Your retention period is the length of time you store employee data or records. This can be for business or compliance purposes. When the retention period ends, you must remove the data. This reduces the risk of keeping unnecessary, inaccurate, or out-of-date information.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) doesn’t say how long to keep employee data. Instead, it says you must keep data no longer than is necessary for the purpose you obtained it for.

Create a data retention policy

If you don’t already have one, now is a good time to create a data retention policy for your company. This policy will document how long your company needs to store employee data. It may also dictate how often you check your employee records. Check for personal data that is outside of the retention period. Get more information about how long you need to store data for tax and compliance purposes. Review the following GOV.UK articles:

• Keeping your pay and tax records (opens in a new tab)
• Company and accounting records for limited companies (opens in a new tab)
• How long to keep your data if you're self-employed (opens in a new tab)

HMRC requires that you store payroll information for:

• The current tax year
• A minimum of three years before the current tax year

For example:

Your current tax year is 6 April 2023 to 5 April 2024. Keep data from 6 April 2020 onwards. 

Complete the following steps:

Your Sage Payroll will never remove an employee’s data itself. Once the retention period ends, you must manually remove it.

To find out how to remove an employee's data or extend their data retention period, GDPR personal data within an employee record.

• Read more about GDPR in UK