Events data retention

PostHog keeps your events for a period that your plan sets. This page tells you what that period is, where to read it, 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:

Two read-only fields on the projects API report it:

• event_retention_months – the length of the window in months. A value of 84 is 7 years.
• events_retention_enforced – whether the window applies to your project today.

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.