Heads up: this post contains affiliate links. If you click through them we may earn a small commission at no cost to you. We only recommend tools and services we've actually tried. Full disclosure →

Disconnecting an account from Rocket Money takes about 30 seconds. It's the data loss that takes a moment to absorb — unlinking is permanent and erases all the categorization, edits, alerts, and in-progress work tied to that account. This guide covers the exact steps on mobile and desktop, what specifically gets deleted, when you should actually unlink (vs just relink), and how disconnecting an account differs from cancelling Premium.

Per Rocket Money's Help Center: "Unlinking a financial institution will remove all associated data from Rocket Money, including edited transactions and applied rules. This information cannot be recovered if you relink your account." Worth pausing on that line before you tap Unlink.

Open Rocket Money →

10M+ members · Owned by Rocket Companies (NYSE: RKT) · Bank connections via Plaid (read-only)

Watch the walkthrough

What's in this guide

Most people who unlink end up regretting it the moment they realize what's gone. Before you do, check whether one of these is your actual goal:

Goal: fix a connection that keeps dropping. Don't unlink — use Fix Connection instead. The "An account requires attention" banner on the Dashboard re-authenticates with the bank and keeps all your data. See Why Does My Rocket Money Account Keep Disconnecting?.

Goal: stop seeing this account in budgets but keep its data. Don't unlink — exclude it from your budget instead. Settings → Linked Accounts → choose the account → toggle the budget-exclusion option. The account still syncs and keeps its history; it just doesn't count toward budget calculations. See How to Hide an Account From Your Rocket Money Budget.

Goal: troubleshoot a sync issue. Don't unlink — per the Help Center, "If you're trying to troubleshoot connection issues contact the Rocket Money Support team for further assistance." Unlinking and relinking will resolve some issues, but at the cost of all your data on that account. Support can sometimes fix the underlying issue without the data loss.

Goal: cancel Premium. Don't unlink — disconnecting a bank doesn't affect your Premium subscription at all. Use the dedicated cancellation flow. See How to Cancel Rocket Money Premium.

Goal: actually remove this institution permanently. OK — keep reading. The unlink flow is what you want.

What unlinking actually deletes

Per Rocket Money's Help Center, the unlink confirmation message states that you'll permanently lose:

  • All historic data for the disconnected institution.
  • Categorization edits — every time you re-categorized a transaction (changing "Other" to "Groceries," for example), that work is gone.
  • Transaction edits — any merchant name corrections, notes, splits, or other manual adjustments.
  • Any alerts set on those accounts (low balance, large transaction, etc.).
  • In-progress subscription cancellations tied to those accounts.

Critically: "This information cannot be recovered if you relink your account." Even relinking the exact same bank, with the exact same credentials, into the exact same Rocket Money account does not restore the deleted data. Plaid will pull a fresh history, but Rocket Money's metadata (your edits, your rules, your categorizations) is wiped.

If you've spent significant time tagging transactions or fine-tuning categorization, this is real work to lose.

Steps: Disconnect from the mobile app

Per Rocket Money's Help Center:

  1. From any page, tap the Settings (⚙️) icon in the upper-left corner of the app.
  2. Tap Linked Accounts from the side menu.
  3. Tap Unlink to the right of the institution you want to disconnect.
  4. A confirmation message appears explaining that you'll permanently lose all historic data, categorization and transaction edits, alerts, and in-progress subscription cancellations.
  5. Tap Unlink My Account to confirm.

The disconnect happens immediately. The institution disappears from your Linked Accounts list, transactions stop syncing, and the historical data is removed.

If you're disconnecting because the institution itself changed (you closed the account, the bank merged into another bank, you switched banks entirely), this is the right path. If you're disconnecting for any other reason, scroll back up to "Before you unlink."

Steps: Disconnect from the desktop website

Per the Help Center:

  1. Sign in to rocketmoney.com on a desktop or tablet browser.
  2. Click the Settings (⚙️) icon along the left-hand sidebar.
  3. Click Linked Accounts from the side menu.
  4. Click the three dots (•••) next to the institution you want to disconnect, and select Unlink.
  5. The same confirmation message appears.
  6. Click Yes, unlink to confirm.

The desktop and mobile flows do the same thing — pick whichever surface you prefer. Some users find the desktop confirmation a touch slower (and therefore more deliberate, which is helpful for an irreversible action), while the mobile flow is faster.

Reconsidering? If your concern is privacy or data exposure, Rocket Money connects via Plaid in read-only mode — meaning even with an account linked, no one can move money or change settings on your behalf. See Is Rocket Money Safe? for the security details. Read-only is the floor of what's possible; nothing is more locked down than what you already have.

