How long
to keep
records.

The six periods

The IRS publishes retention periods tied to what the record supports rather than to what kind of business you run. Read on 12 October 2026:

• Three years, the ordinary case, where none of the situations below applies.
• Six years, “if you do not report income that you should report, and it is more than 25% of the gross income shown on your return.”
• Seven years, “if you file a claim for a loss from worthless securities or bad debt deduction.”
• Indefinitely, “if you do not file a return.”
• Indefinitely, “if you file a fraudulent return.”
• At least four years for employment tax records, “after the date that the tax becomes due or is paid, whichever is later.”

Property records sit outside that list: keep them “until the period of limitations expires for the year in which you dispose of the property”, because they are what establish depreciation, amortisation and the gain or loss when it is sold.

The six-year rule is not about honesty

It is easy to read “if you do not report income that you should report” as describing somebody doing something wrong, and therefore as not applying to you. That is the wrong way round. The rule describes a situation the agency may later find, not an intention you had, and the threshold is arithmetic: more than 25% of the gross income shown on the return.

A business with several income streams, one of which was misfiled, can meet that description without anyone having decided anything. The practical implication is that three years is the floor for the ordinary case rather than a safe universal, and the gap between three and six is cheap to cover.

The two indefinite ones are the quiet trap

Both “keep indefinitely” entries describe a missing or false return, and the first is far more ordinary than it sounds. A year in which someone believed they had no filing obligation, or the first year of a venture that was not thought of as a business yet, is a year with no return, and the retention period for the records behind it does not expire.

Nobody schedules this. The records from the year that felt least like a business are exactly the ones most likely to have been thrown out.

Where the clock starts

Several retention periods do not begin on the date printed on the document. For employment tax records, the period begins when the tax was due or paid, whichever is later. For property records, it begins in the year you dispose of the asset, which may be many years after you bought it.

Filing by the date printed on a receipt is therefore the natural and incorrect habit. Filing by the return the record supports is the one that survives contact with the rules.

Keep the returns themselves, separately

The IRS adds a note that is easy to skim past: “Keep copies of your filed tax returns. They help in preparing future tax returns and making computations if you file an amended return.”

Returns are small, they compress to nothing, and they are the index to everything else. The sane arrangement for most small businesses is to treat returns as permanent and to let the supporting records age out on the schedule above, which costs essentially nothing and removes the worst version of this problem, which is having the receipts and not knowing which year they belong to.

One caution worth stating: these are the federal periods only. States set their own, and some run longer. So does anything imposed by a lender, an insurer or a contract, none of which cares what the IRS minimum is.