How Long to Keep Employee Records: A Retention Schedule for Employers

October 12, 2026Posted by: Tony Acerra

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Most retention charts answer this question with a table, and the table is the easy part. The harder part is that a single employee’s file holds records running on half a dozen different clocks, each started by a different event: the date of hire, the date of termination, the last payroll entry, the end of a calendar year, the due date of a tax return. An HR team that gives the whole folder one retention date will get several of those dates wrong, some too early and some far too late.

This guide puts the federal minimums in one place, shows which event starts each clock, and explains how to turn them into a schedule an HR team can actually run. State law adds its own layer on top of everything here, and our records retention guidelines by state cover that side. For finance, healthcare and legal records alongside HR, see the full business records retention guide.

How Long Do Employers Have to Keep Employee Records?

Record	Federal minimum	Clock starts	Rule
Personnel and employment records (applications, hiring, promotion, pay, termination)	1 year	The record is made or the personnel action happens, whichever is later; the termination date for an involuntary termination	29 CFR 1602.14
Job applications and resumes (age discrimination rules)	1 year	The personnel action the record relates to	29 CFR 1627.3
Payroll records	3 years	Last date of entry	29 CFR 516.5
Time cards and wage rate tables	2 years	Last date of entry, or last effective date for rate tables	29 CFR 516.6
Form I-9	3 years after hire or 1 year after termination, whichever is later	Hire date and termination date	8 CFR 274a.2
FMLA leave records	3 years	Not specified in the rule	29 CFR 825.500
Employment tax records	4 years	The tax due date or the date it was paid, whichever is later	26 CFR 31.6001-1
Records behind benefit plan filings	6 years	Filing date of the related report	29 U.S.C. 1027
OSHA 300 Log, 300A summary and 301 incident reports	5 years	End of the calendar year the records cover	29 CFR 1904.33
Employee medical records under OSHA	Duration of employment plus 30 years	End of employment	29 CFR 1910.1020
Employee exposure records	30 years	Not specified in the rule	29 CFR 1910.1020
Any personnel record relevant to a discrimination charge or lawsuit	Until final disposition	Filing of the charge or action	29 CFR 1602.14

Two things in that table deserve a second look. Three of the rows use a later-of rule, which means the date cannot be worked out from a single event and has to be calculated per employee. And every figure is a minimum. None of these rules requires a record to go anywhere when its period ends; they only say how long it must be available.

Personnel Files: The One-Year Federal Minimum and Why It Is Not Enough

The scope of 29 CFR 1602.14 is wider than most people expect. It covers requests for reasonable accommodation, application forms, and records dealing with hiring, promotion, demotion, transfer, layoff, termination, pay and selection for training. It applies to employers covered by Title VII, which the statute defines as those with 15 or more employees in 20 or more calendar weeks of the current or preceding year. The age discrimination rules add a parallel requirement in 29 CFR 1627.3: job applications, resumes and related employment inquiries are kept for one year from the personnel action they relate to.

The reason one year rarely works in practice is that the federal floor is not the only thing setting the date. Your state may require longer. A former employee’s claim can arrive well after a year has passed; wage claims under the Fair Labor Standards Act can be filed up to three years after they accrue when the violation is willful. And the personnel folder usually contains records with longer clocks of their own. The practical period for a personnel file is set by all three, which is why the schedule has to be built one record type at a time rather than one folder at a time.

Payroll and Wage Records: Three Years, and Two for the Worksheets

The three-year rule in 29 CFR 516.5 covers the payroll records themselves and also the certificates, agreements, plans and notices that sit behind them, such as collective bargaining agreements, counted from their last effective date. The two-year rule in 29 CFR 516.6 covers the working papers: time cards that record daily start and stop times, wage rate tables, and records of additions to or deductions from pay.

The three-year period is not arbitrary. It matches the longest window in which an employee can bring a wage claim under the FLSA statute of limitations: two years for an ordinary violation, three for a willful one. Which suggests a simple operating choice. Rather than tracking time cards on a two-year clock and payroll on a three-year one, many employers keep the whole payroll and timekeeping series together on the three-year schedule. It costs a little extra storage and removes a date calculation that nobody will get right every time.

