How to merge contacts in HubSpot (and find every duplicate)

How to merge two contacts in HubSpot

Step by step, as documented in HubSpot's merge guide:

1. Go to CRM > Contacts.
2. Click the name of the contact you want to keep. This becomes the primary record.
3. In the left panel, open the Actions dropdown and select Merge.
4. In the dialog, search for and select the duplicate (the secondary record).
5. Review the property values HubSpot will keep. Use Set properties to review to compare other properties.
6. Click Merge.

You need the Merge permission or Super Admin rights. Timeline activities from both records end up on the merged contact, and associations from both records are carried over. HubSpot notes that activities can take up to 30 minutes to sync after a merge.

The one decision that matters is step 2. Which record you open first decides which values survive, so read the next section before you merge anything important.

What HubSpot keeps when you merge: our test results

HubSpot's documentation says the primary record's values are "prioritized". We wanted the detail, so we merged contacts and companies on live HubSpot portals on September 29 and 30, 2026, and recorded what survived each time.

Three consequences follow:

1. Choosing the primary record is choosing who wins. If the duplicate holds the up-to-date job title and the primary holds last year's, last year's title survives. Compare the two records first and open the one with the better data.
2. Anything that stores the old record ID must follow the redirect. HubSpot creates a new ID for the merged record (accounts in HubSpot's Primary ID Preservation beta keep the primary record's ID instead). Spreadsheets, a data warehouse or an outside tool that saved the old IDs will point to records that no longer exist on their own.
3. An overwritten value is gone. HubSpot states plainly that "it's not possible to unmerge records". The Merged Record IDs property tells you which records were merged, not what their values were.

If you sync HubSpot with Salesforce, note that only the primary contact keeps syncing after a merge.

How to find duplicates in HubSpot

What HubSpot deduplicates on its own

HubSpot deduplicates contacts on the Email property: you cannot save a second contact with an email that already exists, and a form submission with a known email updates the existing contact. Companies are deduplicated on the company domain name, with one important exception: companies created through the API, which includes most sync apps, are not deduplicated by domain.

The Manage duplicates tool

Go to CRM > Contacts (or Companies), click the three-dot menu in the upper right and select Manage duplicates. According to HubSpot's documentation:

• It requires a Professional or Enterprise subscription (Marketing, Sales, Service, Data or Smart CRM Hub).
• It compares names, email, phone, company name, IP country and zip code for contacts, and domain, name, country, phone and industry for companies, and gives each pair a similarity score.
• It shows up to 10,000 pairs. Merging pairs in bulk and writing custom matching rules require Data Hub Professional or Enterprise.
• Clicking Reject on a pair keeps it out of the list for good (rejections can be undone for 14 days).

What native detection misses

The tool works well on clean data. The duplicates that cost the most are the ones that don't look alike:

• One person, two emails: a work address from an import and a personal Gmail address from a webinar form. HubSpot sees two different people.
• Spelling variants: "Jean-Pierre" and "Jean Pierre", "ACME SAS" and "Acme", accents dropped by an old integration.
• Secondary domains: the same company on brandname.com and brandname.fr, created by two different sync apps.

And some pairs look alike without being duplicates. Merging them destroys good data:

• A shared switchboard number: three colleagues with the same phone number are three people.
• Namesakes on Gmail: two "Thomas Martin" with personal addresses are rarely the same Thomas.
• A parent company and its subsidiary: "Acme" and "Acme France" share a name and a domain root, and often serve different buyers.

How to merge companies in HubSpot

1. Go to CRM > Companies.
2. Open the company to keep.
3. Click Actions, then Merge, and select the duplicate.
4. Review the values and click Merge.

Watch for two failure cases listed by HubSpot: companies linked in a parent and child relationship may refuse to merge, and a merge fails when the two records together reach 250 or more previous merges.

How to merge deals in HubSpot

Deals merge the same way, from CRM > Deals: open the deal to keep, then Actions > Merge. Check the amount, close date and deal stage before you confirm: like any property, they come from the primary deal whenever both deals have a value.

The secondary email trap

In HubSpot, an email address belongs to one contact only, whether it is that contact's primary or an additional address. You can add a secondary email to a contact, unless that address is already on another contact record.

We measured the consequence on October 6, 2026: HubSpot refuses (with a 409 error) to create a contact whose email already exists as the secondary email of another contact. After a merge, the duplicate's email becomes a secondary address on the merged contact, so no new contact can ever be created with it.

That explains a common support question: "HubSpot says this contact already exists, but I can't find it." Search for the address: it is probably a secondary email on a contact merged months ago. It also means the most expensive duplicates, the same person with two different addresses, are exactly the ones HubSpot cannot see on its own.

Merge rules: deciding which value wins

Merging by hand means choosing the primary record pair by pair, and accepting that it wins every conflict. For a few pairs, that is fine. For a few hundred, you need rules per property:

• Keep the most recent value for fields that change: job title, phone number, contact owner.
• Keep the oldest value for fields that should not move: original source, first conversion date.
• Keep both for free text and multiple checkboxes: notes, interests, tags.

This is how the Jipup agent merges: you set the rule once per property, a confidence threshold below which nothing is merged without your approval, and the agent applies it to every pair, in HubSpot, on the schedule you choose. Every merge is logged with both records and the reason, and each value the merge overwrote can be put back.

Ogo Security cut its HubSpot duplicates by 98% after the agent's first pass (read the case study).

Native tool or an agent: which one do you need ?

If your portal has a few dozen duplicates and a Professional plan, the native tool is enough: work through the list once a month. If duplicates keep coming back from imports, forms and sync apps, the cleanup has to run on its own.

How to keep HubSpot duplicate-free

• Import with the Record ID or the email column so rows update existing records instead of creating new ones.
• Ask for a work email on forms where you can, and avoid forms that let the same person sign up with a second address.
• Check how each sync app creates companies: companies created through the API skip HubSpot's domain deduplication.
• Require unique values on identifiers you trust (a customer ID, a legal company number). HubSpot allows up to ten unique properties per object.
• Run detection continuously. Between 15% and 30% of B2B contacts change jobs every year in our customers' databases, depending on the segment, and every import adds new pairs.

FAQ

Where Jipup fits

The Jipup agent does this on your CRM continuously, on the rules you set. CRM cleaning →

Enzo Munoz

Co-founder of Jipup, the AI agent that keeps HubSpot CRMs clean, up to date and enriched. He works every week with RevOps and sales teams on their CRM data.