Start Your Free Trial →

Disconnecting an account vs cancelling Premium

Per Rocket Money's Help Center: "Disconnecting a bank account will not cancel your premium subscription."

This catches a lot of users off-guard. Unlinking your last bank doesn't cancel Premium. Premium is a separate thing — your monthly or annual subscription to Rocket Money's paid features. To stop being charged for Premium, you need to follow the Premium cancellation flow, which is independent of which accounts you have linked.

The two flows:

  • To stop transaction sync from a specific bank — Unlink the institution (this guide).
  • To stop being billed for Rocket Money Premium — Follow How to Cancel Rocket Money Premium.

Both, neither, or one — they're independent toggles. You can keep Premium without any banks linked (though the app won't be very useful), or have many banks linked without Premium (the free tier still supports linking).

If you want to be done with Rocket Money entirely, do both: cancel Premium first, then unlink banks (or simply delete the account, which handles both). The account deletion guide walks through the full off-boarding.

What if you change your mind later?

You can always relink the same bank later. Plaid will reauthenticate, pull a fresh transaction history (typically 90 days back), and re-establish the connection. What you cannot recover:

  • The metadata you accumulated — categorizations, splits, notes, custom rules.
  • Alerts that were tied to the previous connection.
  • Subscription cancellations that were in progress.

If you relink, expect to spend time re-categorizing and re-setting alerts. For a small number of users this is no big deal; for users with months of carefully-tuned rules, it's a meaningful redo.

How this compares to YNAB, Empower, and Monarch

The disconnect flow is broadly similar across all four apps — pick the institution, confirm, done. Differences in the metadata-preservation behavior are where the comparison gets interesting:

Rocket Money. Permanent metadata deletion on unlink, including categorization edits and rules. Cleanest "fresh start" model but you lose your work.

YNAB. Categorization is local to YNAB's data model and persists across reconnect — disconnecting a bank doesn't wipe budget assignments or transaction categories. If you reconnect (or switch the same bank to manual entry), the historical data stays. This is one of YNAB's quiet advantages for users who heavily customize categorization.

Empower. Less metadata to lose because there's less manual customization in the first place. Disconnecting an investment account also removes the holdings history within Empower's view.

Monarch. Allows "soft" disconnects — you can pause a connection without deleting the data, then re-enable it later with everything intact. This is the most user-friendly model of the four for someone who's troubleshooting and doesn't want a permanent commitment yet.

If you frequently switch banks or want to experiment with disconnecting and reconnecting without losing your work, Monarch's model is the gentlest. Rocket Money's model is more "all or nothing."

Try Rocket Money Free tier identifies recurring charges, helps you spot subscriptions to cancel, and includes bill negotiation (available to all users — Rocket Money charges a 35-60% success fee on first-year savings only when negotiation succeeds). Premium ($7-$14/month sliding scale) adds Smart Savings, Concierge cancellation help, real-time sync, and detailed credit-score reporting. Try Rocket Money →

FAQ

Will my bank know I disconnected? Plaid sends an authentication revocation back to the bank. The bank's third-party access logs will show the connection ended. There's no notification or letter — it's just a quiet revocation.

Will Rocket Money keep transactions on my disconnected account anywhere? No. Per the Help Center, the data is removed when you unlink. There's no archive, no recovery, no support-side restore.

Can I disconnect just one sub-account at a bank without unlinking the whole institution? Not easily. Rocket Money treats the institution as one connection; you'd typically need to unlink and relink, this time excluding the sub-account during the link flow. Or, alternatively, exclude the sub-account from your budget instead — see How to Hide an Account From Your Rocket Money Budget.

If I cancel Premium, do my linked banks disconnect automatically? No. Linked accounts continue to sync on the free tier. Cancelling Premium just removes paid features (manual sync button, additional categories, advanced reports, etc.) — your bank links stay.

Will the bank charge me to disconnect? No. There's no charge from your bank for revoking third-party access via Plaid.

What if I'm closing my bank account entirely? Unlink it from Rocket Money before or after closing the account at the bank — order doesn't matter. The unlink will succeed regardless of whether the underlying account is still open.

My disconnect didn't seem to take — the institution still appears. Try refreshing the Linked Accounts page. If it still appears, sign out of Rocket Money and back in. If it persists across that, contact Rocket Money Support — there are rare cases where a Plaid-side revocation lags behind the Rocket Money UI change.

Related reading:

Not financial, legal, or tax advice. We earn a commission if you sign up for Rocket Money through a link on this page; the price is the same. Every claim is verified against Rocket Money's official Help Center documentation and the December 12, 2025 Content Affiliate Talking Points where applicable.