Receipt Retention Rules by Country (US, UK, Australia, Canada)

It's a Tuesday in July. You're cleaning out a Drive folder from 2018. Five-year-old Stripe receipts. Should you delete them? Are you legally allowed to?

The honest answer is: it depends on what country's tax authority you answer to. And the rules are surprisingly different.

Most freelancers I know assume "seven years" because they heard it once. Some assume "forever" because deleting feels scary. Both are wrong in most cases.

Here is what each tax authority actually requires, with sources, in plain English.

Table of Contents

• United States: IRS
• United Kingdom: HMRC
• Australia: ATO
• Canada: CRA
• Quick comparison table
• What "adequate" actually means in practice
• How AutoFileEmail handles all four jurisdictions
• The "destroy after retention" knob
• What about other countries
• Why "start now, not at year 7"
• TL;DR

United States: IRS

The IRS publishes its retention rules in Publication 583 and Topic 305. The short version:

• 3 years from the date you filed your return, or the due date of the return, whichever is later. This is the default for most filings.
• 6 years if you under-report gross income by more than 25%.
• 7 years if you're claiming a loss from worthless securities or a bad-debt deduction.
• Indefinitely if you didn't file a return, or filed a fraudulent one.

Employment tax records: 4 years from the date the tax becomes due or is paid, whichever is later.

Most solo founders and freelancers fall under the 3-year rule. If you've been honest, filed on time, and don't have weird capital-loss claims, three years is the floor.

In practice, I keep mine for 7. The cost is zero (Drive folder), and "if I get audited late" is a real failure mode worth eliminating. But the IRS does not require 7. They require 3.

Digital copies? Yes, fully accepted. Per Rev. Proc. 97-22, electronic storage systems are valid as long as the system "ensures the integrity, accuracy, and reliability" of records and produces legible reproductions. PDFs in Drive meet that bar.

United Kingdom: HMRC

HMRC's rules are stricter on duration but well-defined.

• Self-employed (sole traders, partnerships): keep records for 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline of the relevant tax year.
• Limited companies: keep records for 6 years from the end of the financial year they relate to.
• PAYE records: 3 years after the end of the tax year.

The 5-year clock for self-employed people is the one that surprises people. The 2024-25 tax year files on 31 January 2026. Records for 2024-25 must be kept until 31 January 2031. So you're effectively holding records for almost 6 years from when the expense actually happened.

If HMRC opens an enquiry, you keep records until the enquiry closes regardless of the deadline.

Source: GOV.UK Business records if you're self-employed.

Digital copies? Yes. HMRC accepts digital copies as long as they're complete, legible, and you can produce them on request. PDFs in cloud storage are explicitly fine.

Australia: ATO

The Australian Tax Office uses 5 years.

• 5 years from the date you lodge the relevant tax return. So if you lodge your 2025-26 return in October 2026, you keep records until October 2031.
• If you're in a dispute with the ATO, the clock pauses until the dispute resolves.
• Capital gains tax records: 5 years after the year in which the CGT event occurs (which can be far in the future from when you bought the asset).

Source: ATO record-keeping for business.

Digital copies? Yes, the ATO accepts electronic records explicitly. The requirements: records must be in English (or easily translated), kept for the full 5 years, and not altered or manipulated. A read-only PDF in Drive satisfies this.

The ATO has good plain-language guidance on this. Worth a read if you're operating in Australia: their position is essentially "we don't care about format, we care that the record exists and is unaltered."

Canada: CRA

Canada is the longest of the four major English-speaking jurisdictions.

• 6 years from the end of the tax year the records relate to. So 2024 records must be kept until the end of 2030.
• If you file late, the 6 years runs from the date you filed.
• For corporations, certain records (minute books, share registers) must be kept for the life of the corporation plus 2 years after dissolution.

Source: CRA: How long should you keep your books and records.

Digital copies? Yes. CRA's IC78-10R5 explicitly allows electronic records, with one important caveat: the records must be accessible and convertible to a readable format on request. PDFs in Drive qualify.

CRA can require records be kept in Canada or accessible from Canada. For sole proprietors, this usually isn't a practical issue because you can just access Drive from anywhere in Canada. For corporations or larger businesses, talk to your accountant.

