The Easiest Way to Move Google Contacts from One Google Account to Another

Google Contacts is easily the most convenient way to store your contacts online and sync them across all your devices. But despite being incredibly reliable and including most of the essential contact management features, it does fall short in some scenarios.

For instance, if you’re logged into multiple Google accounts on different devices and want the contacts across all of them synced together, Google Contacts doesn’t provide an option to sync contacts between different Google accounts.

Similarly, if you just created a new Google or Gmail account and want your old Google contacts list transferred over to it, you can’t transfer contacts between accounts directly in Google Contacts.

There is, however, a possible workaround to import Google Contacts to a new account. In this guide, we’ll walk you through its steps to help you move Google contacts (or Gmail contacts as some people refer them as) from one account to another. And this can be done on either desktop (Mac or Windows or Linux) or phone (Android or iPhone).

How to Move Google Contacts Between Two Google Accounts

Although Google Contacts doesn’t have a straightforward, one-step solution to transfer contacts between different Google accounts, it still has built-in export and import functionalities that facilitate the transfer process.

As for the process itself, you can either carry out the transfer on your computer or Android phone, depending on your preference. However, we feel using a computer is a relatively more straightforward approach as you can navigate between accounts and different menus on it quite easily.

Below are the steps demonstrating the two-step process to move contacts between multiple Google accounts on your computer.

Step 1: Exporting Google Contacts

First, you need to export contacts from the source account (Google account from which you wish to move your contacts) and save it to your computer. Here’s how you can do it:

Open a web browser and visit Google Contacts. Enter your email address and password to log in to your Google account.

Once logged in, you have two options to transfer contacts: move all contacts at once or move select contacts.

If you wish to move all contacts at once, click on the Export option from the drop-down menu to open the Export contacts window.

On the other hand, if you wish to move selected contacts only, you’ll need to select contacts one-by-one. To do this, hover over a contact and check off the checkbox to its left to mark it. Repeat the step until you’ve selected all the contacts you wish to move. Once selected, click on the Export option in the left pane.

Depending on your contact selection approach in the previous step, you’ll now see the same option preselected in the Exports contact window. For example, if you went with selected contacts but want to move all contacts at once, you have the option to select the Contacts under Export Contacts in this window to export all contacts at once.

With contacts selected, choose Google CSV as the export format under Export as and click on the Export button to export these contacts.

Google Contacts will generate a CSV file with all your contacts. Download this CSV file to your computer.

Step 2: Importing Google Contacts

Once you have all your contacts from the other account in the CSV format, you now need to import them to the destination account. Follow the instructions below to do this:

Open the browser again and visit Google Contacts in a new tab or window. Enter your credentials for the destination account (account to which you want to move the contacts) to sign in.

After you’ve logged in, click on the Import option in the left pane.

On the Import contacts window, click on the Select file button. Navigate to the folder where you saved the CSV file previously and select it.

Finally, hit the Import button to import the contacts CSV file.

Depending on your contacts list, Google Contacts might take some time to import these contacts from the CSV file. However, once it’s done importing, you should see all your contacts under the Contacts section on the left.

If there are any duplicate contacts, Contacts will show them under the Merge and fix section. To fix conflicted contacts, select Merge and fix from the left section and either click on Merge all to merge all duplicates at once or click on the Merge button on each contact individually to merge the duplicate contacts individually.

Successfully Moving Google Contacts Between Google Accounts

If you followed the above instructions correctly, you should have easily moved all your contacts from one Google account to another. Subsequently, you need to sign in to the other account—to which you transferred the contacts—on all your devices to view/edit/add new contacts.

Do note, however, that your contacts in the source Google account won’t get deleted during the transfer process, and you’ll be able to access them in Google Contacts as you did earlier.

FAQs about Moving Contacts between Google Accounts

1. How do I sync my contacts between two Google accounts?

Unfortunately, there is no official way to sync contacts between two Google accounts. This is precisely why we wrote the guide on how to transfer Google contacts from one account to another. However, one can use third-party apps like Contacts+ and Contacts Sync to achieve the same.

2. How to transfer data from one Google Drive to another?

It is very simple, and it is not necessary to download or upload anything:

Just share the data/folders with the new destination email address. In the share settings, replace the current email address with the new (destination) email address! That’s it! All transfers are done automatically by Google! The process is the same for Google workspace and regular Gmail accounts.

You can also use Google Takeout to archive all Google Drive and Google contacts data and import the same from the new Google account.