The file cabinet in the back office is either full of records nobody dares throw away, or it's been cleaned out in a hurry and nobody can say what went. Both are retention problems. Keeping everything forever creates cost, clutter, and exposure. Throwing things out on a hunch creates a different risk: the day someone asks for a record the law required you to keep.
The way out is a retention schedule: one page that says, for each kind of record, how long you keep it, who owns it, and when it gets destroyed. Federal rules supply some of the answers. Here are the ones small employers meet most often, with the sources, so you can build the page from facts instead of habit.
Payroll records and time cards
The Department of Labor's Fact Sheet #21 on Fair Labor Standards Act recordkeeping says employers must preserve payroll records for at least three years, and the records on which wage computations are based, such as time cards, wage rate tables, and work schedules, for two years (29 CFR Part 516). Many employers simply keep both for three years or more, since the cost of storage is small and the two categories blur in practice.
Form I-9
USCIS's employer handbook says you must keep a Form I-9 for each person you hire for three years after the date of hire, or one year after employment ends, whichever is later (8 CFR 274a.2). This is the one that catches people, because the date to destroy it is different for every employee and depends on when they leave. Store I-9s separately from personnel files, with a column for the date each can be destroyed.
Injury and illness records
Employers who must keep OSHA injury and illness records have to save the OSHA 300 Log, the privacy case list if one exists, the annual 300A summary, and the OSHA 301 incident reports for five years following the end of the calendar year they cover (29 CFR 1904.33). Not every employer has to keep these records; some small employers and industries are partially exempt. Check OSHA's recordkeeping pages for your case.
Personnel and hiring records
The EEOC's recordkeeping guidance says employers must keep personnel and employment records for one year under Title VII and the ADA, and that if an employee is involuntarily terminated, their records must be kept for one year from the date of termination. Under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, payroll records must be kept for three years. When a charge of discrimination is filed, relevant records must be preserved until the final disposition of the charge or any lawsuit based on it. That last rule is the one that overrides every schedule.
What these rules don't tell you
The federal rules above are floors for specific records, not a complete list. Many states set longer periods for payroll, personnel files, or wage statements. Tax records, benefit plan records, contracts, and records covered by industry rules each have their own requirements. The honest way to handle this is to treat every row on your schedule as a claim you've checked against a source, and to say where you found it. When no rule applies, choose a period on purpose and write down why.
Build the schedule
Make a simple table with these columns:
- Record type. Payroll register, time cards, I-9, OSHA log, personnel file, offer letters, and so on.
- Retention period and trigger. “Three years from date of hire or one year after separation, whichever is later” is a different trigger from “five years after the end of the calendar year.” Write the trigger, not just the number.
- Source. The citation or link, and the date you last checked it.
- Owner. A named person who's responsible for destruction. A record without an owner is a record nobody destroys. We've written about assigning ownership for exactly this reason.
- Location. Where the record actually lives, including the folder, system, and any backup.
Add a legal-hold rule
The most important line on the page isn't a retention period. It's the exception: if a charge, lawsuit, audit, or investigation is pending or reasonably expected, you suspend destruction for the relevant records until you're told otherwise. Say who can place a hold and who can lift it. Without that rule, a routine clean-out can destroy the one record a dispute turns on.
Run it twice a year
A schedule only works if someone follows it. Pick two dates, and make one of them now: year-end is a natural time to destroy what has aged out, and it comes with fresh records to file. Keep a short log of what was destroyed and when, so you can show the clean-out was routine, not selective. Connect it to the rest of your upkeep; stale records are one more form of documentation debt.
The bottom line
A retention schedule is one page: record type, period and trigger, source, owner, location. Fill it from the actual rules, such as three years for payroll and two for time cards under the FLSA, three years after hire or one after separation for I-9s, five years for OSHA logs, and a year for personnel records under federal discrimination law, then check your state for longer periods. Add a legal-hold rule and review it twice a year. This is general information, not legal advice; KnowledgeByDesign is not a law firm, and an employment attorney or your state agency is the authority for your situation.
— Tom
A schedule with an owner on every row
KnowledgeByDesign keeps policies and procedures as linked articles with owners and review dates — so the retention schedule is reviewed on a date instead of rediscovered during a dispute.
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