Articles on: Team management

Do archived employees use up paid licences?

In short: no. Archiving an employee frees up one paid seat (licence) — an archived employee does not count towards the seats taken, and you can use the freed seat for somebody new straight away, at no extra cost.

Important: How many employees can be active at the same time depends on the number of seats you have bought. Archiving is the way to free a seat up when somebody leaves the organisation.

What happens to the licence after archiving

When you change an employee's status to "Archived", their seat is released immediately — that employee disappears from the team list and no longer draws on the pool of seats bought. You can assign that seat to somebody new right away. The archived employee's data is kept, so the operation is reversible.

How to archive, restore or permanently delete an employee is described in Archiving, restoring and permanently deleting employees.

The "Inactive" status is not the same as "Archived"

That is the most common misunderstanding. Only archiving frees up a licence:

Inactive — a full team member without access to logging in (for example not yet invited, or with access taken away). They can still be scheduled and still take up a seat.
Archived — an employee removed from the team (offboarding). Frees up the seat, disappears from the lists, and the operation can be undone.

Caution: Changing the status to "Inactive" does NOT free up a licence. To get a paid seat back, use archiving rather than the "Inactive" status.

More about what each status means in Employee statuses and what they mean.

Restoring and free licences

Because archiving freed the seat up, restoring an archived employee requires a free seat. If every seat is taken, free one up first (by archiving somebody else) or buy more — only then will you be able to set the restored employee's status to "Active".

Updated on: 09/08/2026

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