Quick comparison table

Notice none of these say "forever." None of these say "you must keep paper." All four explicitly accept digital copies that are intact and readable.

What "adequate" actually means in practice

The bar is not "the IRS will be impressed by your filing system." The bar is "if asked, you can produce the document."

For all four countries, an adequate record is one that:

1. Identifies the vendor (who you paid)
2. Shows the date
3. Shows the amount
4. Is legible
5. Hasn't been altered

A PDF receipt in /AutoFileEmail/stripe.com/2024/03/ meets all five. The folder structure even pre-categorizes by vendor for you, which makes producing a specific receipt during an enquiry trivial: "Show me what you spent on Stripe in March 2024" becomes one folder click.

For more on what auditors actually want, see the 3 folders that survive an audit and what the IRS actually needs from your receipts.

How AutoFileEmail handles all four jurisdictions

AutoFileEmail files attachments into your Drive in the format /AutoFileEmail/<sender-domain>/<year>/<month>/. This works under every retention regime listed above because:

• Files are immutable in your Drive. Drive's file IDs and modification timestamps function as a tamper-evident log. If you ever need to prove a record hasn't been altered, Drive's revision history does that work.
• Your Drive is yours. AutoFileEmail uses the drive.file scope only - we can only see files in folders we created. We don't host your receipts on our servers; they live in your Google account.
• Folder structure pre-organizes by tax year. When the CRA or HMRC asks for "tax year 2024," you produce one folder. Done.
• No vendor lock-in. If you stop using AutoFileEmail tomorrow, the files stay in your Drive, in the same folder structure, for as long as you need them. There's no proprietary format. The PDFs are the PDFs your vendors sent.

This is why we don't have a "digital archive" feature you pay extra for. The archive is your Drive. We just put files in it correctly.

The "destroy after retention" knob

None of the four countries require you to keep records forever. Once the retention window passes, you can legally delete them.

Many people don't bother because storage is cheap. But if you care about reducing your data footprint - say, you're winding down a business or moving providers - you can clean out old years.

Drive makes this easy: select the year folder, move to trash. Empty trash. Done. Because AutoFileEmail's folder structure groups by year, deleting "everything older than 6 years" is a single delete.

If you're paranoid (some people are, especially in the EU under GDPR data minimization), this is a real option. See GDPR for one-person businesses for the privacy-focused take.

What about other countries

The four above cover most of our user base. A non-exhaustive sampler of others:

• Germany: 10 years for tax-relevant records (Abgabenordnung Section 147).
• France: 6 years for tax records, 10 years for accounting records.
• Singapore: 5 years from the relevant year of assessment.
• India: 8 years for income tax records (extended in some cases).
• New Zealand: 7 years.

In every one of these jurisdictions, digital copies are accepted as long as they're legible and unaltered. The specifics vary; check your local tax authority's guidance.

Why "start now, not at year 7"

The biggest mistake I see is people who plan to "get organized for taxes" the month before they file. By then, every receipt from January to March is buried in Gmail, the Stripe ones are in a different inbox than the AWS ones, and reconstructing the year takes a full weekend.

If you turn on auto-filing in May 2026, your retention clock starts now. By the time the IRS, HMRC, ATO, or CRA could possibly ask, every receipt from this point forward is already filed in the right folder, with the right vendor name, in the right year.

Five years from now, when someone asks you for a 2026 invoice, you'll find it in 30 seconds.

The alternative is a panicked Gmail search starting at year 7.

TL;DR

• US (IRS): 3 years default, 6 if you under-report 25%+, 7 for losses.
• UK (HMRC): 5 years from 31 January submission deadline (self-employed).
• Australia (ATO): 5 years from lodgement.
• Canada (CRA): 6 years from end of tax year.
• All four accept digital copies. PDFs in Drive qualify everywhere.
• None require permanent retention; you can delete after the window expires.

Auto-filing today means you have a clean record by the time anyone could ask for it. AutoFileEmail is free for one inbox, works with Gmail and Drive today, and handles every retention regime above without any configuration.

We don't read your receipts. We just file them, in the right year, in the right folder, where every tax authority on this list will accept them.

If you're a freelancer juggling income across multiple jurisdictions or just want a system that works the same wherever you file, start here. Two minutes to connect, then you're done.