HR Checklist

Employee Offboarding Checklist

What to do, and when, from the day somebody gives notice to the day you close their file.

36 steps
5 phases
7 with a legal deadline

Offboarding goes wrong in the same two places every time: a final paycheck that misses a state deadline, and access that stays live after somebody has left. One is a penalty, the other is a security incident, and both come from the same cause — nobody owning the sequence.

This is that sequence, in the order it happens. Steps marked Deadline carry a statutory clock; the rest will not generate a penalty but are what separate a clean exit from a messy one.

Day 0

The day notice is given

Every deadline below counts from one date, so the first job is fixing that date in writing and telling the three teams who need it. Almost every late final paycheck starts here, with a leaving date nobody confirmed.

Acknowledge the resignation in writing and confirm the last working day. The confirmed date is what every deadline below counts from, so put it in writing before anything else moves.
Establish the final paycheck deadline for the employee’s work state. Deadline It varies by state, and whether the exit was a resignation or a termination often changes it. Check the deadline for your state →
Tell payroll, IT, facilities and the direct manager on the same day. IT needs the date to schedule revocation for the right hour, not the right week.
Decide whether the departure is announced, to whom, and when.
Log the reason for leaving against the record, for later attrition analysis.

Notice period

Before the last day

The notice period is the only window where the person leaving can still answer questions. Spend it on handover and on building the two lists — what they have, and what they can reach — because chasing either afterwards rarely works.

Write down what only this person knows, and who takes each item. Named owners, not a shared document nobody has been told they own.
Reassign open tickets, active deals, recurring meetings and approval chains.
Transfer ownership of files, shared drives, repositories and any automation running under their account. Scripts and scheduled jobs tied to a personal account are the ones that surface weeks later, when they fail.
Remove them from on-call rotations and escalation paths.
Hand over external relationships — clients, vendors, candidates — with an introduction, not a forward.
Build the asset list: laptop, monitor, phone, badge, keys, company card, hardware tokens. Serial numbers now; chasing an unlisted device after the last day rarely succeeds.
Build the access list: email, SSO, VPN, every SaaS tool, admin consoles, production systems, shared credentials. Anything they knew a shared password for has to be rotated, not just un-shared.
Schedule the exit interview while they are still engaged enough to be candid.
Confirm accrued but unused PTO, and whether it is payable. Deadline Some states require payout, some defer to written policy, and a policy that is silent tends to be read against the employer.
Settle outstanding expenses, advances, commissions and bonus eligibility.

Final day

The last day

One day, two jobs: get the knowledge and the kit back, and close the doors behind them. Revocation is scheduled for an hour, not a week, and shared credentials get rotated rather than un-shared.

Run the exit interview, and record it somewhere the answers get read.
Revoke access on the agreed schedule — email and SSO first, then everything downstream. Ending SSO sessions matters as much as disabling the account; an open session outlives the revocation.
Collect every asset on the list and mark each one returned, with condition noted.
Deactivate physical access: badge, door codes, parking, alarm codes.
Rotate any shared credential the person had. Including anything in a team password manager they could read.
Set an email forward or auto-reply that names the person now handling their work.
Remove them from distribution lists, group inboxes, calendars and internal directories.
Confirm the final pay amount: wages, PTO if payable, commissions, expenses, and any lawful deduction.

First days

Immediately after

This is where the penalties live. Two clocks are running — one set by the employee’s state for the final paycheck, one set by federal law for the COBRA notice — and neither waits for your payroll cycle.

Issue the final paycheck by the deadline for that state. Deadline Missing it is the single most common and most expensive offboarding error, and penalties in some states accrue per day. Confirm the date →
Notify the health plan administrator of the qualifying event within 30 days. Deadline That is the employer’s federal window. The administrator then has 14 days to send the election notice — 44 days in total if you are also the administrator.
Confirm the COBRA election notice actually went out, and keep proof that it did. Deadline The burden of showing the notice was sent falls on the employer, and "the system sends it" is not proof. Work out the notice dates →
Send the state-required separation or unemployment notices where your state has one. Deadline
Terminate benefits at the correct date, not the last day worked, where the plan runs to month end.
Close the payroll record after the final payment has cleared.
Cancel or reassign the SaaS seats and licences they held. This is the line item nobody reclaims; it is also the easiest saving in the whole process.

Within 30 days

Closing the file

The part that gets skipped, and the part an auditor asks about. It is also the cheapest: retention, records, and reclaiming the licences nobody cancelled.

Confirm the address on file is current, so the W-2 reaches them in January.
Retain the I-9 for the longer of three years after hire or one year after separation. Deadline Federal, and the clock that catches people is the one-year-after-separation half.
File the signed separation paperwork, final pay statement and asset return record together.
Update the org chart, headcount and any open-role requisition.
Record rehire eligibility and the reference position while the detail is fresh.
Add what went wrong to the process, not to a person’s memory. Every missed step above is a checklist item somebody did not have.

Final Paycheck & COBRA Compliance Calculator — the final-pay deadline in any state, and the federal COBRA dates.
Employee Onboarding Checklist — the same discipline at the other end of the lifecycle.
The offboarding process, explained
Offboarding software — if you would rather this ran itself.

General guidance for US employers, not legal advice. Final pay deadlines, PTO payout rules and separation notices vary by state and change — confirm the current requirement for the employee’s work state with the Final Paycheck & COBRA calculator or the U.S. Department of Labor .