Record Retention

Businesses create invoices, contracts, payroll files and tax records every day, and record retention determines which to keep, in what form and for how long. It supports tax checks, audits, disputes and ordinary operations, while keeping everything forever is not necessarily safe or useful, especially when records contain personal data.

UAE Cabinet Decision 74 of 2023 sets general Tax Procedures record-keeping periods and explicitly allows a Tax Law to state otherwise, and a 2026 FTA decision addresses maintenance of accounting-record information, so check current law for the exact tax, record and person because one five-year slogan is unsafe. The general regulation lists accounting records and commercial books, including payments, receipts, purchases, sales, wages, fixed assets and inventory, and supporting invoices, contracts and correspondence also matter.

A summary ledger without evidence for entries may not let the Authority verify obligations, so keep records in a searchable structure linked to the transaction. Tax is not the only reason to keep a document, since employment, licensing, banking, insurance and commercial contracts may carry separate periods, and litigation or a threatened claim can create another preservation need.

Under the general regulation, a taxable person's records are kept five years after the tax period, unless the applicable Tax Law says otherwise. For persons other than taxable persons, a five-year period is measured from the end of the calendar year in which the document was created, and real estate records have a seven-year period from the end of that calendar year.

These are not interchangeable starting dates. Corporate-tax law is a key exception, because the Federal Tax Authority says both taxable and exempt persons subject to corporate-tax record obligations must retain relevant records for at least seven years after the tax period.

A firm subject to VAT and corporate tax should not destroy a shared invoice after five years if it still supports a corporate-tax period, so use the longer applicable obligation for that record. Disputes and audits can extend retention too, since certain cases require four additional years or until a tax dispute is finally settled, whichever is later, and an ongoing audit or notification of intent to audit can also extend the period.

Place a preservation hold before a routine deletion reaches affected files, and maintain a retention schedule listing record category, governing basis, clock start, minimum period and any hold. A digital archive can be acceptable if records remain complete, available and verifiable under current requirements, as the general regulation allows retaining information from originals under conditions rather than always keeping paper.

The FTA may specify maintenance rules, so check authenticity, readability, retrieval and backup before disposing of originals. The clock often starts after a tax period or calendar year, not the invoice date, so an invoice dated early in a year may need to be kept for substantially longer than a simple anniversary calculation suggests.

For illustration, assume a corporate tax period ends 31 December 2026, so a seven-year minimum after that period points to retaining relevant records through 31 December 2033, before considering holds or other law. This is an illustrative date calculation, not confirmation that every record may be deleted on 1 January 2034, and record retention is best treated as a set of category-specific rules, not one number for the whole business.