Pennsylvania County Records Retention Quick-Reference (2026)

What the County Records Manual is — and why it governs

The County Records Manual is the official retention and disposition schedule for Pennsylvania county government. Its core legal effect is simple and strict: county records may be retained and disposed of only in accordance with the schedules promulgated by the County Records Committee under the County Records Act, as compiled in the PHMC manual. A county office does not get to decide on its own how long a record lives or when it may be shredded. The schedule decides, and the schedule is binding.

The manual covers county offices of counties of the second through eighth class. Pennsylvania has 67 counties classified by population, and the same manual applies across that range, which is why two counties of very different sizes can run their records programs against an identical set of rules. The practical benefit for officials is consistency: a retention question has one authoritative answer, and that answer is the same in Allentown's county seat as it is in a rural courthouse three counties away.

Who sets and approves the schedule

The County Records Committee is the body that creates and updates the schedules. It operates under the County Records Act, and the PHMC's archival and records-management staff support the process and hold the Commonwealth's permanent records. A county cannot lawfully shorten or extend a retention period on its own initiative; a genuine change to a schedule flows through the committee. That structure is what gives a county's destruction decisions their legal footing — they rest on a statewide schedule, not on local discretion.

How a retention schedule actually works

A retention schedule is a structured list of record series. A record series is a group of records that are created, used, and filed as a unit and that share the same retention — for example, the official minutes of the Board of Commissioners, or the deed books in the Recorder of Deeds office. Each series gets its own line in the schedule, and that line is what tells an office what to do with the record.

• Item number — a unique code identifying the series; the official minutes of the Board of County Commissioners or County Council, for instance, carry the schedule item AL-16.1.
• Series title and description — the name of the record group and a short definition so an office matches its files to the correct line rather than guessing.
• Retention period — how long the record must be kept, expressed either as a fixed term or as a permanent designation.
• Disposition — what happens at the end of the period: lawful destruction, transfer to archives, or permanent retention.
• Trigger — the event that starts the retention clock, such as the close of a fiscal year, the completion of an audit, or the expiration of an appeal period.

The trigger matters as much as the number. Many series do not start counting from the date a record is created; they start from an event. Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas case records, for example, should be retained for a minimum of six years following the expiration of the appeal period under the courts' retention schedule. A clerk who counts six years from the filing date rather than from the end of the appeal window will destroy records too early. Reading the trigger correctly is the difference between a compliant schedule and an accidental violation.

How to read and apply a county retention schedule (step by step)

Applying the manual is a repeatable workflow, and counties that treat it as an annual routine rather than a one-time scramble stay compliant with far less effort. The steps below turn the schedule from a reference document into an operating procedure.

1. Inventory by office. Walk each office — Recorder of Deeds, Prothonotary, Register of Wills, Commissioners, Treasurer, and the rest — and list the record series actually held, not the series you assume are held.
2. Match each series to its schedule item. Use the series title and description in the County Records Manual to assign every group of records to the correct item number and retention line.
3. Identify the retention period and its trigger. Record both the length and the event that starts the clock, because an event-based trigger changes the eligible-for-destruction date.
4. Flag the permanent series. Mark deed books, will books, official commissioner minutes, and any other permanent series so they are never queued for destruction and are prioritized for preservation.
5. Calculate destruction-eligible dates. For timed series, compute the earliest lawful disposal date from the trigger plus the retention period, and hold anything still inside its window.
6. Obtain authorization before disposing. Route the destruction list for the sign-offs your county's policy requires, and confirm no legal hold applies.
7. Document the destruction. Record what was destroyed, under which schedule item, on what date, and by whose authorization — the evidence that disposal was routine and policy-driven.
8. Repeat on a fixed cycle. Re-run the review annually so newly eligible records are dispositioned on time and permanent records keep accumulating safely.

Quick-reference: what counties must keep — and for how long

The single most common misconception in county records work is that a blanket number — five years, seven years, ten years — covers everything. It does not. Retention is series-specific, and the most important distinction is between series that are permanent and series that run on a timer. The table below captures the core permanent series and the baseline court-records period that county officials reference most often.

