If you are reading this on day six of a trial with a slightly worried feeling, relax. Cancelling Semrush takes under two minutes and you do not lose access straight away. You keep everything until the date you already paid for, or in the case of a trial, until the last trial day.
I cancel out of habit on day five of every trial I start, before I even decide whether I like the tool. It removes the stress entirely, and I have never once been charged by accident.
Cancel a Semrush subscription or trial, step by step
- Log in at semrush.com and click your profile picture at the top right corner.
- Choose Subscription info from the menu that drops down.
- Look for the section showing your plan and the next billing date. Under it you will find the option to cancel the subscription or turn off automatic renewal.
- Click it. Semrush will ask why you are leaving and will offer you something to stay, usually a discount or a pause. You can decline both.
- Confirm. You should see a message telling you the plan stays active until a specific date and will not renew.
- Check your email for a confirmation. If nothing arrives within a few minutes, go back and make sure the last screen was confirmed rather than closed.
Do this the moment you finish reading. Cancelling early does not shorten your trial. You keep full access until the final day either way, so there is no reason to wait and risk forgetting.
What happens after you cancel
Your account does not disappear. It drops down to the free plan, which keeps working with smaller limits. Your projects stay visible, but anything above free plan limits stops updating. Position tracking pauses, crawls stop refreshing, and exports are no longer available.
This is why I always export before the last day. A CSV of your keyword list and your audit issues sits on your computer forever and does not care what plan you are on.
Cancelling on the trial versus cancelling a paid plan
On a trial, cancelling before the last day means you are never charged. Nothing appears on your statement.
On a paid plan, cancelling stops the next renewal. The month you already paid for continues to the end. Semrush does not usually give partial refunds for a month in progress, so time your cancellation just after you have used what you needed rather than mid month.
If you want a refund
Semrush has a seven day refund window on new subscriptions. If you were charged and it has been under a week, contact support and explain plainly what happened. In my experience a short, polite message with the date and the invoice number gets a quicker answer than a long complaint.
The address to use is the support contact inside your account, since a ticket attached to your account moves faster than a general email.
Consider pausing instead
This is the option most people do not know exists. For a small monthly fee, Semrush will freeze your subscription and keep your projects, historical data and settings alive. When you come back, everything is where you left it.
If your work comes in waves, which mine does, pausing between projects is far cheaper than paying full price for quiet months and much less annoying than rebuilding projects from scratch. I explain where this sits against the normal rates in my pricing guide.
Before you cancel, make the trial count
If you are cancelling because the week got away from you, that happens to almost everyone the first time. The dashboard is crowded and it is easy to spend four days clicking around and learning nothing.
Next time, or right now if you still have days left, do these four things in this order:
- Start a site audit, because the crawl runs while you do other work
- Build one keyword list with difficulty under 30 and export it
- Run a keyword gap report against two competitors and export that too
- Pull a backlink list from the competitor that beats you most often
Four exports, about three hours of real work, and the value stays with you long after the account drops back to free.
Still have trial days left?
Run the four reports above before your access ends. Even if you cancel afterwards, you walk away with a keyword plan and an audit you can work from for months.
Open Semrush and start Takes about 60 seconds. Card needed to verify, no charge during the trial.Questions about cancelling
Will I lose my projects?
No. They stay in the account on the free plan, just without live updates beyond free limits.
Can I come back later?
Yes, and your old projects are usually still sitting there. You will not get a second free trial though.
I cancelled but still see the paid dashboard. Did it fail?
Almost certainly not. You keep paid features until the end date. Check Subscription info and look for a line saying the plan will not renew. If that line is there, you are done.
How do I delete the account completely?
Cancel first, then ask support to delete the account. Deletion is permanent and removes your project history, so export anything you want to keep before you ask.