How Long to Keep Timesheets and Time Cards

If you want a single number, keep timesheets for four years. That covers the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Internal Revenue Service, every anti-discrimination statute and the statute of limitations for a wage claim, with a year to spare for the states that count differently. New York, New Jersey and Hawaii want six, and anyone with employees there keeps six for everyone, because sorting records by state is more work than keeping them.

The long answer is a table, because “timesheet” is not a legal category. The FLSA calls the same document a time card, the IRS calls it support for an employment tax return, a state wage order calls it a time record, and a discrimination charge turns it into a personnel record. Each of those labels carries its own period and, more awkwardly, its own starting point.

Two of these deserve a closer look because they are the ones people get wrong: the two-year FLSA rule, which is the number that shows up in every quick answer and is almost never the right one to use, and the IRS rule, whose clock does not start when you think it does.

The Department of Labor splits records into two groups. The first group, in 29 CFR 516.5, is what it calls payroll records: for every non-exempt employee, the hours worked each day and each workweek, the basis of pay, the regular rate, straight-time earnings, overtime earnings, additions and deductions, total wages and the pay date. Those are kept three years from the last date of entry. The second group, in 29 CFR 516.6, is what the regulation calls “supplementary basic records”: the time cards or time sheets on which the daily start and stop times were written, the work schedules, the wage rate tables and the order and billing records that show what was produced. Those are kept two years.

The logic is that the summary outlives the source. A payroll register that says Maria worked 42.5 hours in the week of March 9 is the record; the time card with her punches is the evidence behind it, and the department was willing to let the evidence go a year earlier. In practice the split is useless. The payroll register cannot be checked without the time card, and if an employee disputes the 42.5, the time card is the only thing that settles it. Which brings us to the statute of limitations.

Under 29 U.S.C. 255 an employee can sue for unpaid overtime going back two years, and three years if the violation was willful. “Willful” is argued in almost every case, so three years is the exposure. An employer that destroys time cards after exactly two years has, for the third year, payroll records it cannot prove and a plaintiff who does not need to. That is the Mt. Clemens problem, and it has its own section below.

What the FLSA does not require is any particular format. Fact Sheet #21 says a time clock, a timekeeper or the employee’s own entries are all acceptable as long as the record is complete and accurate, and that an employee on a fixed schedule can be recorded as having worked the schedule, with only the exceptions noted. The timesheet templates on this site produce a record with daily start, stop and break times and weekly totals, which is the content the regulation asks for.

The IRS does not care about overtime, but it cares a great deal about whether the wages on Form 941 match the wages on Form W-2 and whether the hours support the classification of a worker. Its rule is that all records of employment taxes are kept for at least four years after the fourth-quarter return for the year is filed. For 2026 wages that return is due at the end of January 2027, so the records survive until early 2031. Timesheets are not named in the IRS list, but “amounts and dates of all wage payments” and “dates of employment for each employee” are, and an examiner who questions a wage figure will ask for the hours behind it.

The four-year clock is also why “keep payroll for three years” is bad advice in the United States. The FLSA’s three years and the IRS’s four years run from different events, and the IRS period ends later in every case. A record retention schedule that uses three years for payroll will fail an employment tax examination before it fails a wage-and-hour audit.

Records that support the pandemic-era credits, qualified sick and family leave wages and the employee retention credit, are a special case: the IRS asks for six years. Few employers still have open positions on those, but the hours records behind a 2021 leave claim are among the records a 2026 examination can request.

States set their own minimums, and the longer period wins. The table lists the states where the rule is clear and the period differs from, or restates, the federal one. Everywhere else the federal rules are the floor.

California’s “four recommended” is not a typo. The statute says three, but the state’s Unfair Competition Law lets wage claims reach back four years, and a time record that would have defeated the fourth year has usually been shredded by then. Most California employment lawyers tell clients four, and the state’s own personnel-file rule in Government Code 12946 is four as well. Illinois has the same shape for a different reason: three years for the Minimum Wage Law, five for the Equal Pay Act, so a timesheet that feeds a pay-equity analysis lives five.

If employees work in several states, pick the longest period among them and apply it everywhere. A six-year schedule for a company with one New York office is cheaper than two schedules and a mistake.

The reason to keep time records is not the fine. Failing to keep records is a violation, and the Wage and Hour Division can cite it, but the penalty that hurts is evidentiary. In Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., decided in 1946 and still the rule, the Supreme Court held that when an employer’s records are inaccurate or inadequate, the employee only has to show the amount of unpaid work “as a matter of just and reasonable inference”. A diary, a reconstruction from memory or a co-worker’s estimate is enough. The burden then shifts to the employer to produce evidence of the precise hours or to disprove the estimate, and an employer that threw the time cards away two years ago cannot do either.

In a collective action with forty plaintiffs, the difference between “we have the time cards” and “we destroyed them on schedule” is routinely the difference between a dismissal and a settlement. That is why the retention schedules of companies that have been sued once all say three years or more for time records, whatever 29 CFR 516.6 permits.

The flip side is also worth knowing. Time records that exist and are accurate are the employer’s best defense, and the FLSA lets the employer choose the method. An employee who signs a weekly timesheet, or approves punches in an app, has a hard time arguing a year later that the hours were wrong. Accuracy at the time is worth more than any retention period afterwards; the time card calculator totals the week in minutes and shows the overtime split, which is the figure that ends up in dispute.

The same question has different answers abroad, and anyone running payroll across borders needs them side by side.

The pattern is the same everywhere: the working-time rule is short, the pay rule is long, and the tax rule is longest. Only the numbers change.

1. Keep every time record four years, six if you have employees in New York, New Jersey or Hawaii. Count from the end of the calendar year the record belongs to, not from the day it was made. One date per year is easier to administer than a rolling window, and it is never shorter than any rule above.
2. Keep the time record with the payroll record it supports. A time card that cannot be matched to a pay period is worthless in an audit. Store them by pay period, or make sure the timekeeping export carries the pay period identifier.
3. Stop the clock when a claim arrives. A demand letter, an EEOC charge, a Wage and Hour Division inquiry or a lawsuit suspends every retention period for every record that could be relevant, until the matter is closed. Destroying records after notice is spoliation, and courts punish it harder than any recordkeeping violation.
4. Electronic is fine. No federal rule requires paper. The record must be legible, complete, accurate and retrievable within a reasonable time; a PDF export per pay period plus the raw data is enough. Keep the raw punches, not only the edited totals, because the edits are what gets questioned.
5. Write the schedule down. A one-page policy that says what is kept, how long, where, and who deletes it is itself evidence of good faith, and good faith is what separates the two-year and three-year limitation periods under the FLSA.
6. Delete on schedule. Records kept past the schedule are discoverable. Once the longest applicable period has run and nothing is pending, dispose of them and note the date.