What documents to keep, and for how long

Somewhere in your house there is a box, a drawer, or a carrier bag on top of a wardrobe. It has payslips from a job you left in 2019, the warranty for a washing machine you got rid of two years ago, and a bank statement for an account that closed before either of those things happened.

Most of it can go. That’s the honest answer, and it isn’t the one people expect, because the instinct with anything official-looking is to keep it. Throwing away paperwork is the kind of decision you only find out was wrong much later, so the safe move is always to put it back in the drawer and close the drawer.

Here’s what actually needs to be in there.

For as long as you own the thing

Some paper is tied to an object rather than to a date, and the rule is simple: it stays until the object goes.

The V5C for your car. Keep it while you own the vehicle, and hand over or update the right part when you sell it.
Building work certificates. FENSA or CERTASS for replacement windows, Gas Safe for boiler installations, building control completion certificates for anything structural. When you come to sell, the buyer’s solicitor will ask for these, and reissuing them is somewhere between slow and impossible.
Guarantees for work on the house. Damp proofing, roofing, underpinning. These are often insurance-backed and often transferable to the next owner, which makes them worth real money at the point of sale.
Appliance warranties and receipts, for the length of the warranty at least. See the section on six years below, because the warranty is not the whole story.
Title deeds, if you have paper ones. Most property in England and Wales is now registered electronically with HM Land Registry, so the paper is usually a historical curiosity rather than proof of anything. Usually is not always. Keep them.

Six years, or five in Scotland

Six years is the number that keeps coming up, and it’s worth knowing where it comes from rather than treating it as folklore.

Under the Limitation Act 1980, most claims arising from a simple contract have to be brought within six years in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland works to five, under the Prescription and Limitation (Scotland) Act 1973. After that window, the dispute is generally time-barred. So six years is not a filing rule handed down from anywhere. It’s the length of time something could still turn into an argument.

That covers:

Bank and credit card statements. There’s no legal requirement to keep any of these. Banks generally make several years available online, which for most people is enough, but if you’re between accounts or the bank has changed hands, six years of your own copies is the cautious version.
Loan and credit agreements, until six years after they’re settled.
Anything you might need to prove you paid, including builders, solicitors and anyone else who invoiced you for something substantial.

The same window applies to faulty goods, and this one is widely misunderstood. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 you can bring a claim about a product that wasn’t of satisfactory quality for up to six years in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and five in Scotland. That is not a six-year guarantee. After the first six months, the burden is on you to show the fault was there from the start, which gets harder the longer you leave it. But it does mean the receipt for an expensive appliance is worth keeping well past the end of the manufacturer’s warranty.

Tax has its own clock

HMRC’s retention guidance splits by how you earn, and the two answers are quite far apart.

If you file a Self Assessment return and you’re employed rather than self-employed, keep the records for 22 months after the end of the tax year the return covers. If you’re self-employed, or you let out property, it’s five years after the 31 January submission deadline for that year, which works out at about five years and ten months from the end of the tax year itself.

Digital copies are fine. HMRC accepts scans, so a photograph of a receipt is as good as the receipt, which is a small mercy given how quickly till receipts fade.

Two things worth holding separately from the general tax pile:

P60s. Your employer has to give you one by 31 May each year. Keep the last few. They’re the cleanest single-page proof of what you earned and what you paid, and mortgage applications ask for them.
Payslips. Nobody needs a decade of these. Enough for the next mortgage or benefits application is the practical answer, which is usually three to six months, plus whatever your lender specifically asks for.

Two years, and mostly for proving where you live

Utility bills, council tax bills and the rest of the monthly paper are proof-of-address documents more than anything else, and the organisations that ask for proof of address rarely want anything older than three months. Two years is a generous ceiling. Beyond that they’re taking up space in exchange for nothing.

The exception is a bill you’re disputing, which stays until the dispute is finished and then follows the six-year rule.

Keep these for good

A short list, and worth knowing where all of it is:

Birth, marriage, civil partnership, divorce and death certificates
Your will, and crucially, a note of where the original is held. A copy is not a will
Pension paperwork, including annual statements from schemes you left decades ago. Old workplace pensions are genuinely difficult to trace later, and the Pension Tracing Service on gov.uk exists precisely because so many people lose them
Records of qualifications, professional registrations and NI number
Anything relating to a property you still own

What you can throw out this afternoon

The satisfying part.

Old MOT certificates. Every test a vehicle has had, pass or fail, along with the mileage recorded at the time, is on gov.uk. The paper adds nothing.
Expired insurance schedules, once any possible claim period has passed. The current one, plus the renewal notice, is all that’s working.
Instruction manuals. They are all online, and the online one is more likely to be current.
Payslips older than a couple of years, assuming you have the P60s.
Bank statements for closed accounts, once you’re past the six years.
Warranty documents for things you no longer own. Obvious, and yet.

Where it lives matters as much as how long

The retention rules are the easy half. The hard half is that when you actually need one of these documents, you need it quickly and you need to know it’s the current version, and a box in the loft fails both tests.

The thing that makes paperwork findable is not a good filing system. It’s keeping the document attached to the thing it belongs to, so the boiler service record sits with the boiler, the V5C sits with the car, and the policy sits with the insurance renewal date rather than in a folder called Documents. Then finding it is a question about the boiler, which you can answer, rather than a question about your filing, which you can’t.

That’s how Oosby holds them. Not a drive full of scans, but the certificate kept against the thing it’s evidence for, encrypted on your device before it goes anywhere.

None of which requires you to deal with the drawer today. But when you do, the pile that comes out of it will be much bigger than the pile that goes back in, and the bit that goes back in is smaller than you’d think.