Retention Periods in Germany 2026: A Table for Businesses

How long must you keep invoices in Germany? And bank statements, contracts, payroll records? The answer is one of three numbers: 6, 8 or 10 years. The middle one is new since 2025. This guide gives you the current German retention periods as a table, explains when a period starts, and shows how to keep records digitally.

It matters for every company that keeps books in Germany, including German subsidiaries and branches of foreign companies. See also why GoBD applies to companies outside Germany.

What changed in 2025: 8 instead of 10 years for receipts

The Fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act (Bürokratieentlastungsgesetz IV) shortened the retention period for accounting vouchers (Buchungsbelege) from ten to eight years on 1 January 2025. Accounting vouchers are all documents a booking is based on: invoices, receipts, till slips, bank statements, delivery notes that support a booking.

The new period applies to all records whose old period hadn’t ended by 31 December 2024. In practice: vouchers from 2016 and earlier could be destroyed from 1 January 2025. For banks, insurers and investment firms the change applies one year later.

Books, annual financial statements and inventories stay at ten years.

German retention periods 2026: the table

The legal basis is section 147 of the German Fiscal Code (AO) and section 257 of the German Commercial Code (HGB), for invoices also section 14b of the VAT Act (UStG).

Record	Period	Basis
Books and records (general ledger, journal, cash book)	10 years	s. 147(1) no. 1 AO
Annual financial statements, opening balance sheet, management reports, inventories	10 years	s. 147(1) no. 1 AO
Work instructions and organisational documents, e.g. the procedural documentation	10 years	s. 147(1) no. 1 AO
Incoming and outgoing invoices	8 years	s. 147(1) no. 4 AO, s. 14b UStG
Bank statements	8 years	accounting voucher
Receipts, till slips, cash reports	8 years	accounting voucher
Credit notes, delivery notes (if used as a voucher)	8 years	accounting voucher
E-invoices (XRechnung, ZUGFeRD)	8 years	like any invoice
Business letters received	6 years	s. 147(1) no. 2 AO
Copies of business letters sent	6 years	s. 147(1) no. 3 AO
Quotes that led to an order	6 years	business letter
Contracts (not used as a voucher)	6 years	business letter
Payroll accounts	6 years	s. 41 EStG
Other tax-relevant documents	6 years	s. 147(1) no. 5 AO

Rule of thumb: anything that supports a booking, 8 years. Anything that is a book or a financial statement, 10 years. Business correspondence, 6 years.

Retention periods for invoices

Invoices are the most common case: incoming and outgoing invoices must be kept for eight years, whether on paper, as PDF or as an e-invoice. For an e-invoice, the structured data (the XML) is the original, not a printout or rendered view. More in E-Invoicing in Germany.

When does the period start?

The period starts at the end of the calendar year in which

• the last entry was made in the book,
• the financial statements were prepared,
• the business letter was received or sent, or
• the accounting voucher was created.

Example: an invoice dated 15 March 2026 starts the period on 31 December 2026. Eight years later, on 31 December 2034, it ends. You may destroy the invoice from 1 January 2035.

When the period doesn’t end: suspension

The retention period doesn’t end as long as the records matter for a tax whose assessment period hasn’t expired (s. 147(3) AO), for example during a tax audit, an objection procedure or a provisional tax assessment. Check whether anything is still open before you destroy records.

Keeping records digitally: what’s allowed

You don’t have to fill a basement with binders. Digital storage is explicitly allowed, and mandatory for documents you received electronically:

• Documents received electronically (a PDF invoice by email, an e-invoice) must be kept electronically, in their original format. A printout is not enough.
• Paper documents may be scanned and the paper destroyed if the scan matches the original visually and your scanning process is documented. Exceptions: annual financial statements and the opening balance sheet stay in the original. Details in Replacement scanning.
• The archive must keep records unaltered, complete and readable at any time for the whole period. An ordinary folder on a server usually doesn’t. What an archive needs to do is explained in GoBD-compliant archiving.
• The tax authority must be able to access the data during an audit, even after you switch systems.

After the period ends: delete, but properly

Many companies keep everything forever, just in case. With personal data, such as job applications, payroll records or customer correspondence, that’s a problem: the GDPR requires data to be deleted once there’s no longer a reason to keep it. An expired retention period is such a moment.

At the same time, nothing may disappear before its period ends. So you need both: protection against deleting too early, and an orderly way to remove expired records.

Managing retention periods automatically

Tracking a deadline for every single document in a calendar doesn’t work. In Papermerge, the period belongs to the category:

1. You decide once that incoming invoices are kept for eight years, business letters for six and financial statements for ten.
2. The period counts from the upload or from a date field of the document, such as the invoice date.
3. While it runs, nobody can delete an archived document.
4. When it has expired, the document goes on a list of deletion requests. It is deleted only when a designated person approves (four-eyes principle), and both steps are recorded in the audit log.

The setup wizard suggests categories with periods when you start; check the values with your tax adviser. More on the retention rules page.