This feature is available to Claude Enterprise plan customers. To set custom retention periods for your organization, you must have either a Primary Owner or Owner role.
Custom data retention controls allow organizations to manage how long Claude stores conversation and project data. This article explains how to set up and manage data retention periods for your organization.
How data retention works
Data retention is based on the last observed activity:
For chats: Retention period starts from the time of the last message in the conversation.
For projects: Retention period starts from the time the project was last updated (including chat creation or knowledge base modifications).
The minimum retention period is 30 days, and each month is counted as 30 days. For example, a 3-month retention period equals 90 days.
Important considerations
Deletion occurs at midnight UTC on the scheduled day.
By default, data is retained indefinitely unless a custom retention period is set.
When you modify retention settings, any data that falls outside the new retention period will be deleted immediately upon saving.
Data past its retention period will be permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.
For chats:
All chats (including chats within projects) will be deleted.
For projects:
All projects (including any chats within those projects) will be deleted.
Setting up data retention
To set custom retention periods:
Log in to your Claude Enterprise account
Navigate to Account Settings
Locate the Data Management section
Set your desired retention period (minimum 30 days)
Save your changes
Example retention calculation
If a conversation’s last message is at 3PM UTC on March 1st with a 30-day retention period, the deletion will occur at midnight UTC on March 31st.
Monitoring retention-related activities
All retention-related actions and changes are automatically tracked in audit logs. You can access these logs to monitor changes to retention settings and data deletion events.