EEOC Personnel and Employment Recordkeeping Requirements

Under EEOC recordkeeping requirements, covered employers must keep most personnel and employment records for at least one year, hold payroll records for three years, and preserve any records tied to a pending discrimination charge until the case is fully resolved. State and local governments, school systems, and larger federal contractors get a longer two-year floor. Medical and genetic information sits under a separate rule that requires confidential storage apart from the general personnel file. The obligations come from 29 CFR Part 1602, and the EEOC can subpoena the records you were supposed to keep.

Who Has to Follow These Rules

Title VII, the ADA, and GINA reach private employers with 15 or more employees. The ADEA sets the bar at 20.¹ Hit either threshold and the recordkeeping duties in 29 CFR Part 1602 attach.

Counting is where smaller employers get tripped up. Every person on payroll counts, including part-time, seasonal, and temporary workers. Independent contractors and business owners do not. You need the required headcount for every working day in at least 20 calendar weeks of the current or prior year. Closely linked companies can be treated as a single employer even when neither entity alone would clear the threshold.²

Labor organizations and employment agencies have their own tracking duties under the same regulations, covering membership data and referral records.

What Records You Have to Keep

The regulation covers any record an employer creates or maintains in connection with employment decisions. It specifically lists application forms, hiring records, promotions, demotions, transfers, layoffs and terminations, pay rates and other compensation terms, requests for reasonable accommodation, and selection records for training or apprenticeship programs.³ The phrase “including but not necessarily limited to” makes that list a floor, not a ceiling.

Records for people you did not hire count too. When someone applies and is rejected, the application, any test results, and the interview notes have to be preserved, along with the same materials for everyone else who competed for that position.⁴ Shredding rejected applications after the role is filled is a common practice that directly violates the rule.

How Long You Have to Keep Them

The default is one year. Personnel and employment records must be kept for at least one year from the date the record was made or the date of the personnel action, whichever is later. If an employee is involuntarily terminated, the clock runs from the termination date, not the date the record was originally created.³ A performance review written six months before a firing still has to sit in your files for a full year after the employee’s last day.

Payroll records are on a longer schedule. Under the FLSA and Equal Pay Act, employers must preserve payroll records for at least three years.⁵ The EEOC uses these to compare compensation across employees and identify wage discrimination patterns.⁶ Personnel and payroll records often overlap, so the practical rule is to apply the three-year period to anything touching pay. Destroying a compensation document at twelve months because you labeled it “personnel” instead of “payroll” creates avoidable exposure.

Government Employers and Federal Contractors

State and local government employers keep personnel and employment records for two years from the date the record was made or the personnel action occurred, whichever is later.⁷ School systems and individual schools follow the same two-year floor under a separate subpart.⁸ For terminated employees, that two-year clock runs from the termination date.

Federal contractors sit under OFCCP rules. Contractors with 150 or more employees and a government contract worth at least $150,000 must retain personnel records for two years. Smaller contractors fall back to the one-year default.⁹

Medical and Genetic Records Go in a Separate File

The ADA requires any medical information about an applicant or employee to be kept in files physically separate from the general personnel file.¹⁰ That reaches information from disability-related inquiries, medical examinations, and voluntary wellness programs, plus medical information an employee volunteers.¹¹

Access to the confidential medical file is limited to three groups: supervisors and managers who need to know about work restrictions or accommodations, first aid and safety personnel when a disability could require emergency treatment, and government officials investigating ADA compliance.¹⁰ Filing a doctor’s note about a back injury in the regular personnel folder violates the rule even if no one reads it.

GINA adds a parallel restriction. Written genetic information also has to go in a separate medical file, and disclosure is limited to a short list of situations, such as a written employee request, a court order, or a public health agency responding to an imminent contagious disease threat.¹²

What Changes When a Charge Is Filed

All the standard timelines get overridden the moment a discrimination charge is filed against your organization. You must preserve every personnel record relevant to the charge until “final disposition,” meaning either the date the deadline for filing a lawsuit expires or, if a suit is filed, the date that litigation is fully resolved.⁴ That can push preservation out for years beyond the normal one-year or three-year floors.

“Relevant” reaches well past the file of the person who filed the charge. It includes records for other employees who hold or have held similar positions, and application materials from every other candidate who competed for the position at issue.⁴ The EEOC uses those comparison records to test whether the charging party was treated differently from similarly situated colleagues.

Issuing a litigation hold as soon as you receive notice of a charge is the standard response. The hold suspends routine document destruction and tells the relevant teams to preserve everything connected to the matter, including emails and performance evaluations. Waiting a few weeks can let automated deletion policies destroy exactly the records you need.

What Happens If the Records Are Missing

The EEOC does not levy standalone fines for recordkeeping failures. The damage shows up during investigations and litigation.

When an employer cannot produce records it was required to keep, the EEOC and courts may draw an adverse inference: they assume the missing records would have supported the employee’s claim. That does not automatically prove discrimination, but it weakens the defense because factual gaps fill in against the employer. Courts are more likely to impose this sanction when records were destroyed after a charge was filed or when there is no legitimate explanation for the loss.

The EEOC can also subpoena documents during an investigation.¹³ If an employer will not produce records voluntarily, refusal can lead to judicial enforcement. Under Title VII, the ADA, and GINA, the subpoena is limited to evidence relevant to the specific charge. Under the ADEA and Equal Pay Act, it reaches any matter under investigation.

EEO-1 Component 1 Reporting

Private employers with 100 or more employees must file the EEO-1 Component 1 report annually. Federal contractors and first-tier subcontractors with 50 or more employees and a government contract, subcontract, or purchase order worth $50,000 or more are also required to file.¹⁴ The report categorizes employees by race, ethnicity, and sex across ten job categories, from executive and senior-level officials down to service workers.

Filing runs through the EEOC’s online system during a window that typically opens in the spring. The EEOC sets deadlines year by year; as of late 2025, details for the 2025 collection had not yet been posted.¹⁵ Employers keep a copy of their most recently filed report at each establishment or at a central headquarters location.

A Note on Form I-9

Form I-9 is not an EEOC obligation, but it sits alongside the same personnel records and often gets folded into the same filing system. Federal regulations require you to keep a completed Form I-9 for three years after the hire date or one year after employment ends, whichever is later.¹⁶ For anyone who worked less than two years, the three-years-from-hire calculation controls; for longer tenures, the one-year-after-separation calculation controls. Because I-9s contain sensitive identifying information, many employers store them separately from both the general personnel file and the confidential medical file.

1
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Coverage of Business/Private Employers
2
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. How Do You Count the Number of Employees an Employer Has?
3
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 1602 Subpart C – Recordkeeping by Employers
4
GovInfo. 29 CFR 1602.14 – Preservation of Records Made or Kept
5
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Recordkeeping Requirements
6
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 21 – Recordkeeping Requirements under the Fair Labor Standards Act
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eCFR. 29 CFR Part 1602 Subpart I – State and Local Governments Recordkeeping
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eCFR. 29 CFR 1602.40 – Preservation of Records Made or Kept
9
eCFR. 41 CFR 60-1.12 – Record Retention
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 U.S. Code 12112 – Discrimination
11
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Enforcement Guidance on Disability-Related Inquiries and Medical Examinations of Employees under the ADA
12
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Fact Sheet: Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act
13
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 U.S. Code 2000e-9 – Conduct of Hearings and Investigations
14
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. 2024 EEO-1 Component 1 Instruction Booklet
15
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. EEO Data Collections
16
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 10.0 Retaining Form I-9