How Long to Keep Documents: A Practical Retention Table
Before any numbers, the caveat that matters most: retention periods differ by country, by state or province, and by your personal situation, and they change over time. Everything below is common practice rather than legal advice, and for anything with tax, legal, or medical consequences you should follow your local regulations and your accountant's advice. Treat the table as a default that tells you which pile a document belongs to, then adjust the specific durations to your own jurisdiction once, write them down, and stop rethinking them every year.
The rough tiers most households end up with look like this. Keep forever: birth and marriage certificates, passports and ID history, property deeds, mortgage completion documents, wills, pension and retirement records, immunisation and major medical history, and any document proving you paid off a debt. Keep for several years: tax filings and their supporting receipts, bank and investment statements, employment contracts and payslips, and lease agreements. Keep while active plus a short tail: insurance policies, warranties, and service contracts, which you hold as long as the coverage runs and then a while after it ends.
Two categories deserve their own rule because people get them backwards. Warranties and manuals should be kept for the life of the object, not for a fixed number of years, and the manual is worth keeping only if you can find it, which is why scanning it beats a kitchen drawer. Contracts should be kept relative to the end of the relationship rather than the signing date: a five year lease signed in 2020 and ended in 2025 starts its retention clock in 2025. Filing by the signing date alone is the single most common reason people discard something too early.
Once a document is scanned, whether you can shred the original depends on the document. Anything whose value is the physical artifact itself, meaning notarised deeds, original certificates, wet-signature contracts, and anything with a seal or stamp, stays in paper regardless of how good your scan is. Everything else, meaning receipts, statements, manuals, routine correspondence, can usually go once the digital copy is verified and backed up. Verify means you actually opened the PDF and read the last page, not that the scanner made a noise. Shred anything with account numbers or an address rather than binning it.
The scan is only worth keeping if it is findable, so run OCR on every document you digitise. PdfWill OCR produces a searchable PDF or plain text locally in your browser with no upload, which means a receipt from four years ago turns up by typing the vendor name instead of by opening forty files. For multi-page items, merge the pages into one document, use organize to fix the page order that the scanner reversed, and repair anything that a failing scanner produced as a corrupt file. Then apply the retention tier by moving the file into a year-named folder you can review annually.