To cancel your Stash account, you have to empty it first: turn off every recurring investment, sell or transfer your holdings, withdraw your cash to a linked bank, zero out your Stash banking balance, and only then cancel the subscription inside the app. Stash is a brokerage, not a streaming service, so there’s no one-click exit. The whole process usually takes a week or more once you factor in trade settlement and bank transfers, and Stash keeps charging $3 or $12 per month depending on your plan until the subscription is actually canceled.1Stash. Stash Pricing Every day you delay costs money, so work through the steps in order.
Turn Off Auto-Stash and Round-Ups First
Before you sell a single share, go into your account settings and disable every automatic feature that funnels money into Stash. That means Auto-Stash (the recurring investment feature), round-ups, and any scheduled transfers from your linked bank. Check both sides.
This is the step people skip, and it’s the one that drags closure out for weeks. You sell everything, pull the cash, think you’re done, and then a $5 auto-investment lands the next Monday. Now there’s a new fractional share to sell, another settlement cycle to wait on, and a fresh balance keeping the account alive.
Sell Your Holdings and Withdraw the Cash
Stash won’t close an account that still has a balance anywhere on the platform. Place sell orders for every stock and ETF you own, fractional shares included. Most securities now settle on a T+1 basis, so cash from a sale becomes available one business day after the trade.2U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Shortening the Securities Transaction Settlement Cycle
Once the proceeds settle, transfer the cash to your external bank account using that bank’s routing and account numbers. ACH transfers typically arrive within one business day, sometimes two. Then confirm your Stash balance reads exactly zero. If a dividend or interest payment is still pending, wait for it to post before moving on. Stash charges $1 per month on accounts that still hold a positive balance during closure, so don’t let a few cents sit there.3Stash. What Are the Ancillary Account Fees
If you have a Stash debit card, drain that balance too. The banking side is a separate account that also has to hit zero, and pending card transactions will block cancellation until they fully post.
One thing to think through before you sell: liquidating your whole portfolio is a taxable event. Gains on positions held over a year get long-term capital gains rates; anything sold within a year of purchase is taxed as ordinary income.4Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 409, Capital Gains and Losses For a small account the bill is usually modest. If your portfolio has grown, run the numbers first, because a transfer may make more sense than a sale.
Transfer Your Investments Instead
You don’t have to sell. If you’d rather keep the holdings and just leave Stash, an ACAT (Automated Customer Account Transfer) moves your shares directly to another brokerage with no taxable sale. Open the receiving account first, then initiate the transfer from the new brokerage’s side. It usually takes five to seven business days.
Stash charges $100 per account for an outgoing ACAT.3Stash. What Are the Ancillary Account Fees Some receiving brokerages reimburse this on larger accounts, so ask before you start. Fractional shares don’t transfer: during an ACAT, Stash sells any fractional positions and sends the cash. Only whole shares move intact.
On a small account the $100 fee eats a real chunk of your balance, so selling and transferring cash is usually smarter. On a larger portfolio with real unrealized gains, the ACAT saves you from a tax bill that would dwarf the fee.
Closing a Stash IRA Is Different
If your Stash account is a traditional or Roth IRA, do not just cash it out. Withdrawing from a traditional IRA before age 59½ triggers a 10% early withdrawal penalty on top of regular income taxes.5Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Exceptions to Tax on Early Distributions Roth contributions come out tax-free, but early withdrawals of earnings face the same penalty and taxes unless an exception applies.
The clean path is a rollover. A direct rollover (trustee-to-trustee transfer) moves your Stash IRA straight to another custodian’s IRA with no tax event. If Stash sends you a check instead, you have 60 days to deposit the full amount into another qualifying retirement account. Miss the window and the whole distribution becomes taxable income, plus the 10% penalty if you’re under 59½. The IRS limits you to one indirect IRA-to-IRA rollover per 12-month period, so if you’ve already used one, the direct transfer is your only safe option. The ACAT fee for an IRA is the same $100, and compared to the alternative, it’s almost always worth paying.3Stash. What Are the Ancillary Account Fees
Cancel the Subscription in the App
Once every balance across every Stash account reads zero, you can cancel the subscription itself. In the app, open your profile (the person icon), find the subscription management option, and tap “Cancel my plan.” The web portal follows a similar path through account settings.6Stash. How Do I Cancel My Stash Plan
Expect a few retention screens: reminders of what you’re giving up, offers to downgrade instead. Keep clicking through to the final confirmation. If any balance is still sitting anywhere, the system blocks the cancellation and sends you back to clear it.
Stash emails a confirmation to the address on file once you finish. Save it. It’s your proof of the cancellation date if a surprise charge appears later. Trading access shuts down right away, though you can usually still log in for tax documents.
Get Your Tax Documents Before Access Ends
Even after closure, Stash has to send tax forms for the year you had activity. If you sold investments, you’ll get a Form 1099-B showing proceeds and cost basis for each sale.7Internal Revenue Service. About Form 1099-B, Proceeds From Broker and Barter Exchange Transactions Dividends during the year generate a 1099-DIV.8Internal Revenue Service. About Form 1099-DIV, Dividends and Distributions These usually arrive by mid-February. If you had a Stash IRA, Form 5498 reporting your contributions may not arrive until May or June.
Stash generally keeps a limited-access portal open for former users to download documents, but don’t count on it being there forever. Pull your final statements and tax forms as soon as they post, and store digital copies somewhere secure. The IRS can generally assess additional tax within three years of the date you filed,9Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 26 – Section 6501 so keeping your Stash records at hand for several years after closure is simple protection. If your login stops working before you’ve downloaded what you need, contact Stash customer support for copies.