Form I-9: The Rule That Trips Up Most Employers

The rule sits in 8 CFR 274a.2, and the words that matter are the last three. An employer keeps the form three years after the hire or one year after termination, whichever is later. Two examples show how differently that plays out.

• Hired March 1, 2022, left June 30, 2023. Three years after hire is March 1, 2025. One year after termination is June 30, 2024. The later date wins: keep the form until March 1, 2025.
• Hired March 1, 2015, left January 15, 2026. Three years after hire passed long ago, in 2018. One year after termination is January 15, 2027. Keep the form until January 15, 2027.

The short version, if you are the person who has to fix this: you can’t put a retention end date on an I-9 when you file it. Every I-9 for a current employee stays until the day that person leaves, and then you do the math once. Anyone who worked for you more than two years lands on the one-year-after-separation date. Anyone who left sooner lands on the three-years-from-hire date. That’s the whole rule, and most I-9 retention errors come from applying one half of it and forgetting the other.

Two practical points follow. The same regulation gives an employer at least three business days’ notice before an inspection of its I-9s, which is not long if the forms are scattered through individual personnel folders in several locations. Many employers keep I-9s in a separate file for exactly that reason, so an inspection covers the forms and nothing else. And the forms can be kept electronically, provided the system meets the standards the regulation sets out and existing forms stay fully accessible when the system changes.

Benefits, Leave and Tax Records: FMLA, ERISA and Employment Taxes

The FMLA rule in 29 CFR 825.500 does not prescribe a form or a system, and it allows records to be kept on microfilm or in electronic form as long as they can be produced and read. The detail that affects filing is in the same section: certifications, recertifications and medical histories created for FMLA purposes must be kept as confidential medical records, in files separate from the usual personnel file.

For employment taxes, 26 CFR 31.6001-1 sets the minimum at four years after the due date of the tax for the period the records relate to, or the date the tax was paid, whichever is later. A late payment therefore extends the retention date for that period. For benefit plans, 29 U.S.C. 1027 requires the records behind the plan’s reports, including vouchers, worksheets and receipts, to be available for at least six years after the filing date of the report they support.

Safety and Medical Records: Five Years for OSHA Logs, Thirty for Exposure

The five-year rule in 29 CFR 1904.33 has a detail that turns storage into an active obligation: during those five years, stored 300 Logs must be updated to add newly discovered recordable cases and to reflect changes in how earlier cases are classified. A log sent to storage and never retrieved again is not compliant. Employers with 10 or fewer employees throughout the previous calendar year are generally exempt from keeping these records under 29 CFR 1904.1, though they still have to report serious incidents.

The longest clock in the whole schedule belongs to 29 CFR 1910.1020. Employee medical records are preserved for at least the duration of employment plus thirty years, with narrow exceptions such as health insurance claims kept separately from the employer’s medical program. For someone who works in a facility with regulated exposures for twenty years, that is a record kept for half a century.

Medical information also has to live apart from the personnel file. Under the ADA, medical information from employment examinations is kept on separate forms and in separate medical files and treated as confidential, and GINA applies the same separation to genetic information, including family medical history. Put together with the FMLA rule above, that gives the medical side of an employee’s records its own file, its own access controls and its own retention clock.

When a Legal Hold Overrides Every Schedule Above

The EEOC rule in 29 CFR 1602.14 spells out what relevant means, and it is broader than the complainant’s own file. It includes records about all other employees holding positions similar to the one the person held or sought, and the applications and test papers of every other candidate for a job the person applied for and did not get. Final disposition is defined as well: the end of the period in which the person can still sue in federal court or, if a suit is brought, the date the litigation ends.

The duty to preserve can start before anything is filed. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e) lets a court act when electronically stored information that should have been preserved in anticipation of litigation is lost because a party did not take reasonable steps to keep it. Paper files deserve the same caution. In practice that means a hold has to reach the boxes in offsite storage and the folders in a cabinet, not only the email system, and every scheduled review on those records has to stop until the hold is lifted. Our guide to litigation holds on physical records covers the inventory side of that in detail.

