Events data retention
Contents
PostHog keeps your events for a period that your plan sets. This page tells you what that period is and what it does not do.
This page describes general data retention rules, with the following exceptions:
- Session recording retention
- AI events for AI Observability
- Data deletion tools
Your retention period
Your retention period comes from your plan:
| Plan | Events data retention |
|---|---|
| Free | 1 year |
| Paid plans | 7 years |
Retention applies on PostHog Cloud only. A self-hosted instance keeps your events until you remove them.
What retention does to your data
When retention applies to your project:
- A query on the events table reads only the events inside the window. PostHog does not include older events in the result.
- An insight whose date range goes past the window shows a banner, so that you do not read a smaller number as a drop in your product.
- Tables in the Data Warehouse keep all of their rows, because retention applies to the events table only.
Retention is not a deletion tool
You cannot make your retention period shorter to remove data, and a shorter period is not available on request. To remove data, use the tools in controlling data storage:
- Delete a person, together with their events and recordings, to answer a right to be forgotten request.
- Delete a project or an organization to remove all of the events in it.
To keep events for longer than your retention period, send them to your own storage with a batch export.