Can You Share Audible Memberships? (We Checked)

An Audible membership comes with a lot of benefits, and if you love listening to audiobooks on-demand, it’s natural to wonder if you might be able to share that love with others.

And as luck would have it, you do have options in that regard, even though Audible lacks a dedicated “family” plan intended for sharing.

So if you’re curious to learn more about how you can share your Audible account with your loved ones, keep reading because that’s exactly what we’re going to explore today!

Here’s How You can Share Audible Memberships:

Audible offers two subscription plans, neither of which is intended for sharing. However, using the Amazon Household and Family Library Sharing features, you can share Audible with your household members.

Here’s a full guide to Audible’s family plan.

Smart phone rests on top of books. Audible app on on screen

What Are the Options for Sharing Audible with Friends and Family?

Audible.com keeps things nice and simple by offering only two different subscription plans, Audible Plus and Audible Premium Plus.

This is in contrast to a lot of other online subscription services, which commonly offer three to five different subscription plan options.

Often, one of these options will be a “family plan” or some other kind of subscription option intended for multiple people to share.

At first glance, the fact that Audible lacks a clear family plan might lead one to believe that it’s not possible to share a single subscription between multiple people.

However, a closer look reveals that this is not the case, and you have multiple options through which to share your membership benefits with others, with some caveats.

In order to share Audible benefits without directly giving out your login information (more on that later), you’ll need to first create an Amazon Household.

How to access your Amazon Household:

  1. Log in to your Amazon.com account
  2. Head to Amazon’s Customer Service page called “What is Amazon Household?”
  3. Here you can read more about what Amazon Household is and how it works
  4. Then, click the link under the first heading that says “Manage Your Household”
  5. From there, you’ll be able to use the buttons at the bottom of the page to add accounts to your Amazon Household.
    • You can have up to two adult (18+), four teen (13-17), and four child (12 and under) accounts in your Household.

Amazon Household has a variety of benefits and features, but for the purposes of today’s topic, it’s just a necessary prerequisite to Audible sharing.

So, once you’ve set up your Amazon Household, you’ll be able to share audiobooks from your Audible account with members of your Amazon Household.

Note that you can share titles with the other adult account or any child account in your Household, but for whatever reason, you cannot share with teen accounts.

Furthermore, you cannot share titles from the Audible Plus catalog.

With all that being said, any non-Plus-Catalog title in your Audible library is eligible for sharing.

As far as we can tell, this means that if you have an Audible Premium Plus account, any title you add to your library, whether you’ve purchased it or not, can be accessed by Household members.

There do not seem to be any other options for sharing Audible with friends and family; Amazon Household is the only method we could find which allows this.

It is also important to note that Amazon Household does expect you to use this feature only with people you actually live with.

If you do not share a physical address, it might be possible to trick the system into allowing you to use the feature anyway, but this would be difficult and is not the intended use.

When adding people to your Amazon Household, you’ll be prompted to verify that you do, in fact, share an address before being allowed to continue.

As a result, there does not appear to be a simple way to share any Audible benefits with anyone you do not live with.

What is the Easiest Way to Share Audible with Your Spouse?

The easiest way to share your Audible content (except for the Plus catalog) with a spouse would be to create an Amazon Household with them as the other adult member.

While child and teen accounts have various restrictions under Amazon Household, a maximum of two adult accounts can share everything more freely with fewer restrictions.

Unfortunately, if your spouse wants to access the Amazon Plus catalog, they’d need to pay their own subscription fee since that part of the Audible library is not eligible for sharing.

But beyond that, you should be able to share everything else from your Audible account with a spouse if you set them up as the other adult in your Amazon Household.

Of course, your spouse is one person you’re likely to trust enough to directly share your account credentials with, so this is also theoretically an option. More on that in a bit.

Dow do I Share Audible with my Child?

To share Audible titles with a child, you’ll need to add them to your Amazon Household as a child account.

Child accounts (12 and under) have various restrictions placed upon them, but you can freely choose to share Audible titles with child accounts in your Amazon Household.

In fact, you can customize exactly what you do and don’t want to share so that the child’s account won’t just get access to whatever they want from Audible unless you clear it first.

This can be useful for ensuring that your child can’t get access to age-inappropriate material.

You can hand-pick specific titles to share with your child and remove their access to them at any time.

Can You Share Audible Credits Across Accounts?

After doing a bit of digging, we’ve determined there is no way to directly transfer Audible credits from one account to another.

However, there is a way to use credits from one account to purchase a title for someone else’s account as a gift.

So while you cannot send the actual credits, you can ask the other account holder what title they’d like, then buy that title as a gift using your credits.

If you’re the holder of both accounts, of course, you can just purchase the title you want by using the account that has credits and send it as a gift to the desired account.

Check out our article about how long Audible credits last!

Can You let Other People Use Your Audible Account?

You can, but this comes with a slew of warnings.

It’s common advice on the internet to never share your passwords with anyone else at all.

Often, this is very good advice. A malicious party could do a lot of damage with direct access to your online accounts.

However, a better way to rephrase this advice might be: never give a password to anyone unless you trust them implicitly.

Because the truth is that people do share accounts, all the time.

It’s just very important to be absolutely certain that you can completely trust the person you’re sharing with.

So if you have a partner, spouse, best friend, or family member you trust completely and absolutely, you could theoretically just give them your Audible username and password.

Doing so means they’ll have complete access to your account. They can see and access everything you can.

Since Audible doesn’t allow you to share the Plus catalog with anyone, even though Amazon Household, sharing your account information can be one way to bypass this restriction.

Do note that because you’re sharing one account, you will not be able to have separate libraries or personalized recommendations; everything either of you listens to will be lumped together.

There are no restrictions to the number of devices you can access your account from, so allowing another person to use your account from another device in this way shouldn’t be an issue.

That said, it’s possible there may be a limit on how many devices can stream audiobooks at the same time.

We couldn’t find any concrete information on the subject, so this may or may not be the case, but it’s something to keep in mind in case you encounter problems when sharing your account.

Can You Add More Users to the Same Audible Account?

As far as we can tell, there is no way to add additional user profiles directly to an Audible account.

Your two options for this sort of thing are to either use Amazon Household or directly share your login information, as discussed above.

With Amazon Household, you will get to define separate user profiles, but their access is more limited compared to the Audible account holder.

And if you share your login directly, the person you share with will get full access, but they cannot create a separate profile, and you will share the same library, recommendations, etc.

Sadly, there does not appear to be a way to do both; you either accept the limitations of sharing through Amazon Household or you forgo personalized accounts by sharing directly.

Please also read our easy solution guide to Audible and Login Issues.

Does it Cost Extra to Enable Sharing with Your Household?

Amazon Household does not incur any additional charge to set up.

The only thing you’ll be spending to set up Amazon Household is a bit of time and effort going through the setup process.

You will, of course, need to be paying for an Audible subscription in order to have something to share in the first place, but it costs the same whether or not you use Household sharing.

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