Invite users to your Organization

Organization invitations let you add new members to your Organization. When you send an invitation, Clerk sends an email to the invited user with a unique invitation link. When the user visits the Organization invitation link, Clerk redirects them to the Account Portal sign-in page. If the user is already signed in, Clerk redirects them to your application's homepage (/). If you want to redirect the user to a specific page in your application, you can specify a redirect URL when creating the invitation.

By default, only admins can invite users to an Organization.

This feature requires that Email is enabled, as Clerk uses the user's email address to send the invitation. If you don't want to enable Email for your application, you can bypass the invitation flow completely and add existing users directly to the Organization with the createOrganizationMembership() method. Because this method requires the user's ID, the user must already have a Clerk account.

When to use invitations

Invitations work well when you need precise control over who joins your Organization and which Role they receive. This approach fits scenarios where:

• Teams are small and members are known in advance.
• Onboarding requires manual approval or review.
• Specific Roles need to be assigned during the invitation.

If you want to streamline enrollment for users with company email addresses, consider Verified Domains, which can automatically invite users based on their email domain. If customers require centralized authentication through their Identity Provider, use Enterprise SSO.

Create an invitation

Clerk's prebuilt components and Account Portal pages manage all Organization invitation flows, including creating, managing, and accepting invitations.

However, if you want to build custom flows⁠, see the following sections.

Client-side

To create an Organization invitation on the client-side, see the dedicated guide. Note that this uses the organizations.inviteMember() method, which does not let you specify a redirect URL; the invitation links will always redirect to the Account Portal sign-in page. If you want to specify a redirect URL, you must create the invitation on the server-side.

Server-side

To create Organization invitations on the server-side, use the Backend API by either calling the endpoint directly or using clerkClient. clerkClient is a wrapper around the Backend API that makes it easier to interact with the API. If you receive a 429 response, respect the Retry-After header before retrying.

Use the following tabs to see examples for each method.

curl 'https://api.clerk.com/v1/organizations/{org_123}/invitations' \
-X POST \
-H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_SECRET_KEY' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{ "inviter_user_id": "user_123", "email_address": "email@example.com", "role": "org:member" }'

curl 'https://api.clerk.com/v1/organizations/{org_123}/invitations/bulk' \
-X POST \
-H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_SECRET_KEY' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '[{ "inviter_user_id": "user_123", "email_address": "email123@example.com", "role": "org:member" }, { "inviter_user_id": "user_456", "email_address": "email456@example.com", "role": "org:member" }]'

Redirect URL

When you create an invitation, you can specify a redirect_url parameter. This parameter tells Clerk where to redirect the user when they visit the invitation link.

curl 'https://api.clerk.com/v1/organizations/{org_123}/invitations' \
  -X POST \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_SECRET_KEY' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{ "inviter_user_id": "user_123", "email_address": "email@example.com", "role": "org:member", "redirect_url": "https://www.example.com/accept-invitation" }'

Once the user visits the invitation link, they will be redirected to the page you specified. On that page, you must handle the authentication flow in your code. You can either embed the <SignIn /> component or, if the prebuilt component doesn't meet your needs or you require more control over the logic, you can build a custom flow.

Invitation metadata

You can also add metadata to an invitation when creating the invitation through the Backend API. Once the invited user signs up using the invitation link, Clerk stores the invitation metadata (OrganizationInvitation.publicMetadata) in the Organization membership's metadata (OrganizationMembership.publicMetadata). For more details on Organization membership metadata, see the OrganizationMembership reference.

curl 'https://api.clerk.com/v1/organizations/{org_123}/invitations' \
  -X POST \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_SECRET_KEY' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{ "inviter_user_id": "user_123", "email_address": "email@example.com", "role": "org:member", "public_metadata": {"department": "marketing"} }'

Revoke an invitation

Revoking an invitation prevents the user from using the invitation link that was sent to them.

Client-side

To revoke an invitation client-side, see the dedicated guide.

Server-side

To revoke an invitation server-side, use the Backend API by either calling the endpoint directly or using clerkClient. clerkClient is a wrapper around the Backend API that makes it easier to interact with the API.

Use the following tabs to see examples for each method.

curl 'https://api.clerk.com/v1/organizations/{org_123}/invitations/{inv_123}/revoke' \
  -X POST \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_SECRET_KEY' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{ "requesting_user_id": "user_123" }'

Next steps

Now that you understand how to invite users to your Organization, you can: