Guide
How long to keep receipts
For US federal tax, the default is three years from the date you filed. It stretches to six years if you left off more than 25% of your gross income, seven for a worthless-securities or bad-debt claim, and indefinitely if you filed a fraudulent return or never filed at all. Employment tax records run four years. Everything else — warranties, returns, property basis — follows the asset, not the calendar.
The periods, as the IRS states them
Keep records three years from the date you filed the original return, unless one of four exceptions applies. Seven years for a claim from worthless securities or a bad debt deduction. Six years if you did not report income you should have and it was more than 25% of the gross income shown on the return. Indefinitely if you filed a fraudulent return, and indefinitely if you did not file at all.
There is a fifth case worth knowing: if you file a claim for credit or refund after filing your return, the window is three years from the filing date or two years from the date you paid the tax, whichever is later. These are the IRS's own figures, from its "How long should I keep records?" page, checked on 16 August 2026. This guide covers US federal tax only, it is not tax advice, and the rules that apply to you personally are worth confirming with a tax professional once.
Employment tax records: four years
If you have employees, keep employment tax records at least four years after the date the tax becomes due or the date it is paid, whichever is later. That is a separate clock from the three-year default, and it is longer, so a single business that pays anyone runs both.
In practice this means a business retention policy has at least two shelves rather than one. If you keep everything for the longest applicable period you never have to reason about which shelf a document belongs on — and with digital records the storage cost of over-keeping is close to nothing.
Records tied to property outlive all of it
Records connected to property stay until the period of limitations expires for the year you dispose of that property. You need them to work out depreciation, amortisation and depletion deductions while you hold the asset, and to calculate the gain or loss when you sell it.
This is the rule that catches people out, because it is not a number of years — it is a rule about events. A receipt for a machine bought in 2019 and sold in 2031 matters in 2034. The same logic applies to home improvement records that adjust the basis of a property you may sell decades later. If you throw away by date rather than by asset, this is the category you lose.
Digital copies count, if the system is sound
The IRS states that all requirements applying to hard copy books and records apply equally to electronic storage systems. Original hard copies may be destroyed once the electronic system has been tested to establish that it reproduces the records in compliance with the IRS's requirements for an electronic storage system.
The practical reading of Publication 583 is that scanning is allowed and binning the paper afterwards is allowed, but the burden is on your system being legible, complete and retrievable rather than on the fact that a photo exists. A folder of unlabelled camera-roll images is not that. Records that are indexed, searchable and backed up are. This is covered in more depth in the guide to organising receipts electronically.
Non-tax reasons to keep a receipt
Tax is only one of four clocks. Warranty periods run from purchase and often need the receipt as proof. Return and exchange windows are short but absolute. Insurance claims need evidence of what you owned and what it cost. And anything reimbursable needs the receipt until the money actually arrives.
These clocks are the reason a blanket "three years then shred" policy is wrong for personal spending. A £900 washing machine with a five-year warranty needs its receipt for five years even though nobody will ever ask about it on a tax return. Sort by why you are keeping something, not by when you bought it.
What to do with the pile you already have
Do not sort it. Capture it. Photograph or scan everything in the backlog into one dated batch, then apply retention rules to the digital copies where deleting is free and reversible until you empty the bin. Sorting first is what makes the backlog permanent — it turns a mechanical hour into a decision for every slip.
Once the backlog is digital, the retention question stops being a filing job and becomes a search query: everything from a given year is one filter away, and the pile itself no longer occupies a drawer. Going forward, the habit that keeps this from recurring is same-day capture, which is the subject of the main organising guide.
A retention policy that fits on one line
Keep tax-relevant records seven years, employment records seven, property records until seven years after you dispose of the asset, and warranty records for the length of the warranty. Over-keeping by a few years costs nothing digitally and removes the need to remember which exception applies to you.
The reason to pick seven rather than three is that you cannot always tell in advance which exception you fall under — the 25%-of-gross-income rule is not something you know at filing time if it happens through an error. Seven years covers every ordinary case. It is a simplification, not a legal minimum, and if your situation involves fraud allegations, unfiled returns or an open enquiry, it does not apply and you need advice rather than a rule of thumb.
Questions
Common questions
How long should I keep receipts for taxes?
Three years from the date you filed covers the ordinary case for US federal tax. Keep them six years if you failed to report more than 25% of your gross income, seven years for a worthless-securities or bad-debt claim, and indefinitely if you filed a fraudulent return or did not file. Keeping everything seven years is the simple version that covers all the ordinary cases.
Can I throw away receipts after scanning them?
For US federal tax, yes — Publication 583 permits destroying the original hard copies once your electronic storage system has been tested to show it reproduces records in compliance with IRS requirements. The condition is the system, not the scan: records must be legible, complete, indexed and retrievable. Documents you may need in original form for a non-tax reason are a separate question.
How long do businesses have to keep receipts?
The same three-year default applies, with employment tax records held at least four years after the tax is due or paid, and property records held until the limitations period expires for the year of disposal. In practice a business that runs a single seven-year policy plus an asset shelf satisfies all three without having to categorise each document.
Do I need to keep paper receipts if I have the bank statement?
A statement proves payment, not what the payment was for. The IRS's own wording in Publication 583 is that proof of payment by itself does not establish entitlement to a deduction — you also need documents such as invoices or sales slips showing what you bought. The pairing of statement and receipt is what makes an expense defensible, which is why matching the two is worth a system.
How long should I keep personal receipts?
Long enough to serve the reason you kept it: the return window for anything returnable, the warranty period for anything with a warranty, and the tax retention period for anything you claimed. Everyday personal spending you will never be asked about does not need keeping at all. Deciding this once, as a rule, is faster than deciding it per receipt.
Does the retention clock start at the purchase date or the filing date?
The filing date, for the tax periods. The three-year and six-year windows run from the date you filed the original return, and the refund-claim window runs from the filing date or the payment date, whichever is later. A receipt from January 2026 that lands on a return filed in April 2027 is therefore live until at least April 2030.