Multi-Tenant Setup: Cannot Create Users With Same Email in Different Tenants

[helloukey]

I am using Payload CMS with a multi-tenant architecture. All tenants share the same MongoDB database. I’ve set up a tenants collection and a global users collection that has a relationship/array field referencing one or more tenants.

The problem is that I cannot create accounts with the same email address under different tenants. Payload enforces a globally unique index on the email field in the Users collection. This makes sense for single-tenant projects, but in a multi-tenant scenario it prevents the same person from registering separately under two different organizations.

Current Behavior

• Payload automatically adds a unique index on email in the Users collection when auth: true is enabled.
• Attempting to create a user with an email that already exists (even under a different tenant) results in a duplicate key error.
• Login, forgot-password, and verification flows also assume email is globally unique.

Expected Behavior

In a multi-tenant setup, I would like Payload to support per-tenant email uniqueness:

• The same email can exist in multiple tenants.
• Within a tenant, email must still be unique.
• Authentication and password reset flows should consider both email and tenant context.

Example Scenario

• Tenant A creates user [email protected].
• Tenant B also needs to create a different user record with the same [email protected].
• Today this is not possible because of the global unique constraint.

[bratvanov]

Good point! I wonder if using email subaddressing (or plus addressing) - e.g [email protected] and [email protected] which should all route to [email protected] be a temporary workaround to your issue?

[helloukey]

@bratvanov Great idea!

Thanks!