Deed books and indices must be retained permanently for administrative, legal, and historical purposes, as must will books and the official minutes of the Board of County Commissioners or County Council. These are the records that establish title, settle estates, and document the governing decisions of the county, and the manual treats them as the permanent backbone of county recordkeeping. Beyond these, most series carry a finite period defined in their own schedule item — which is exactly why the matching step above cannot be skipped.

The Right-to-Know Law: the access clock layered on retention

Pennsylvania is an open-records state. Under the Right-to-Know Law (Act 3 of 2008), government records are presumed public unless an exemption applies, and the burden of justifying any withholding falls on the agency. The duty is time-bound: a county's open-records officer must respond to a written records request within five business days of receipt. Retention scheduling and access compliance are therefore two sides of one job — a county can only produce what it lawfully kept and can actually find.

The clocks compound. If a county needs more than the initial five business days, it may extend, but a request is deemed denied if the response is expected to exceed 30 days beyond that window unless the requester agrees in writing to the extension. A requester may then appeal a denied or deemed-denied request to the Office of Open Records within 15 business days, and the OOR appeals officer must issue a final determination within 30 days of receiving the appeal. Missed internal deadlines do not pause this sequence; they accelerate it toward an appeal.

Fees are tightly capped, which surprises offices used to billing for effort. The OOR Official RTKL Fee Schedule limits black-and-white photocopies to $0.25 per page for the first 1,000 pages, and no fee may be charged for staff time, for searching for or retrieving records, or for the agency's review or response letter. An agency may require a requester to prepay an estimate only when fulfilling the request is expected to exceed $100. Charging for staff search time is one of the more frequent — and easily avoided — RTKL errors.

Defensible destruction: disposing of records the right way

Defensible destruction is the disposal of records strictly according to an approved retention schedule, fully documented, applied consistently across the organization, and suspended whenever a legal hold or active litigation applies. The goal is to be able to demonstrate that any given record was destroyed as a matter of routine policy — on schedule, with authorization — rather than to evade a request, an audit, or a lawsuit. That demonstrability is what makes destruction defensible rather than merely convenient.

• Authority: every disposal traces to a specific County Records Manual schedule item with a defined retention period that has actually elapsed.
• Documentation: a certificate or log records what was destroyed, the schedule item relied on, the date, and the approving official.
• Consistency: the same series is dispositioned the same way every cycle, so destruction looks like policy, not selective deletion.
• Legal hold: any litigation, audit, investigation, or pending Right-to-Know request suspends destruction of the affected records until the hold is lifted.
• Method: destruction is appropriate to the sensitivity of the record, with secure handling for anything containing protected or confidential information.

Going electronic: PDF/A, the 2019 municipal rule, and the federal benchmark

Counties are not locked into paper. Counties may maintain permanent records electronically using the PDF/A format, but they must notify the PHMC of their intent to use PDF/A for each records series. That per-series notification is a step counties miss when they treat scanning as an IT project rather than a records decision — the format is permitted, but only with the manual's process followed series by series.

Municipalities have gone further. The PA Municipal Records Manual — approved December 16, 2008 and amended July 23, 2009 and March 28, 2019 — governs third-class cities, boroughs, incorporated towns, and first- and second-class townships under schedules approved by the Local Government Records Committee. Since the 2019 update, Pennsylvania municipalities may keep permanent records exclusively in electronic PDF/A form without a paper or microfilm copy, provided the records are stored on a live server with at least one separately backed-up copy. It is a useful signal of where preservation-grade electronic recordkeeping is heading for local government generally.

The federal benchmark points the same direction and is worth modeling even where it does not directly bind a county. Under OMB Memorandum M-23-07, by June 30, 2024 all federal agencies were required to manage all permanent records in an electronic format. After that date, the National Archives will no longer accept transfers of permanent or temporary records in analog formats, accepting records only in electronic format with appropriate metadata, and beginning July 1, 2024 agencies must digitize permanent records created in analog before transferring them. The quality bar is codified: 36 CFR Part 1236 Subpart E sets the standards and procedures agencies must apply when digitizing permanent paper records using reflective digitization techniques — a sensible reference point for a county that wants its scans to be preservation-grade.

