Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
How long somebody stays signed in. Agents are signed out after 60 minutes of inactivity by default and end users after eight hours, and there is a separate 12-hour maximum for team members that cannot be switched off once it is enabled.
Set it
- In Admin Center, click Account, then Security, then Advanced.
- Open the Authentication tab.
- Set Team member session inactivity and End user session inactivity separately.
Zendesk's own advice is to set the shortest duration your organisation can work with, because an abandoned session is the simplest way in.
The two audiences are not the same problem
| Team members | Default 60 minutes. They hold access to your customer data, often on shared or portable machines. |
| End users | Default eight hours. They see their own tickets, and a short timeout mostly produces sign-in friction. |
The 12-hour maximum is one-way
Zendesk is rolling out a maximum session duration of 12 hours for team members. Once it is enabled it cannot be disabled, although the duration can be adjusted afterwards. Team members are warned five minutes before they are signed out.
Check that before somebody turns it on to see what it does. It is a setting you can tune but not undo.
Inactivity is not the same as duration
The timeouts above measure inactivity: an agent working continuously is not signed out at 60 minutes. The 12-hour limit is a hard ceiling on the session itself regardless of activity, which is why the two exist alongside each other.
Shorter is safer and more annoying
Every reduction trades convenience for exposure, and the right point depends on where your agents work. A team on personal laptops in an office is a different risk from one on shared machines in a public space.
Where you need it short, say why. A timeout that arrives without explanation is read as a fault and worked around.
Single sign-on has its own clock
Where staff sign in through your identity provider, that provider's session policy also applies, and the shorter of the two wins. Setting a tight timeout here while the identity provider keeps a long session achieves less than it appears to.
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