How long to keep things

The most-searched question in this subject has an answer that fits in three words, and every page that gives you those three words is doing you a disservice.

There is no single retention period. There are several, they depend on your jurisdiction, on the type of record, on what you do for a living, on whether anything is under enquiry, and on obligations that have nothing to do with tax at all. A page that says “keep everything for seven years” is either guessing or quietly assuming you live somewhere specific and are a specific kind of taxpayer.

This site will not give you a number. What it can give you is the structure — the thing that actually determines whether you can honour whatever period applies, and the part nobody writes about because it’s less satisfying than a number.

Why it isn’t one number

Four independent sources of variation, any of which can move the answer.

Jurisdiction. Every tax authority sets its own periods, and they differ. Some countries have different periods for different taxes. Federal systems can have one period nationally and another at state or provincial level, both applying to you at once.

Record type. The period for routine transaction records is often not the period for records relating to an asset you still hold, a capital item, a property, a loan, or an employee. Some categories are held for as long as the underlying thing exists, plus a period after it ends.

Circumstances. Periods commonly run from a filing date rather than from a transaction date, which means two receipts from the same month can have different end dates if they fall either side of a year end. Periods can extend where a return was late, amended, or is under enquiry — and in some systems there is effectively no limit in cases of serious error.

Non-tax obligations. Warranties, insurance, professional requirements, contractual obligations to a client, employment records, and consumer protection rules all impose their own timescales, and several of them outlast the tax ones.

The consequence is that “how long” is a matrix, not a scalar — and any given reader’s cell in it is something their tax authority publishes and an adviser can apply.

The scheme that works regardless

Here’s the useful part. You don’t need to know the periods to build a system that honours them, because the system’s job is to make disposal by cohort possible.

Group by period, not by category. The organising unit is the financial period — whatever yours is — because retention clocks nearly always run from a period boundary rather than from individual transaction dates. One container per period. Everything from that period in it.

Separate the long-hold records at the point of filing. A small number of things need keeping much longer than routine transactions: anything relating to an asset you still own, property, major equipment, loans, employment, and anything under dispute. These go in their own place, outside the year cohorts, because otherwise they get destroyed with the cohort they happened to arrive in. This single move prevents the most common retention failure, which is binning a year and discovering it contained the purchase record for something you still have.

Make disposal a discrete action, not a habit. A cohort is either live or disposable. When the applicable period ends, the whole container goes at once. Nothing is deleted piecemeal, which means nothing is deleted by accident.

Write the disposal date on the container. Not the period it covers — the date it becomes disposable, worked out once when you close it. Future you should not have to re-derive the rule.

Never dispose while anything is open. An enquiry, a dispute, a claim, an audit, an outstanding warranty. The clock is suspended in practice whether or not the rules say so, because the records are in use.

Keep or bin

KEEP OR BIN — building a retention scheme

  · Records grouped into per-period cohorts
    with a disposal date written on
                    → KEEP. This is the whole system.

  · Asset, property, loan and employment
    records
                    → KEEP SEPARATELY, outside the
                      cohorts. They outlive them.

  · Anything relating to an open dispute,
    claim or enquiry
                    → KEEP. Do not dispose while
                      anything is open.

  · A cohort past its disposal date, nothing
    open, nothing long-hold inside
                    → BIN, entirely, in one action.

  · Deleting individual old files as you
    come across them
                    → DON'T. Piecemeal disposal is how
                      cohorts develop holes and how
                      the wrong thing goes.

  · "Keep everything forever, storage is
    cheap"
                    → NOT A SCHEME. Cheap to store,
                      expensive to search, and it can
                      cut against you where rules
                      require disposal.

  · The actual period that applies to you
                    → ASK LOCALLY. Your tax authority
                      publishes it; an adviser applies
                      it to your circumstances.

The keep-everything temptation

Storage is nearly free, so why not keep it all?

Three reasons, none of them decisive on its own.

Findability degrades with volume. A folder holding eleven years of undifferentiated records is functionally a shoebox with better lighting. The point of retention structure is partly to keep the live set small.

Some obligations run the other way. Data protection regimes in several jurisdictions require personal data not to be kept longer than necessary — which bites if your records include other people’s details, as employment and client records do. Whether that applies to you is, again, a local question.

Indefinite retention defers a decision rather than making one. Eventually someone has to work out what’s in there, usually under time pressure, usually not you.

That said: if the choice is between keeping everything and keeping nothing, keep everything. The scheme above is better than both, but volume is a much smaller problem than absence.

Digital retention is not automatic

A quiet failure worth naming. Records in cloud storage feel permanently kept, and several things quietly end that: an account closed or lapsed, a service discontinued, a subscription downgraded below its storage tier, a sync deletion propagated everywhere, and a proprietary format nobody can open.

Retention means the record will be readable at the end of the period. A file in a service you no longer pay for does not meet that. Any retention scheme that lives entirely inside one commercial service is exposed to that service’s business decisions, which is an argument for holding an independent copy of anything with a long clock on it.

What this doesn’t settle

The number. Deliberately, and it’s the whole point of the page.

How long you must keep any particular record is set by your tax authority and by any other obligations that apply to your work, it differs by jurisdiction and by record type, and it changes. Your tax authority publishes its own requirements; an accountant or adviser can apply them to your circumstances in about ten minutes.

What this page gives you is the thing that makes the answer usable once you have it: records in period cohorts, long-hold items separated out, a disposal date written down, and disposal as a single deliberate action. Get that in place and the number is a detail you can fill in later — which is the correct relationship between the two, and the reverse of how everyone approaches it.