PHMC Records Compliance for County Government

What governs county records compliance in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has 67 counties, each classified by population and each maintaining its records under retention schedules approved by the state. The foundational rule is set by the County Records Act: county records may be retained and disposed of only in accordance with retention schedules promulgated by the County Records Committee, and those schedules are compiled in the PHMC County Records Manual. In other words, a county clerk, recorder of deeds, or prothonotary does not decide independently how long a document lives — the schedule decides, and the schedule has the force of law.

The County Records Manual's schedules apply to county offices of counties of the second through eighth class. (Philadelphia, the sole county of the first class, operates under separate arrangements.) Administration runs through the PHMC's Division of Archival and Records Management Services, which staffs the County Records Committee and the Pennsylvania State Archives. A records officer's job is therefore less about judgment and more about disciplined execution: knowing which series a document belongs to, applying the right retention period, and documenting every disposition.

Counties should not confuse their manual with the others in the same family. The Pennsylvania 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. Court records held by the Courts of Common Pleas and Magisterial District Courts follow a separate retention schedule issued under 204 Pa. Code by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts. A county records program touches all three regimes, which is why mapping every series to the correct authority is the first step toward compliance.

The three pillars in practice

• Retention — every series is kept for a defined period, from a few years to permanent, set by the County Records Committee.
• Access — public records are produced on request under the Right-to-Know Law, on a five-business-day clock.
• Format and preservation — paper, microfilm, or approved electronic formats (PDF/A) must keep records legible and authentic for the full retention period.

How Pennsylvania retention schedules actually work

Retention in Pennsylvania is series-based, not document-based. The County Records Manual organizes records into numbered series — for example, the official minutes of the Board of County Commissioners or County Council carry series code AL-16.1 — and assigns each series a retention period. That period is measured either from the record's creation or from a triggering event, such as the close of a fiscal year, the settlement of an estate, or the expiration of an appeal period. Understanding the trigger matters as much as the number of years: a five-year retention that starts at case closure is very different from one that starts at filing.

A subset of records is permanent and may never be lawfully destroyed because it carries enduring administrative, legal, and historical value. Under the County Records Manual, Deed Books and their indices are permanent, County Will Books are permanent, and the official minutes of the Board of County Commissioners (AL-16.1) are permanent. These are the records that establish land title, settle estates, and document the governance of the county — destroying them would be both unlawful and irreversible. Most other series, by contrast, carry fixed terms and become eligible for disposition once that term elapses.

Court records sit under a different but parallel schedule. Under the AOPC retention schedule, Court of Common Pleas records should be retained for a minimum of six years following the expiration of the appeal period — a reminder that the trigger (appeal period expiration) and the floor (six years) work together. Because counties physically house court files alongside their own records, the records officer must apply each schedule to its own series rather than imposing a single blanket rule across the building.

The Right-to-Know Law: deadlines records officers must hit

Pennsylvania is an open-records state. The Right-to-Know Law (Act 3 of 2008, 65 P.S. § 67.101 et seq.) presumes that records in the possession of a county are public unless a specific exemption applies, and it puts the burden on the agency to justify any withholding. Every county must designate an open-records officer (AORO) to receive and process requests. The law is built around firm deadlines, and the most common compliance failures are missed dates rather than wrong redactions.

The request lifecycle is a sequence of clocks. A written request starts a five-business-day response window. The agency can extend that window in defined circumstances, but if the response is expected to take more than 30 days beyond the initial five business days, the request is deemed denied unless the requester agrees in writing to the extension. A denial — actual or deemed — opens a 15-business-day appeal window to the Office of Open Records (OOR), and the OOR appeals officer must then issue a final determination within 30 days.

1. Receipt: the open-records officer logs the written request and the date it arrived, starting the clock.
2. Response: within 5 business days, the agency must grant, deny, or invoke a permitted extension in writing.
3. Extension limit: if fulfillment will exceed 30 days beyond the initial 5 business days, the request is deemed denied unless the requester agrees in writing to the longer timeline.
4. Appeal: a requester may appeal a denial or deemed denial to the Office of Open Records within 15 business days.
5. Determination: the OOR appeals officer issues a final, written determination within 30 days of receiving the appeal.

What counties may charge for records — and what they may not

Fees under the Right-to-Know Law are tightly capped, and counties that overcharge invite appeals. The Office of Open Records' Official RTKL Fee Schedule caps black-and-white photocopies at $0.25 per page for the first 1,000 pages. Just as important is what cannot be billed: no fee may be charged for staff time, for searching for or retrieving records, or for the agency's review or its response letter. The labor of finding the file is the agency's cost, not the requester's.

