How long should you keep invoices and contracts?
Every country that taxes a business also tells that business how long to keep its paperwork. The duty is universal; the number of years is not. Throwing documents away too early exposes you, keeping them with no method drowns you, and copying a period you read about in another country protects you from nothing.
Below are five sets of rules, each with the official source it comes from. Then the part that does not change from one border to the next: how you file.
01Five countries, five answers
| Country | Accounting records and invoices | When the clock starts | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| France | 10 years | Close of the financial year | Code de commerce, art. L123-22, service-public.gouv.fr |
| Germany | 10 years for books and annual accounts, 8 years for accounting vouchers including invoices since 1 January 2025, 6 years for other business correspondence | End of the calendar year in which the document arose | §147 AO, gesetze-im-internet.de |
| Ireland | 6 years | Date of the transaction | Taxes Acts, revenue.ie |
| Netherlands | 7 years, and 10 years for records concerning real estate | When the data stops being current | belastingdienst.nl |
| United Kingdom | 6 years | End of the last company financial year the records relate to | gov.uk |
02Three things the table does not show
- The clock almost never starts on the invoice. It starts at a close: a financial year, a calendar year, the moment a figure stops being current. An invoice issued in January, in a business whose year ends in December, is therefore kept close to a year longer than the headline number suggests.
- Other documents run on other periods. In France, commercial contracts are five years under the Code de commerce (art. L110-4) and tax records six years under the Livre des procédures fiscales (art. L102 B), while the accounting records stay at ten. One country, three answers that do not match, depending on the document in your hand.
- Longer periods sit on top of the standard one. GOV.UK is explicit: keep records beyond six years if the return was filed late, if HMRC has opened a compliance check, or if the records cover an asset expected to last longer than that.
03A digital copy counts, if it stays readable
None of these rules ask for paper. What they ask for is a document that can still be read, and produced on request, for the whole period. German law states it plainly: an invoice must remain legible for the entire eight years. That is a stronger requirement than it sounds. A file format nobody opens any more, a disk that no longer spins, or an export locked inside software you stopped paying for all fail it, quietly, years before anyone asks.
04The trap: keeping without being able to find
Keeping ten years of invoices is of no use if, on the day of an audit or a dispute, you spend two hours digging through a hard drive. Useful retention is a period respected plus an organisation that holds over time: filing by financial year, clear names, and a copy that lives outside your computer.
05A simple method
- One folder per financial year (2024, 2025 and so on), and inside it a split between invoices, contracts and tax.
- Name things on the way in: date, type, issuer. Your future self will thank you.
- Date the upload: knowing when a document entered your archive is often worth more than the date printed on it, because that is the date every one of these clocks is measured against.
- Get a copy off your machine: an online archive, hosted in France and outside the US cloud, protects you from a disk failure as much as from a stolen laptop.
The right question: will you be able to find the right document in five years?
06In short
Six years in Ireland and the UK, seven in the Netherlands, eight to ten in Germany, ten in France. Check the one that applies to you rather than the one that sounds familiar, and remember that the period starts at a close, not at a date printed on a page. Beyond the periods themselves, it is the organisation that makes the difference. PDF Archive gives you the frame: filing in folders, a dated upload, and storage in France.
This article is for information and does not constitute legal or accounting advice. The periods above were checked against the official sources linked in the table on 21 August 2026; rules change, so check the ones that apply to your own situation.