Assign an Autodesk licence to a user: the two steps

Adding someone to your team and giving them a licence are two separate actions.

You paid for the seats, you added your colleague to the account, and a week later he still opens AutoCAD to a trial banner. Nothing is broken. By the end of this page you will have made the assignment and you will know which role you need to be allowed to make it.

Here is the sentence that settles most of these cases: being in your team is not the same as holding a seat. Inviting a person puts them in the team. Assigning hands them the product. Autodesk keeps those two things in different screens, and plenty of admins do the first, watch the name appear in the list, and reasonably conclude the job is done.

It is not done. Nobody gets an alert about a seat that was never handed out, which is why these cases drift for weeks before somebody complains.

Invite the user first: first name, last name, email address, Send Invite.

If the person is not in your team yet, start here. Skip it and the assign screen will not show their name at all.

1. Select User Management > By User in the navigation menu. If you do not see User Management at all, you are not an admin.
2. Choose the team you want the person in, then select Invite Users.
3. Enter first name, last name and email address, then select Send Invite.

https://manage.autodesk.com/

Two statuses follow, and the difference matters. Someone who already has an Autodesk account shows as Verified straight away. Someone who does not shows as Invited and has 7 days to create an account through the link in the email. Miss that window and you select the user and choose Resend Invite.

The email address is where this goes wrong more often than anything technical. Invite the work address, and if that person already has an Autodesk account on a private address, they sign in with the private one out of habit and report that the licence does not work. It works. They are looking at the wrong account.

Four admin roles exist, and the one that receives the invoice cannot assign a thing.

This is the second trap, and in a small practice it causes real paralysis. The contract manager, called purchaser in some regions, is the person who bought the subscription and gets the renewal notices and the invoices. They cannot assign a single seat unless they also hold a primary or secondary admin role.

A team has exactly one primary admin, by default the original purchaser, and it can have several secondary and SSO admins. Changing a role takes four clicks: By User, select the person, Change role, pick the role, Save. Only a secondary admin can be promoted to primary, and the old primary then becomes a secondary admin. Two things sit outside that: the contract manager can only be changed by opening a case through the Autodesk Assistant, and a primary admin cannot be removed while their admin rights are still on them.

My advice for any office under twenty people: give at least two people a secondary admin role. A team whose single admin is on holiday is a team where nobody starts on Monday.

You assign a seat by product, by user or by group, and the screens behave differently.

All three routes end in a working licence. Which one you take depends on whether you are thinking about a product, a person or a department.

By product. Select User Management > By product, choose a team, then a product to see who currently holds a seat on it. Select Assign users, enter each user's name and email address, then either Assign all items or Customize assignment to pick individual items and confirm with Assign.

By user. Select User Management > By User and choose a person to see what they have and what you can still give them. Assign hands over the product with everything in it. The arrow next to Assign hides the useful part: Customize and then Assign selected items, or a seat from a specific subscription.

Taking access away works in reverse. Unassign next to the user removes the product and everything with it; the arrow next to Unassign lets you clear individual checkboxes and Save changes. One exception catches people out: products assigned by default or through a group cannot be unassigned from By user or By product. If the Unassign you expected is missing, that is why, and the fix is in the group.

Assign from the pool unless you have a reason to pin someone to a subscription ID.

This is the choice with a clock in it, and it is barely explained anywhere. A seat can come from the pool, meaning any available subscription in your team, or from one specific subscription ID.

From the pool, the system handles the seats itself: as long as the team has enough of them, everyone keeps access, and a subscription renewing on an odd date is not your problem. Pinned to a subscription ID, the user gets a seat from that subscription only, and when it expires their access to the product ends. On a date you set months ago and forgot about.

Autodesk documents both options on its page on assigning product access, checked on 8 August 2026. Pinning has honest uses: cost allocation per project, a subscription paid by a client, a contractor who should lose access when the contract ends. Otherwise, take the pool. What the pinned user eventually runs into is described in what happens when your software licence expires, with the surprise added.

A seat belongs to a team, so spare seats in another team are out of reach.

People search for how to assign a licence to a team, which tells you the mental model is slightly off. You do not assign a licence to a team, you park a subscription in one. The team is the container: users, assignments and settings live in it. Someone in team A cannot be given a seat that sits in team B.

