---
title: "Consent record retention"
description: "How long consent records are kept, how the effective window is resolved per team, and what the deletion job actually does."
url: "https://cookiebeam.com/docs/compliance/retention"
lang: "en"
---

# Consent record retention

How long consent records are kept, how the effective window is resolved per team, and what the deletion job actually does.

Consent record retention is **plan-dependent**. There is no single global figure, and any document that gives you one is describing a plan rather than the product.

## The windows

Each plan in the shipped product catalog carries a consent retention value in months:

| Plan | Consent retention |
| --- | --- |
| Free | Retained for 12 months |
| Starter | Retained for 12 months |
| Professional | Retained for 24 months |
| Business | Retained for 60 months |
| Enterprise | Retained for 84 months on a current catalog entry — but see below |

Teams whose subscription has lapsed fall back to the same window as Free.

**Enterprise is the exception worth checking.** The 84-month figure comes from the current product catalog. Enterprise catalog entries created before the retention field existed were backfilled as *unlimited* instead, and the job's own fallback for an enterprise entry with no retention value is also unlimited. A team resolving to unlimited is skipped by the purge entirely and its consent records are never deleted. Whether a given Enterprise account is on 84 months or unlimited therefore depends on when and how its catalog entry was created — if that distinction matters to your obligations, confirm your account's effective value rather than assuming the table.

**Where you see your own value:** each plan's retention window is listed with that plan's usage limits on the public pricing page. Platform operators can also apply a per-customer override, which takes precedence over the catalog value — if an override was agreed for your account, the agreed figure governs, and the pricing page will not reflect it.

## How the effective window is resolved

A daily job resolves each team's window in a fixed order and stops at the first value it finds:

1. a per-customer override, then
2. the value on the team's catalog entry, then
3. a per-plan fallback for catalog rows that predate the field, then
4. the minimum window.

The result is then raised to a **floor of 12 months**. A configuration that asked for a shorter window than that would be ignored in favour of the floor, so twelve months is the shortest period any consent record is kept.

A window can also be set to unlimited, in which case the team is skipped entirely and nothing is deleted.

## What deletion does

The job runs daily. For each team it computes a cutoff date, then deletes consent-log rows created before that cutoff in batches of five thousand until none remain. Deletion is permanent: rows are removed from the table, not flagged. There is no undelete, and the job supports a dry-run mode that reports the counts it would delete without touching anything.

Two consequences worth planning for:

- **Export before the window closes if you need the records longer.** Once the job has run, the rows are gone; a longer plan window applied afterwards does not bring back what was already deleted.
- **Retention is measured from record creation**, not from the visitor's last visit. A visitor who consented once and never returned has their record deleted a window after that consent, whether or not the consent was still being relied upon.

## What this window does not cover

This window governs consent records only. It is not your retention policy, and it does not decide how long *you* should keep evidence of consent — that depends on your limitation periods and your own analysis. Other data in the product is governed separately; administrative audit records, for example, have their own fixed window described in [Audit trail](https://cookiebeam.com/docs/compliance/audit-trail).