A Comprehensive Guide to Transferring Airtable Base Ownership

Airtable's 2025 interface makes it easier to hand off work, but ownership is still tied to workspaces. The company's Working with collaborators help center article (updated October 31, 2025) clarifies that only workspace owners can promote another collaborator to owner. Use the step-by-step approach below to transfer control without breaking automations or billing.

1. Understand what "ownership" means

• Workspace owners control billing, plan level, and collaborator roles. A base automatically inherits the permissions of the workspace it lives in.
• Creators can build bases and automations but cannot reassign ownership.
• Enterprise admins can also reassign workspaces through the Admin Panel.

If you only need someone else to edit a base, granting them the Creator role may be enough. Ownership transfer is for cases where responsibility, billing, or compliance requirements change.

2. Pre-transfer checklist

Before you change any roles, work through this short list:

• Confirm the recipient has an Airtable account under the correct email and has verified their login (including SSO if your org requires it).
• Review active automations, scripting apps, and third-party integrations. Note anything authenticated with the current owner's credentials.
• Download a recent CSV or leverage Airtable's snapshot history so you have a rollback point.
• Alert stakeholders when the change will happen; moving a base to a different workspace can affect shared links and synced tables.

3. Promote a new workspace owner (current UI)

1. From the Airtable home screen, hover over the workspace that contains the base.
2. Click Share (or the ... menu > Manage access) to open the collaborators panel.
3. If the future owner is not listed, invite them and choose the Owner role. Airtable will send an email and mark the invite as pending until accepted.
4. To promote an existing collaborator, click the dropdown next to their name and choose Owner. Airtable immediately transfers ownership; you can optionally downgrade your own role to Creator or Editor.

The new owner now controls every base in that workspace, including billing. Repeat the process for any other workspaces that reference the same base via synced tables.

4. Move a base to a different workspace

If the recipient should control the base inside their own workspace, move it after you promote them:

1. Open the base, click the workspace name in the header, and choose Move base.
2. Select the destination workspace owned by the new collaborator.
3. Review sharing links and synced tables. If the base feeds other workspaces, update those connections to point to the new location.

Moving a base retains its revision history, automations, and Interfaces, but integrations that rely on workspace-specific API tokens may need to be reauthorized.

5. Enterprise Admin Panel handoff

On Business and Enterprise Scale plans, admins can reassign owners centrally:

1. Open the Admin Panel and browse to Workspaces.
2. Select the workspace, click Workspace owners, and promote the new collaborator.
3. Verify billing, security settings, and compliance policies once the change is saved.

This path is useful when the original owner has left the organization and cannot accept an invitation.

6. Post-transfer validation

• Run every automation and extension in test mode to confirm they still have permission to execute.
• Check that synced tables, Interfaces, and shared views render for the intended audience.
• Update documentation so team members know who now owns the workspace.
• Remove the former owner if they no longer need access. Airtable's usage analytics can help you confirm there are no lingering dependencies.

Keep momentum after the transfer

Handled carefully, ownership transfers are seamless for end users. Follow the checklist above and you'll preserve automations, avoid security surprises, and keep your Airtable estate well governed even as your team evolves.