I’ve been an Audible member since 2008. Lately, I’ve been accumulating credits in my Audible account so I decided to start exploring my Audible account options. This guide covers what I discovered and includes step-by-step instructions for how to cancel your Audible membership plus other options such as how to pause your Audible account or switch your Audible plan.
How to Cancel Audible Membership
Instructions to Cancel Audible Membership
To cancel your Audible membership, follow these instructions:
1. Go to the Account Details page on the Audible desktop site.
2. Click “Cancel Membership” at the bottom of the “Membership details” section.
3. Follow the on-screen instructions and steps. Before you cancel, Audible will make sure you don’t leave anything on the table and try to resolve any issues you have. We cover some of these items in more detail below.
4. After you cancel, an automated email will be sent to you as proof of your plan changes.
Things to Consider Before You Cancel Audible
Before you cancel your subscription, Audible will try to understand why and offer some recommendations, deals, and assistance to keep you as a customer. These include:
Remaining Credits
Do you still have any remaining credits?
You’ll want to use these because after you cancel you will lose access to your member benefits and all credits at the end of your final billing period. Helpfully, Audible will remind you if you have unused credits:
Exchange Audible Books
Did you know that Audible has a satisfaction guarantee?
This guarantee means if you didn’t love one of your listens, you can exchange it for another. We’ve put together the following guide to help with this: How to Return or Exchange Audible Audiobooks. Audible will also notify you of this before you finish canceling:
Switch Your Audible Plan
Have you considered switching your Audible membership to a different plan?
Available plans include Audible Plus, Audible Premium Plus (1 or 2 credits per month or 12 credits upfront), and Audible Silver:
Audible Cancellation Special Offers
Why are you canceling your Audible membership? Audible will you to take a minute to answer this question:
Depending on your answer, you may receive an offer from Audible such as the following Audible annual plan deal:
Contacting Customer Care
Are you wanting to cancel Audible because of unresolved issues e.g. technical problems?
If so, Audible asks you to contact Audible Customer Service to see if they can help. I’ve always found interactions with this team to be positive to don’t hesitate to do this. There are also multiple contact options – chat, phone, and email – which is nice.
How to Pause Audible Membership
Instructions to Pause Audible Membership
An alternative to canceling is to pause your Audible membership.
Perhaps, like me, you’ve been accumulating credits. Whatever the reason, Audible members with monthly plans can pause their account one time every 12 months. That pause can be anywhere between one to three months. For membership plans that don’t earn credits, this feature is not available.
To pause your Audible membership, follow these instructions:
1. Go to the Account Details page on the Audible desktop site.
2. Click “Pause Membership” at the bottom of the “Membership details” section.
3. Follow the on-screen instructions and steps to pause your Audible membership.
Note: if you don’t see an option to pause your membership or if you are not eligible to pause your membership through self-service (like me – see screenshot below), you need to contact Audible Customer Service. Contact options include chat, phone, and email. I paused my Audible membership by contacting customer service via chat and the process took no longer than 5 minutes.
4. When done, Audible sent me the below confirmation email confirming my Audible membership was on pause:
Things to Consider Before You Pause Audible
As per the above email, when pausing your Audible membership you should be aware of the following:
- While on pause you won’t be billed for your membership and you can still use your remaining credits. However, you will not have access to the Audible Plus Catalog until your membership resumes.
- You will still be able to listen to the titles you added to your library with credits, and purchase individual titles at Audible.com without membership. Your username and password will stay the same.
- You can change your mind about pausing and resume membership anytime you would like.
What’s your experience with canceling, pausing, or switching your Audible membership? Let us know if the comments below.
Are you looking for an Audible alternative? If so, check out our post on the 5 Best Alternatives to Audible. Benefits offered by some of Audible’s competitors include a more generous free trial, cheap audiobooks with no membership requirement, the ability to support your local bookstore, and more.
Thank you for these instructions. They are perfect!
Jan 2018 – They now have a “Pause” option. I chose 90 days, to allow me to catch up with some of my longer titles. Thanks for the instructions!
I have a problem that relates to switching or redirecting my account from Audible.com (USA) automatically to Audible .com au (Australia)
I have dealt with USA since inception and have purchased hundreds of titles. I automatically accrue 1 new credit per month. no problem.
However, every time I want to sign in it automatically switches me to the .au Australian company. This company despite many pleadings on my part to cancel my account continue to load 2 new $14.95 credits a month on my account.
I do not want to do business with the .au company. They are (or were) way behind in title selections and it is ridiculous to be charged for credits I have not authorized.
The search engine automatically states in a banner that I have been switched from ,com USA to .com AU based on my location. This is very wrong and more than frustrating. They do not appear to be the same company but a franchised or other entity.
Is there ay way I can fix this? I have tried, but no avail. My conversations with .AU in the past have been very disturbing, with their seeming to not understand my concerns etc.
What to do?
There is another option, which might be helpful for some people. I went to cancel my account and when asked for a reason chose “I’m trying to reduce expenses.” The first offer they had was to half my subscription for 3 months. I hit “continue cancelling.” The next offer was for $9.95 for the whole year, which would allow me to keep up to 36 credits for the whole year for the one-time fee. The plan is called AudibleListenerLight.
Can I just make sure, you mean you can keep the credits you already had paid for? If it was 36 new credits for $9.95 that would be an awesome deal!!
THANK YOU!- After trawling endlessly through websites saying that it was impossible to end this subscription… Finally an answer. Simple, clear and concise.
Great – Thank you
Worked really well : )
Thanks so much! THis worked perfectly!
I just tried this and the offer is actually 50% off the Gold Plan at the moment for three months! Awesome!
Thank you so much.