Funding the work: the County Records Improvement Fund

Records work has a dedicated, recurring funding source built into Pennsylvania law. Under 42 P.S. § 21052.1, a $5 fee is charged on each document recorded, in addition to the Recorder of Deeds' standard fee, to fund records management improvements. The split is fixed: of that $5, $2 is deposited into the County Records Improvement Fund and $3 is retained by the Recorder of Deeds for office records management, with the fund supporting a comprehensive records management plan.

A County Records Improvement Fund exists in counties of the second-A, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth classes, and in home rule charter counties of those classes. Because the fund is fed by routine recording activity, it gives a county a predictable stream to put toward scheduling, indexing, microfilming, and digitization — the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps records both compliant and findable. Officials planning a records initiative should confirm the fund balance early, because it often covers more of a program than expected.

The economics: the cost of paper and the value of finding

The case for investing CRI Fund dollars in better records systems rests less on storage cost than on retrieval cost. Workers spend an estimated 20-30% of the workday — roughly 1.6 to 2.5 hours per day — searching for and gathering information, time a well-indexed digital records environment can reclaim. In a county office where staff field Right-to-Know requests against a five-business-day clock, that lost time is not abstract; it is the gap between meeting the deadline and drifting toward a deemed denial.

Read together, the funding and the economics make the same point. The County Records Improvement Fund supplies money that already exists for this purpose, and the retrieval-time burden is the recurring cost that better recordkeeping reduces. A county does not have to choose between compliance and efficiency; a defensible schedule, applied to findable records, delivers both.

Common mistakes — and when not to destroy

Most county records problems are not exotic. They are a handful of recurring errors, each avoidable once an office knows to look for it.

• Applying a blanket retention number. Destroying on a generic five- or seven-year rule instead of the series-specific period in the County Records Manual is the most common — and most consequential — mistake.
• Forgetting the permanent series. Queuing deed books, will books, or official commissioner minutes for destruction because they are old and bulky; these are permanent and may never be lawfully destroyed.
• Miscounting the trigger. Starting the retention clock at creation when the schedule starts it at an event, such as the six-year minimum that runs from the expiration of the appeal period for court records.
• Destroying without a record. Disposing of files with no certificate of destruction listing the schedule item, date, and authorization, which leaves nothing to prove the disposal was routine.
• Scanning without the manual's process. Imaging permanent records and discarding originals without using PDF/A and notifying the PHMC for that series.
• Charging illegal RTKL fees. Billing for staff search time or exceeding the $0.25-per-page copy cap, both of which the OOR fee schedule prohibits or limits.
• Ignoring legal holds. Continuing routine destruction while litigation, an audit, or a pending request affects the records in question.

When not to destroy is the easier half to remember. Do not destroy a record that is still inside its retention period, that belongs to a permanent series, or that is subject to a legal hold or a pending Right-to-Know request — even if the schedule would otherwise allow it. In each case the safe move is to hold the records and confirm authority before acting.

Applying this in the Lehigh Valley

The counties of the Lehigh Valley and the surrounding Mid-Atlantic operate under the same framework described here. As second-through-eighth-class counties, they retain and dispose of records under the PHMC County Records Manual, meet the Right-to-Know clocks through their open-records officers, and can draw on the County Records Improvement Fund to modernize. The work that turns those obligations into a running program is consistent: inventory each office, map every series to its schedule item, protect the permanent records, schedule defensible destruction for the rest, and move eligible series to preservation-grade electronic form.

Reynolds Business Systems builds that kind of program for county offices across the region from its base in Emmaus. The value of a local partner is practical: schedules read and applied office by office, permanent series identified before anything is scanned or shredded, PDF/A conversion handled with the required PHMC notifications, and indexing that lets staff answer a records request inside the five-business-day window. The standards are statewide; the execution is where a county turns a compliance duty into a faster, more transparent office.

Frequently asked questions

Is Pennsylvania an open records state?

