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Question

Access inheritance not working for new users in the team

  • September 8, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 34 views
Erik23

As an admin on a professional plan of a small team I have an issue where new team members won’t get access to pre-existing files/folders.

I need to manually grant access to each and every file which is not sustainable. Inheritance of team (role) access doesn’t seem to be working properly.

  1. If sharing is set to “Anyone can view” the employees (as full members) must request to edit.
  2. If sharing is set to “{team name}” and “Edit” it works, but then the clients can’t access 
  3. If sharing is set back to “Anyone can view” the edit rights for the employee is gone.

Despite being a full member in the team and a full seat, the new employee is not added to the automatic “Share this file” > “People from {team}”.

 

Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

    2 replies

    Lauri_Incrosnatu

    You are not doing anything wrong. Figma changed the logic, leaving us with Professional plan in a bad situation, as their previous (default) access settings worked in a way that new team members automatically were able to access and edit all files.

    I’ve been trying to sort this out for for a while, but so far the answers from Figma have been “oh, you have set only people invited to files...” and they are not really seeing the problem or providing us with any solution.

    I showcased the issue here on this thread: 

    We don’t use the “anyone” setting that much, but I now realize that this use case, where you want to quickly link a file with the “anyone can view” setting for clients, is a perfect example of how bad this new logic is. Because new employees are now excluded from the “collaborators list”, they would not be able to edit these files at all. You would have to add every new employee as an editor to every file each time someone is hired, potentially across hundreds or thousands of files.

    I think the migration was done in a very poor way. I’d say most small teams would want their team members to have access to old files by default, and this new logic completely destroys that. There is no way for us to mass-edit permissions and it’s riddled with these type of silly issues. For the past week, I’ve been changing the access permissions of critical files one by one so that new employees can access them. The use case you just mentioned is even worse, because there is no way to set files in a way that would automatically include new employees in the future, and this issue is not only for old files or folders done before the migration, it’s for new ones as well.

    Please Figma, help us out here!

      Erik23
      • Erik23
      • Author
      • New Member
      • September 8, 2026

      Figma changed the logic, leaving us with Professional plan in a bad situation, as their previous (default) access settings worked in a way that new team members automatically were able to access and edit all old files.

      I’ve been trying to sort this out for for a while, but so far the answers from Figma have been “oh, you have set only people invited to files...” and they are not really providing us with any solutions.

      I showcased the issue here on this thread: 

      We don’t use the “anyone” setting that much, but I now understand that this use case, where you want to link a file with the “anyone can view” setting for clients, is a real problem because new employees are excluded from the “collaborators list”, meaning that they would not be able to edit these files at all. You would have to add new employees as editors to every file every time someone is hired, potentially across hundreds or thousands of files.

      I think the migration was done in a very poor way. I’d say most small teams would want their team members to have access to old files by default, and this new logic completely destroys that. There is no way for us to mass-edit permissions and it’s riddled with these type of silly issues. For the past week, I’ve been changing the access permissions of critical files one by one so that new employees can access them. The use case you just mentioned is even worse, because there is no way to set files in a way that would automatically include new employees in the future, and this issue is not only for old folders done before the migration, it’s for new ones as well.

      Please Figma, help us out here!

      Thank you for the reply and pointing me towards the other thread (I was unable to find similar issues before). I fully agree with you. This could - and should - have been handled better. As we’re quite reliant on all team members accessing all designs while we’re frequently showcasing design to clients, this is basically a showstopper without manually granting access to all individual projects. I’ll repeat after you: Please Figma, help us!

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