I wanted to put my account on hold but the page saying I’d lose my credits kept scaring me from going further.
Thanks!
I got $20 to stay after choosed cancel and to many credits. After that I could put the account on hold for 90 days
Thanks! I just got half off my next 3 months. It was a bit scary clicking continue when it was warning me of losing my credits, but sure enough, they bribed me to stay! That just saved me $22.50 over the next 3 months! WOHOO!
I just breezed through the ‘cancel’ process, assuming i’d be suspending the account as I have before. Got to the end and ‘boom’ account was canceled and credits are GONE. Never saw option to suspend for 90 days. Nice of Audible to keep changing things up. Never seen such a high profile company treat their subscribers with such contempt.
I’m guessing you didn’t get the option to suspend because you have previously done so in the past. That sucks though… suggest you contact Audible customer support to see if they can do anything.
You can only suspend once a year
If I cancel my account will I still have the books I downloaded to listen too?
Yes.
Three years later it still works. Thank you!
audible have changed their website and they no longer have the cancel membership button at the bottom left. i have seen some people saying that they purposely hide this button so no one will cancel their membership which is a big problem for me because i am on a very tight budget and i honestly cannot afford to have a membership anymore. I have tried calling the international call line but it says the number is inactive. please help
I did the cost was to expensive option. I was afraid I’d lose the 3 credits I had so I spent them before I did this. Well I was offered the 9.95 a year with 50% off coupons through out the year and you don’t lose your credits. So I did that but what it failed to say is that you can’t do returns like under the other plans. So I went to customer service chat option to see what we could do.
Turns out they have a Silver plan not on the site. Its 14 dollars, every OTHER month. This gives you 1 credit every other month and you can stock up to six. If you find yourself holding credits then having to spend on books you don’t really want, this seems a good way to go.
Also I was told if you lose credits, like you have 8 but your account only allows 6, if you contact customer service, they can reinstate your lost credits.
Hope this info is useful to someone. 🙂
FYI, looks like you can only suspend your account once. I had suspended my account once before, and when I tried it again just now I got “Sorry, you can only accept this offer once. If you have any questions please contact Customer Care at (888) 283-5051. We are available all day, everyday.”
I just called audible to put my account on hold after they had told me they were canceling for lack of payment (Credit card no longer valid). They told me they would let me roll over only six “points”. I have been paying for a gold membership since November 2012. I have received four books. I thought I was accumulating them and I would read them in my retirement. Too bad for me. Audible stinks.
Thank you for this! They certainly are insidious in their ways to try and keep people paying…I needed a little break in paying them, but didn’t want to lose my credits…this was perfect 🙂
This is exactly what I needed to read to learn about this stuff. Thank you so much for writing this up. You’re my hero of the hour. ^_^
Tnx for your help! It still works. I do think it is not right of audible to take away your credits when canceling your subscription.
It looks like this article was posted a few years ago, so I thought it would be helpful to confirm that this method *definitely still works,*
I’m now happily on hold with Audible. Thank you!
Yep … November 14 of 2015 … just got $20 to hold onto my gold account as I checked that I have too many credits that I don’t use. Thanks for the tip! 🙂 Martha
This was the perfect solution to my problem – didn’t want to lose my credits but wasn’t able to keep up with listening to them! Putting it on hold was perfect – thanks for the helpful article!
Just another update: still works as of today. Selected the “I get too many credits” reason, got the $20 offer, took that, then went right back and selected the same reason, was offered the 90-day suspension, and took that.
Thanks so much for posting this!
Very interesting to read these comments . I have been too busy to go to Audible and choose titles for my 4 credits . when I went to log in today I found that everything except my login had been wiped -my library , my credits, even my gold membership. Yet I am still paying their monthly fee. So I have emiled them to ask them to sort it. It says on Amazon that I have 4 credits so if I have no luck I’ll try to buy through that site- then might try to cancel it -although that “light” subscription sounds great.
Thank you for this, and thanks to Mike two posts up for pointing out the changes to the layout since this article was written. I did the same think Mike did, first I took the $20 credit, then I went right back and cancelled again for “too many credits” and got the 90 day hold.
If you have you canceled the membership the credits are now gone. Contact Audible (I did so by using chat)
Audible will need to enroll you again into a membership plan, so they can give you the credits back and then place your account on hold.
In the chat, I was offered a free trial and then they would place my account on hold for 2 months. So, I got all my credits back and one free credit and for 3 months there is no membership fee.
I forgot to mention that I had already done the $20 credit and have done a 90 day hold.
I just tried to cancel mine when it gave me opinions why I wanted to cancel I wrote that money was right right now and that was only reason then I cliccked on to cancel and it gave me 3 opinions 1 out of on hold 2 offer me same deal that I have 3 give me 1 free credit to stay with them. I couldn’t pass up the free credit
Re: “Audible only allows placing accounts on hold one time”
Copied 08/20/2016 from Audible: Monthly Audible membership plans can be placed on hold once every 12 months for a duration of up to three months. During this time you will not be billed your monthly membership fee. To place your account on hold, please contact Customer Care.
Thank you! I thought I might lose all my existing books plus I didn’t really want to cancel – just put my account on hold. Wonderful suggestions.
Does anyone know if when you put your membership on hold you lose your credits?
Thank you for all of the tips!
I was still hesitant, afraid I would lose my accumulated credits as a few people did, so I sent an email to audible asking how to suspend without losing credits. Within seconds I received an email (which ended up in my spam box….so if you are going the email route…..make sure to check it. ) The email simply said that my membership would be put on hold for 90 days, that I could continue to use my accumulated credits, and membership would resume after t he 90 days.
I am definitely going to ask about the Silver membership once my account is active again!
Happy holidays to all!