Misfiled items
The National Archives holds over 18 million documents spanning nearly 1,000 years of UK history. Due to the size and scale of its collection, a few records may be misplaced from time to time. Explore how The National Archive locates and tracks these items.
The National Archives' paper collection continues to grow every year and is currently stored in more than 252km shelving. While we make every effort to ensure that every record in this collection is filed in its correct place, a few documents may be misfiled from time to time.
To track this, The National Archive produces lists of everything that it knows has been misfiled. This dates back to the 1850s when the collection first became publicly available.
Find out which documents are misfiled
You can access the current list of misfiled documents below. Discovery, our online catalogue, also lists where individual files or portions of a record are unavailable. This is updated daily.
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Missing or misplaced documents (CSV, 264kB)
1736 rows of data
This list is updated annually. The current list was generated in February 2026.
Each misfiled document has a date associated with it. This is the procedure we follow for allocating dates to misfiled documents:
- If available, we will provide the date at which the document was officially classed as missing on our computer systems.
- Where this is not available, the date of the missing search sheets (pre-computer) has been used.
- Some documents that have been missing from before the computer era have no misfiled date associated with them. Where this is the case we have used 24/05/1999. This is the date when the current computer system was first activated.
Each document is listed as misfiled only after a dedicated search has been completed and the search papers filed where the document should be stored in the collection. Searches for newly misfiled documents are undertaken every Monday. The vast majority of these searches will locate the document before it is officially listed as missing.
Misfiled documents that have not been found at the search stage are occasionally found while producing records from other boxes.
Types of misfiled records
There are two dedicated descriptions in Discovery that we use for misfiled records.
Missing: misfiled at Kew
These are whole documents that have been misfiled while stored in The National Archives. Normally this happens during the document returns process after viewing.
Misplaced: misplaced while on loan by a government department
These are whole documents or whole extracts from documents that have been misplaced while on recall by the originating government department away from The National Archives.