How to Turn These Rules Into One Working Retention Schedule

A workable schedule usually comes down to six steps.

1. Split the file into series. Personnel records, I-9s, medical and FMLA certification records, payroll and timekeeping, benefits, and safety records each get their own place. Medical records are already required to be kept apart, and many employers file I-9s separately too, so this is less of a change than it sounds.
2. Record the trigger dates. Hire date, termination date, last payroll entry, calendar year and tax due date are the events that start the clocks. Capture them at the series level so nobody has to reconstruct them years later.
3. Take the longest applicable period. Where two rules cover the same record, as the FLSA and age discrimination rules both do for payroll data, the longer one governs.
4. Layer state law on top. Federal minimums are the floor. Your state’s rules, set out in our records retention guidelines by state, often run longer.
5. Check for holds before any review. The end of a retention period is the moment to confirm that no charge, lawsuit or foreseeable dispute touches the record.
6. Write it into the policy. The schedule belongs in your records retention policy, so HR, legal and whoever manages storage are working from the same dates.

The same periods apply whether a record is on paper or in electronic form; the medium changes how the record is stored, not how long it must be kept. And when a period ends, the record becomes eligible for review. Nothing in the federal rules above requires disposal at that point. A record that is still useful, or that could become relevant to a claim, can stay in secure document storage for as long as the organization decides it should. For HR teams handling this at scale, our HR document management page covers how the files themselves are organized and retrieved.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long do you have to keep an I-9 after an employee leaves?

An employer keeps a Form I-9 for three years after the date of hire or one year after the date employment ends, whichever is later, under 8 CFR 274a.2. For anyone employed more than two years, that works out to one year after the last day of work. For shorter tenures, the three-years-from-hire date is later and governs. The form cannot be given a retention end date until the employee leaves.

How long should payroll records be kept?

Payroll records under the Fair Labor Standards Act are kept for at least three years from the last date of entry, and supporting records such as time cards and wage rate tables for at least two years. Employment tax records are kept at least four years after the tax was due or paid, whichever is later. Many employers keep payroll and timekeeping together on the three-year schedule to avoid tracking two dates.

Should employee medical records be kept in the personnel file?

No. Federal rules require medical information to be kept separately from the personnel file and treated as confidential. The ADA requires separate medical files for information from employment examinations, GINA applies the same rule to genetic information and family medical history, and FMLA certifications and medical histories must also be kept apart from the usual personnel file. Medical records under OSHA’s access rule are kept for the duration of employment plus thirty years.

What happens to the retention schedule when an employee files a discrimination charge?

The schedule is suspended for every relevant record. Under 29 CFR 1602.14, once a charge of discrimination is filed or a lawsuit is brought, the employer must keep all personnel records relevant to it until final disposition. That includes records about other employees in similar positions and the applications of other candidates for the same job, and it applies even where the normal retention period has already passed.

Do the same retention periods apply to scanned or electronic employee records?

Yes. Federal retention periods apply to the record, not to the medium it is stored on, so an electronic or scanned copy is held for the same period as the paper original would be. Some rules add conditions on how electronic records are kept. The I-9 regulation, for example, allows electronic storage only when the system meets specific standards and keeps existing forms fully accessible if the system is replaced.

Keep the Schedule Working

A retention schedule for employee records works when each record series has its own trigger date and minimum, the later-of rules are calculated rather than guessed, and a hold stops the clock the moment a dispute appears. GRM supports the records side of that schedule end to end: enterprise records management with indexed offsite storage, barcode tracking and logged retrievals, so a folder can be found within an inspection window; climate-controlled vault storage for records and media that need environmental control; document scanning for files that need to be available electronically; and documented, certified destruction once a record has been confirmed eligible. For the fully digital part that follows scanning, meaning the workflow, retention and access controls on the electronic copies, GRM works in cooperation with its sister company, VisualVault, through the content services platform. Request a quote to work through your employee records schedule with us.