Error: "User doesn't have permission to access customer" despite Admin access

[Digimoli Media]

Hello, I am using the Google Ads API with a Developer Token from my Manager Account (MCC). My user account has Admin access to this MCC.

The CustomerService.ListAccessibleCustomers method works correctly and returns my list of accounts. However, when I try to send a search query to any of these client accounts using my MCC ID as the 'login-customer-id', I receive the following error: "User doesn't have permission to access customer".

This API error causes our application's backend function to fail, which prevents us from fetching the list of ad accounts. As a result, our settings page shows an empty state or a "null" error to the user, and they cannot select an ad account to proceed.

The error details show a PERMISSION_DENIED error. Can you please help me understand why my user, who is an admin on the MCC, does not have permission to query a client account that is visible in ListAccessibleCustomers?

Thank you

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi,

Thank you for reaching out to the Google Ads API support team.

I could see that you are encountering a USER_PERMISSION_DENIED authorization error, it means the user doesn't have permission to access the customer. Also, kindly check if you have the correct access level to the Google Ads account that you are accessing. Please make sure that email Id that you're using to generate OAuth credentials, is added to your account with 'Admin' or 'Standard' access to make mutate operations.

To analyze your issue further could you kindly provide us with the below details.

• Execute List Accessible Customers and provide us complete API request and response logs, you may also check this API documentation for more information.
• The user email is used for generating the OAuth credentials i.e, refresh token.
• Complete API logs (request and response with request-id and request header) generated at your end.

If you are using a client library and haven't enabled the logging yet, I would request you to enable logging for the specific client library that you are using. You can refer to the guides Java, .Net, PHP, Python, Ruby or Perl to enable logging at your end. For REST interface requests, you can enable logging via the curl command by using the -i flag.

You can send the details via Reply privately to the author option, or direct private reply to this email.
 

Thanks,
 

Google Ads API Team

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[2025-07-28 06:46:27Z GMT] This message is in relation to case "ref:!00D1U01174p.!500Ht01swv5g:ref" (ADR-00320733)