Does Deleting a User Erase Their Records?

Myth:

“Deleting a user in ServiceNow wipes out their data—like incidents, approvals, and history.”

This is one of the most dangerous misconceptions in ServiceNow administration. Teams often believe that removing a user account will cleanly delete all associated records they touched, perhaps to comply with offboarding policies or clean up inactive users. But that’s not how it works.

The Truth: Deleting a user doesn’t erase the records they interacted with, but it can break system references and lead to major data inconsistencies. According to ServiceNow best practices (KB0963051), it is recommended that users should never be deleted. Instead, deactivate them by setting:

• Active = false
• Locked out = true

This maintains the historical audit trail (such as who approved what or handled which ticket) intact and avoids issues with foreign key relationships to user records.

Why This Matters in Real-World Use

• 🧾 Approvals, tasks, and audit history may reference the user—deleting them breaks those links.
• 🔍 Search and reporting: Past incidents may appear with blank "Assigned to" fields if the user is gone.
• 💣 Script or flow errors: Custom scripts or flows referencing sys_user data might throw null pointer exceptions if the record is deleted.

⚙️ Best Practices for User Offboarding

Use Case Recommended Approach: User leaves the company. Set Active = false and Locked out = true. Need to prevent logins, Ensure Roles are removed, and MFA is reset, while preserving approvals/history. Never delete the sys_user Record the Need for compliance traceability. Keep all user references intact for audit logs

🟡 Pro Tip: You can create a User Offboarding Flow in Flow Designer that removes roles, locks the user, and sends a notification to HR, without deleting any records.

Final Word

In ServiceNow, user deletion is a data integrity risk—not a cleanup tool. Keep users deactivated, not deleted, to maintain full traceability and avoid unexpected issues across your instance.

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