Yes. Under the Right-to-Know Law (Act 3 of 2008), Pennsylvania presumes government records are public unless an exemption applies, and the burden of justifying withholding falls on the agency. A county's open-records officer must respond to a written request within five business days. Records may be inspected and copied, subject to the law's fee caps and exemptions.

Can I view PA public records for free?

Inspecting public records on site is generally free, and the Right-to-Know Law prohibits charging for staff time, searching, retrieving, or an agency's review and response letter. Counties may charge for duplication: the Office of Open Records caps black-and-white photocopies at $0.25 per page for the first 1,000 pages, and agencies may require prepayment when estimated fees exceed $100.

What is the 7-year retention policy?

There is no single seven-year rule for Pennsylvania county records. Seven years is a common benchmark in private-sector and tax contexts, but county retention is set series by series in the PHMC County Records Manual. Some series are permanent and others carry shorter or longer periods. Counties should match each record to its specific schedule item rather than apply a blanket figure.

What records are kept for 30 years?

Pennsylvania's County Records Manual does not use a blanket 30-year rule, and the 30-day figures in the Right-to-Know Law concern response and appeal clocks, not retention. Retention is assigned per record series. Several core county series — deed books, will books, and official commissioner minutes — are permanent, while others carry their own schedule-defined periods you should look up individually.

How long must Pennsylvania counties keep records?

It depends on the record series. The PHMC County Records Manual assigns each series a retention period and disposition. Core land and probate records such as deed books and will books, and the official minutes of the Board of Commissioners, are permanent. Court of Common Pleas case records carry a minimum of six years after the appeal period expires under the AOPC schedule.

What is the PA County Records Manual?

It is the official schedule, issued through the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, that governs how county offices retain and dispose of records. Promulgated by the County Records Committee under the County Records Act, it covers counties of the second through eighth class. County records may be retained and destroyed only in accordance with its schedules, which makes it the controlling reference for any county records decision.

Can Pennsylvania municipalities keep permanent records electronically?

Yes. Since the 2019 update to the Municipal Records Manual, municipalities may keep permanent records exclusively in electronic PDF/A form without a paper or microfilm copy, provided the records sit on a live server with at least one separately backed-up copy. The Municipal Records Manual governs third-class cities, boroughs, incorporated towns, and first- and second-class townships.

Who approves county records retention schedules in Pennsylvania?

The County Records Committee, operating under the County Records Act, sets and approves the retention and disposition schedules published in the PHMC County Records Manual. For municipalities, the Local Government Records Committee performs the equivalent role. Counties cannot lawfully shorten or extend these periods on their own; genuine changes flow through the committee process rather than local discretion.

Can counties scan paper records and destroy the originals?

Counties may maintain permanent records electronically using the PDF/A format, but must notify the PHMC of their intent to use PDF/A for each records series. Disposing of paper originals after imaging should follow the applicable schedule and the county's documented program. For a defensible quality bar, 36 CFR Part 1236 Subpart E sets the federal standards for digitizing permanent records.

How is county records management funded in Pennsylvania?

Pennsylvania law (42 P.S. § 21052.1) adds a $5 fee on each recorded document beyond the Recorder of Deeds' standard fee. Of that, $2 goes to the County Records Improvement Fund and $3 is retained by the Recorder for office records management. The fund exists in second-A through eighth-class counties and home rule counties of those classes.

What is defensible destruction?

Defensible destruction is the disposal of records strictly according to an approved retention schedule, fully documented, applied consistently, and suspended whenever a legal hold or active litigation applies. It lets a county show that records were destroyed as a matter of routine policy — not to avoid a request or lawsuit — which is the standard that withstands audit and legal scrutiny.

Does the Right-to-Know Law affect how long we keep records?

The Right-to-Know Law governs access, not retention, but the two intersect. A county cannot produce a record it destroyed prematurely or cannot locate. Sound retention scheduling and findable, well-indexed records make the five-business-day response window achievable and reduce the risk of deemed denials, appeals to the Office of Open Records, and the 30-day determinations that follow.