Deciding how long to keep personal data

What is it?

A checklist and guidance to show you how to identify how long you should keep personal data for each of your work activities.

Why did we create it?

• How to set a retention period is a question we are asked during training. We’ve created a checklist that people can refer to whenever they need to choose a retention period.
• Having a guide allows for officers to self-serve before seeking the help of the Records Manager or Data Protection Officer.

Who should use it?

• Data owners
• Project leads
• Records Managers and Data Protection Officers (to share with their organisation’s staff)

© London Office of Technology and Innovation, 2026. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.