Advice on retention

Information should be retained only as long as it is needed for business, legal or historical purposes and a retention policy needs to be devised and applied to all information held.

You can apply many different retention periods or you can aggregate them into three categories:

  • short – for example, up to two years
  • medium – up to eight years
  • long

Model retention schedules

The National Archives has provided advice on retention for certain groups of administrative records. However, these model retention schedules are no longer being maintained and should be used with care. All legislative retention periods should be checked against legislation.gov.uk.