified that the domain shows up for you on the same Google Domains URL, you can return to the source account and remove the original email address from the Users section by clicking the trash can to the right of that source email address.

Now, to reduce confusion, you should only see the new email address on the Users list, and the new account fully owns that domain! There’s no code, no nothing needed in order to achieve this. Luckily, it’s quick and painless.

But be sure to re-enable Auto-renew!

However, there is one thing you should be aware of. Yes, the new account owns the domain, and can manage it in full, including deleting it entirely, but in the midst of that transfer you just performed, Auto-renew for billing was disabled! This is because the other Google Account you gifted the domain to may have a different payment method on file entirely or none at all.

To resolve this, just visit the main ‘Domain overview’ tab on the new account’s Google Domains page for that domain and scroll down. At the bottom, you’ll see ‘Billing’, with a big, green circle around a calendar icon. By clicking the ‘Change renewal settings’ button, you can toggle the ‘Auto-renew is off’ section from a gray slider to a green one. Then, the option will pop up for you to enter or select a credit or debit card on file and explicitly state “Auto-renew is on” after that point.

And you’re done!

Of course, you’ll also receive an email confirming these changes, and you’re good to go! Just like that, you’ve effectively magicked the domain from one Google Account to another! I’ll be sure to create a step-by-step tutorial for transferring your domain to another hosting provider like Hostinger since I know that not everyone is going to be interested in being Squarespace’s customer, but given the breadth of options out there, I’ll do my best to keep that guide-to-be generic.