One office with one team never notices this. It gets interesting when a company buys through two channels, takes over another firm, or has one contract on the founder's name and a newer one on the company's. Two teams, two pools, and an admin who swears there is a free seat while the screen insists there is not. Both are right. The way out is to move the subscription to the team where the people are, which is a contract manager action that also needs an admin role. Named user licensing works like this by design: the seat follows a person, not a workstation.

Groups are the only route that scales, and they cannot be tied to a subscription ID.

One by one is fine for five people and miserable for fifty. Create a group, put users in it, assign products to the whole group at once. AutoCAD to the Architects group, Civil 3D and Navisworks Manage to the Civil Engineers group. A new colleague then gets their software by being added to the right group.

1. Select User Management > By Group and open an existing group.
2. Choose the Products tab to see what the group already has.
3. Select Assign to give the group a product, or Unassign to take it away.

Count your seats first. A group assignment does not create seats out of nothing, and Autodesk says plainly to make sure there are enough for everyone in the group before you assign.

The limitation is worth knowing before you design your structure: groups are assigned to your product pool and cannot be attached to a specific subscription ID. If one person in that group has to sit on a particular subscription for billing reasons, you handle that person separately through By user. A workaround, not a feature.

Moving a seat to a different person is unassign first, then assign.

A drafter I worked with moved between two offices of the same group, same job, same software, different team. His old office unassigned nothing, because he was still with the company. His new office had bought a seat and could not find him in the list, because nobody had invited him into their team. Four days of markups on paper while two organisations each assumed the other had it covered.

The sequence is short. Under By User, open the person leaving the role and select Unassign to free the seat. Then open the new person, inviting them first if they are not in the team, and assign the product. If the leaver is going altogether, remove them from the team: that revokes their access to products, hubs and any projects tied to them, but it does not delete their personal Autodesk account. Nor should it. That account is theirs.

Two questions get mixed up constantly. Same person, new machine is a different job, covered in our guide to moving an Autodesk licence to a new PC. This page is the other case: same licence, different person. If you need one more seat rather than a reshuffle, an extra Autodesk All Apps subscription lands in the same pool and assigns like the ones you already have.

A CSV import assigns up to 5,000 users at once, without telling any of them.

Past a handful of people, use the Import tab instead of typing names. The rules are picky:

• One row per user, with your first user on row 2, because row 1 is ignored.
• At least 3 columns: first name, last name, email address. A fourth column with a subscription ID is optional; leave it out and the system assigns from any available subscription for that product.
• Save as CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) if any name carries an accent. Muñoz and Grün are why half of these imports come back broken.
• Upload it under Assign users in the Import tab with Upload CSV file. You can keep working while it runs.

Two behaviours to know beforehand. Users who already have access are not given a second seat, so the import is safe to rerun. And users assigned through an import receive no email notification at all, which is why a rollout can look finished on your screen and unfinished on theirs.

If your screen says Classic User Management, only assignment by user exists.

Accounts bought through a reseller or Autodesk Sales some years ago can still fall under the classic process. You recognise it by Classic User Management under User Management, and you may see both sets of screens if your products are mixed.

Classic has two roles instead of four: a contract manager and a software coordinator, one of each per contract. Assignment runs through the Edit Access link beside the user's name, then the Products and Services tab, then individual services or Assign All, then Save. One classic detail is worth money: at purchase the contract manager gets a seat by default, so if that person never uses the software, remove the assignment and the seat frees up.

Still nothing on their screen? These are the usual causes.

Assignment is close to instant. If an hour has gone by and the user still sees a trial, work down this list.

• Invited but never assigned. The big one. A name in By User with no product beside it is exactly this.
• Status is Invited, not Verified. The account was never finished, or the 7 days ran out. Choose Resend Invite.
• They sign in with a different email address than the one you invited. The licence follows the address, not the person.
• You are the contract manager without an admin role, so the controls are simply not there.
• You assigned in the wrong team, which is easy when the selector defaults to the team you opened last.
• They have not signed out and back in since you assigned the seat.

When the assignment is visibly correct and the software still refuses, the problem has moved to their machine: start with what to do when AutoCAD licence activation fails. If you bought through us and the seat is not showing up at all, send us the order number and the email address.

One last thing, and it costs actual money. Open By User and read the list as a stranger would. In most offices that have run Autodesk for a few years there are one or two seats sitting on people who left, renewing every twelve months because unassigning was never anybody's job. Nothing in the account will ever mention it. Put a reminder in the calendar for the month before your renewal date, and read that list then, while the number in front of you still means something.