When a request is large enough that fees are expected to exceed $100, the agency may require the requester to prepay an estimate before producing the records. That threshold is also a useful internal trigger: a request crossing it usually signals a high-volume retrieval that a digital records system would handle far more cheaply than pulling paper from storage.

Worked example: pricing a large copy request

Defensible destruction: disposing of records without legal risk

Destruction is the part of records management that ends careers when it goes wrong. "Defensible destruction" means a county can demonstrate, after the fact, that any record it destroyed was eligible under an approved schedule, was not subject to a legal hold, and was disposed of with documented authorization. The standard is not that destruction looks reasonable — it is that the paper trail proves the schedule was followed.

1. Identify the series and confirm the record is not permanent and has met its full retention period under the County Records Manual.
2. Screen for legal holds: confirm no litigation, audit, investigation, or Right-to-Know request touches the record.
3. Prepare a disposition list and obtain the authorization required by the schedule and county policy.
4. Destroy securely — shredding or certified destruction for confidential records — and retain a certificate or log of what was destroyed and when.
5. File the disposition record permanently, so the act of destruction is itself documented and auditable.

The discipline that protects a county is consistency. Ad hoc clean-outs — a department clearing a storage room before a move, or a new administration purging "old files" — are where unlawful destruction happens. A standing schedule executed on a calendar, with disposition certificates kept permanently, turns destruction from a liability into a defensible, routine operation.

Microfilm, digitization, and electronic records standards

Format is now the most active area of county records policy. Counties may maintain permanent records electronically using the PDF/A format, but with an explicit condition: the county must notify the PHMC of its intent to use PDF/A for each records series. PDF/A is the archival profile of PDF, designed so a document remains self-contained and renderable for the long term. The per-series notification requirement keeps the State Archives aware of how each permanent series is being preserved.

Municipalities have moved further. Since the 2019 update to the Municipal Records Manual, Pennsylvania municipalities may keep permanent records exclusively in electronic (PDF/A) form, without retaining a paper or microfilm copy — provided the records are stored on a live server with at least one separately backed-up copy. That backup condition is the safeguard: electronic-only retention is permitted only when redundancy protects against media failure. Counties evaluating an electronic-first program should treat that same backup discipline as a baseline, not an option.

The federal trajectory underscores where this is heading. Under OMB Memorandum M-23-07, by June 30, 2024 all federal agencies were required to manage permanent records in an electronic format; after that date, the National Archives no longer accepts transfers of permanent or temporary records in analog formats. Starting July 1, 2024, federal agencies must digitize permanent records created in analog before transferring them. The digitization itself is governed by 36 CFR Part 1236 Subpart E, which sets the standards and procedures for digitizing permanent paper records. Counties are not bound by these federal rules, but they establish the technical benchmark — image quality, metadata, and validation — that a defensible county digitization program should mirror.

Funding modernization: the County Records Improvement Fund

Records modernization in Pennsylvania has a dedicated funding mechanism most counties already collect. Under 42 P.S. § 21052.1, a $5 fee is charged for each document recorded, in addition to the Recorder of Deeds' standard recording fee. Of that $5, $2 is deposited into the County Records Improvement Fund to support a comprehensive records management plan, and $3 is retained by the Recorder of Deeds for that office's own records management. 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.

Worked example: turning recording volume into a modernization budget

The fund scales with recording activity. Each recorded document directs $2 into the County Records Improvement Fund, so annual accrual is simply $2 multiplied by the number of documents recorded. For illustration, a county recording 25,000 documents in a year would accrue roughly $50,000 toward its records management plan, on top of the $3 per document its Recorder of Deeds retains for office records management. The recording-volume figure varies by county and is illustrative here, but the structure is fixed: every deed, mortgage, and lien recorded compounds a real, recurring budget for digitization, microfilming, and storage — which is why a documented records management plan is the prerequisite for putting the fund to work.

Common compliance failures (and how counties avoid them)

Most county compliance problems are not exotic. They cluster around a handful of avoidable mistakes, and each maps to a specific obligation in the framework above.

