How to export your LinkedIn connections — and what the CSV actually contains

LinkedIn ships a free, built-in export of your first-degree network, and the whole procedure takes about ten minutes. No Premium plan, no browser extension, no third-party tool. The catch is what comes back: a slim CSV that is thinner than most people expect — and that thinness is deliberate.

Where the export lives (and why the path keeps moving)

LinkedIn reorganises its settings every couple of years, so any guide that promises pixel-exact screenshots ages badly. The structure underneath is stable, though: the export is part of the data privacy section of your settings, because legally it is a data-privacy feature — it overlaps with your right of access under the GDPR and similar laws. If the labels in the steps below have drifted by the time you read this, type “data” into the settings search field and the export page comes straight up.

As of mid-2026, the path runs like this:

1. Open Settings & Privacy

   On the desktop site, click your profile photo in the top-right corner and choose Settings & Privacy from the dropdown. The desktop flow is the reliable one — the app exposes the same section, but you’ll want the resulting file on a machine with a spreadsheet anyway.

2. Go to Data privacy → Get a copy of your data

   In the left-hand menu, open Data privacy. Under “How LinkedIn uses your data” sits Get a copy of your data — the official, account-native export.

3. Select 'Connections' only

   Choose “Want something in particular?” and tick Connections. You can request the full archive (messages, profile, activity), but it’s slower to generate and overkill for this job. The connections-only file is small and fast.

4. Request the archive and confirm your password

   Click Request archive and re-enter your password when prompted. LinkedIn queues the job and tells you it can take up to 24 hours — for a connections-only export, ten minutes is the more typical reality.

5. Download Connections.csv from the email link

   A download link arrives at the email address on your account; the same download also appears on the settings page itself. Inside the ZIP sits Connections.csv — open it in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, or anything else that reads CSV.

That’s the entire procedure. Nobody is notified, nothing appears on your profile, and you can repeat it as often as you like.

What the CSV contains — and what it leaves out

Open the file and you’ll find a handful of columns: first name, last name, email address, company, position, and “Connected On” — the date the connection was made. Depending on the export version, a profile URL may ride along too. For a 1,500-connection network, that’s a 1,500-row table you can sort, filter, and keep forever.

Now the part most guides skate over: the email column will be almost entirely empty, and that’s not a malfunction. Every LinkedIn member controls whether their connections may see or download their email address — the setting is called “Who can see or download your email address”, and the download permission is switched off for the overwhelming majority, partly because few people ever visit that setting. So when your export shows a blank cell, it means that person never opted into being exported. The honest way to read that column: it’s a list of choices, and the blanks are also an answer.

The same logic explains everything else the file lacks. No phone numbers. No notes, no tags, no message history. Nothing about second-degree contacts. LinkedIn’s position is consistent: your export contains your data — who you connected with and when — not other people’s profile data in bulk. Frustrating if you hoped for a ready-made address book; defensible if you imagine your own row in someone else’s export.

If you do want more than the connection list, the same export page offers the full archive: your messages, invitations, profile history, posts, and more. It’s worth requesting once — the message history in particular is useful raw material when you’re reconstructing where a relationship left off — but it arrives as a sprawling folder of CSVs rather than one tidy table, and it can genuinely take the full 24 hours to generate. For the recurring routine, the connections-only export is the right tool.

One more property worth internalising: the CSV is a snapshot, not a feed. Positions and companies are accurate on the day you export and decay from there at the speed your network changes jobs. Re-running the export every few months is the boring, reliable fix.

Don’t reach for a scraper

The thinness of the official export is exactly what scraper extensions monetise. They promise “full profiles”, “verified emails”, “auto-sync” — and they deliver it by puppeting your logged-in browser session to copy profile pages, which is the thing LinkedIn’s User Agreement prohibits in plain language.

There’s a second-order problem with scraped “enrichment” that gets less airtime than the ban risk: the data is about other people. A tool that hoovers up emails, phone numbers, and job histories your contacts never agreed to share isn’t just gambling with your account — it’s building you a database of third-party personal data collected against the terms everyone signed. Even where that’s legally grey rather than black, it’s a strange foundation for software whose entire purpose is treating relationships well.

The ToS-respecting alternatives are less glamorous but risk-free. The official export covers names, employers, and the relationship timeline. Your own mailbox covers everyone who ever emailed you — addresses given to you directly. The contact-info panel on a profile shows whatever that person chose to share with you, and copying it by hand into your own notes is ordinary note-taking, not scraping. And for the people who actually matter, there is the radical option: ask. A short “getting my contacts in order — what’s the best email for you?” costs one message and tends to restart conversations that had gone quiet.

The export is a list. Your memory makes it a network.

Here’s what no export — official or scraped — will ever contain: how you met, what you talked about last, what they’re working toward, whether you owe them a reply. That context lives in one place only, and it’s you.

It’s also where the real value sits. Levin, Walter & Murnighan (2011) studied executives who deliberately reconnected with dormant ties — people they hadn’t spoken to in years — and found the advice those contacts gave was more novel and just as trustworthy as what current contacts offered. Your Connections.csv is, statistically, mostly dormant ties. The file can’t tell you which fifty of the fifteen hundred are worth waking up; ten minutes of triage with your own memory can.

The mechanics are simple. Sort by “Connected On”, skim the list once, and mark the people you’d genuinely take a call from. For each of those, add two fields the CSV doesn’t have: how you met, and the last thing you talked about. What you’re producing is zero-party data — context you volunteer about your own relationships, sitting on your side of the fence instead of on a platform that can change its rules. Whether you do that in a spreadsheet or a dedicated tool matters less than that it happens within a week of the export, while the memories are still retrievable. We build Endearist around exactly this workflow — there’s a step-by-step for wiring the export into a personal CRM workflow for LinkedIn — but the triage works the same in Google Sheets.

If you’re unsure whether you need software for this at all, the honest threshold test is in our piece on when a personal CRM beats your contacts app: below roughly fifty actively maintained relationships, a well-kept spreadsheet is genuinely enough.

Your data rights make this durable

A last point that outlasts any menu redesign: the export isn’t a courtesy. Under the GDPR — and a growing family of laws elsewhere — you have a right to obtain a copy of the personal data a platform holds about you, in a portable, machine-readable format. LinkedIn’s “Get a copy of your data” page is its implementation of that right, which is also why the feature is unlikely to disappear, however often it gets renamed.

So treat the export as routine maintenance, not a one-off rescue. Twice a year: request, download, merge, and spend ten minutes asking the only question that matters — who on this list do I not want to lose? The CSV won’t answer it. It will, reliably, make you ask.