• Destroying records without authorization — clearing a storage room ahead of a move or a transition, instead of executing the County Records Committee schedule with documented disposition.
• Missing Right-to-Know deadlines — letting the five-business-day window lapse, which converts inaction into a deemed denial the requester can appeal to the Office of Open Records.
• Charging prohibited fees — billing for staff time, searching, or retrieval, when only copying (up to $0.25 per page for the first 1,000 pages) and certain costs are permitted.
• Going electronic without notifying the PHMC — converting a permanent series to PDF/A without the required per-series notification, or without a separately backed-up copy.
• Applying one retention rule to everything — treating county, municipal, and court records as interchangeable instead of matching each series to its own schedule and trigger.
• Suspending nothing under a legal hold — letting scheduled destruction run on a record that has become relevant to litigation, an audit, or an open request.

The throughline is documentation. A county that can show its schedule, its disposition certificates, its RTKL response log, and its PHMC notifications is in a defensible position even when a decision is questioned. A county that relies on institutional memory is exposed the moment that memory leaves the building.

The Lehigh Valley and Pennsylvania context

These obligations are uniform across the Commonwealth's 67 counties, but the practical demands fall hardest on the offices that record the most: the Recorder of Deeds, the Register of Wills, the Prothonotary, and the Clerk of Courts. In the Lehigh Valley, counties such as Lehigh and Northampton manage centuries of permanent land and probate records alongside high daily volumes of new recordings and Right-to-Know requests — exactly the conditions under which a documented retention program and a funded digitization plan pay for themselves.

Reynolds Business Systems is a family-owned firm based in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, serving the Lehigh Valley — Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton — and the wider Mid-Atlantic for more than 55 years. That work centers on the operational side of these requirements: converting permanent series to PDF/A under the PHMC's per-series framework, microfilming for long-term preservation, and building retrieval systems that make five-business-day Right-to-Know turnarounds routine rather than stressful. The compliance rules are set by the County Records Committee, the Office of Open Records, and the PHMC; the role of a records partner is to make following them dependable, auditable, and affordable.

Frequently asked questions

Is Pennsylvania an open records state?

Yes. The Right-to-Know Law (Act 3 of 2008) presumes that records held by a county are public unless a specific exemption applies, and it places the burden on the agency to justify withholding. Every county designates an open-records officer who must respond to a written request within five business days.

Can I view Pennsylvania public records for free?

Often, yes. Under the Right-to-Know Law, no fee may be charged for staff time, for searching, or for retrieving records, nor for the agency's review or response letter. Copies are capped at $0.25 per page for the first 1,000 pages, and an agency may require prepayment only when fees are expected to exceed $100.

What is the 7-year retention policy for county records?

There is no single seven-year rule for Pennsylvania county records. Retention is set series by series in the PHMC County Records Manual and ranges from a few years to permanent. Seven years is a common period for certain financial and tax-related records, but the controlling figure for any specific series is whatever the County Records Committee schedule assigns.

What county records are kept permanently?

Records with enduring legal and historical value are permanent under the County Records Manual and may never be lawfully destroyed. These include Deed Books and their indices, County Will Books, and the official minutes of the Board of County Commissioners or County Council (series AL-16.1).

How long must Pennsylvania counties keep records?

It depends entirely on the series. Some records are permanent (deeds, wills, commissioner minutes), while most administrative and fiscal series carry fixed terms set by the County Records Manual. Court of Common Pleas records, under the AOPC schedule, should be kept a minimum of six years after the appeal period expires.

What is the PA County Records Manual?

It is the compilation of retention and disposition schedules that Pennsylvania counties must follow. Issued through the PHMC and approved by the County Records Committee under the County Records Act, it applies to county offices of the second through eighth class and dictates how long each records series is kept and when it may be destroyed.

Who approves county records retention schedules in Pennsylvania?

The County Records Committee. Under the County Records Act, county records may be retained and disposed of only in accordance with schedules the committee promulgates, which are then compiled in the PHMC County Records Manual. The PHMC's Division of Archival and Records Management Services administers the process.

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 are stored on a live server with at least one separately backed-up copy.

What format must a county use for electronic permanent records?

PDF/A, the archival profile of PDF. Counties may maintain permanent records electronically in PDF/A, but must notify the PHMC of their intent to use the format for each records series. The per-series notification keeps the State Archives informed of how each permanent series is being preserved.

How does the County Records Improvement Fund work?

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

What are the Right-to-Know appeal deadlines?

A requester may appeal a denial or deemed denial to the Office of Open Records within 15 business days of the agency's response. The OOR appeals officer must then issue a final determination within 30 days of receiving the appeal.