How long is CCTV footage kept?UK retention by sector, and what the law actually says
There’s no single legal retention period for CCTV in the UK. The rule is to keep footage only as long as you need it, which lands most systems around 30 days. Here’s how that plays out by sector, and how your storage really decides it.
The quick answer
There is no single legal retention period for CCTV in the UK. The rule is to keep footage only as long as you genuinely need it for the reason you installed the cameras, then let it overwrite. In practice most systems land on roughly 30 days, because that covers the delayed thefts, insurance claims and disputes that tend to surface weeks after the event. Some settings hold longer (banks around 90 days, licensed premises to a fixed licence condition), and home cameras have no minimum at all, they simply keep whatever the hard drive holds before it loops. The number is set by your purpose and your storage, not by a date in a statute.
What this guide covers
- Why there is no fixed legal retention period, and the principle that replaces it.
- Typical retention by sector: shops, supermarkets, schools, pubs, banks, offices and home.
- How retention is really set by storage, resolution and recording mode, not a calendar.
- How long home CCTV should keep footage, and the domestic-camera caveat.
- Requesting footage: subject access, police requests and how fast you need to move.
- Overwriting, deletion and keeping the one clip that actually matters.
This is general guidance for homeowners and businesses, not legal advice. Retention rules sit under UK data protection law and can be tightened by sector regulators or licence conditions, so check the ICO guidance or take advice for your own situation.
Typical CCTV retention by setting (scan this first)
These are common, real-world periods, not legal limits. The point of the table is to show how the same principle, keep it only as long as you need it, lands on different numbers depending on what the cameras are there to do.
| Setting | Typical retention | Why it lands there |
|---|---|---|
| Home CCTV | No legal minimum; commonly 2-6 weeks | Set by drive size, not law. Long enough to spot something after a holiday or a quiet spell. |
| Shops and small retail | Around 30 days | Long enough to cover a delayed theft report, a chargeback dispute or a slip-and-trip claim. |
| Supermarkets and larger retail | 30-90 days | Higher footfall, more disputes and loss-prevention cases that surface weeks later. |
| Pubs and licensed premises | Commonly 28-31 days | Usually fixed by a licence condition; the period is written into the premises licence. |
| Schools | Around 30 days unless flagged | Footage tied to a safeguarding or behaviour incident is kept longer, the rest is overwritten. |
| Banks and ATMs | Often up to 90 days | Fraud and card disputes routinely surface a month or two after the event. |
| Offices and workplaces | Around 30 days | Covers access disputes, theft and the odd HR or insurance matter without hoarding footage. |
| Public space (council) | Commonly 30-31 days | Set by a published retention policy; clips needed for an investigation are extracted and held separately. |
Home CCTV
- Typical retention
- No legal minimum; commonly 2-6 weeks
- Why it lands there
- Set by drive size, not law. Long enough to spot something after a holiday or a quiet spell.
Shops and small retail
- Typical retention
- Around 30 days
- Why it lands there
- Long enough to cover a delayed theft report, a chargeback dispute or a slip-and-trip claim.
Supermarkets and larger retail
- Typical retention
- 30-90 days
- Why it lands there
- Higher footfall, more disputes and loss-prevention cases that surface weeks later.
Pubs and licensed premises
- Typical retention
- Commonly 28-31 days
- Why it lands there
- Usually fixed by a licence condition; the period is written into the premises licence.
Schools
- Typical retention
- Around 30 days unless flagged
- Why it lands there
- Footage tied to a safeguarding or behaviour incident is kept longer, the rest is overwritten.
Banks and ATMs
- Typical retention
- Often up to 90 days
- Why it lands there
- Fraud and card disputes routinely surface a month or two after the event.
Offices and workplaces
- Typical retention
- Around 30 days
- Why it lands there
- Covers access disputes, theft and the odd HR or insurance matter without hoarding footage.
Public space (council)
- Typical retention
- Commonly 30-31 days
- Why it lands there
- Set by a published retention policy; clips needed for an investigation are extracted and held separately.
By the Doberman install team · CCTV system designers & installers, Leicester · Last reviewed June 2026
By the Doberman install team
CCTV system designers & installers, Leicester
Last reviewed June 2026
There is no legal CCTV retention period (and why that trips people up)
People expect a clean answer: keep it for X days, the law says so. There isn't one. UK data protection law, the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, never sets a fixed CCTV retention period. What it sets instead is a principle called storage limitation: you keep personal data, and footage of identifiable people is personal data, only for as long as you actually need it for the purpose you collected it.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) puts it the same way in its video surveillance guidance. There's no prescribed period, the operator decides a proportionate retention period tied to the purpose, documents it, and sticks to it. Keeping everything forever "just in case" is exactly what the rules push against; so is having no policy at all.
So the honest answer to "how long is CCTV footage kept?" is: as long as the operator decided it needs to be, which for most systems works out at around a month. The sections below explain why that number recurs, and where it sensibly moves.
Why 30 days is the common default
Thirty days isn't magic and it isn't in any statute. It's where the trade-off between "long enough to be useful" and "not hoarding footage" naturally settles for most homes and small businesses. The events you actually need footage for, a theft noticed after a weekend away, a delivery dispute, a vehicle reversing into your gate, a slip-and-trip claim, tend to come to light days or a couple of weeks after they happen, not the same afternoon.
A month gives you headroom for that lag while keeping the system honest. It also happens to be a comfortable storage target for a typical install, which is why so many recorders are sized around it. The figure is convention plus practicality, not a rule, so treat "about 30 days" as a sensible starting point you then justify for your own site rather than a box to tick.
Retention is set by storage, not a calendar
Here's the part most explanations skip. A CCTV system doesn't "decide" to keep footage for 30 days. It records continuously to a hard drive and, when the drive fills, it overwrites the oldest footage first. So your real retention period is simply how many days of recording fit on the drive before it loops, and that depends entirely on four things: the number of cameras, their resolution, the frame rate, and whether they record continuously or only on detection.
Push the resolution up from 4MP to 8MP, or switch from motion-only to 24/7 recording, and the same drive that held five weeks of footage might now hold ten days. Add two more cameras and it drops again. This is why a retention target and a storage spec have to be designed together, not picked separately, and why we work it out at the survey rather than guessing.
If you want to see how the maths plays out for your own setup, our CCTV storage calculator turns camera count, resolution and recording mode into a rough number of days, so you can size the drive to the retention you actually want rather than the other way round.
How long should home CCTV keep footage?
For a home there's no minimum and no maximum in law, only the storage-limitation principle if your cameras capture anyone beyond your own boundary. Most households are well served by two to six weeks, which is comfortably enough to catch something you only noticed after a holiday, a run of night-time activity on the street, or a parcel that went missing last Tuesday.
Worth knowing: there's a "domestic purposes" exemption that can take home CCTV outside the UK GDPR entirely, but only if the cameras cover nothing beyond your own property. The moment a camera takes in a pavement, a shared driveway or a neighbour's garden, the exemption falls away and you're expected to keep footage proportionately and handle requests properly. We cover the boundary rules, signage and neighbour disputes in full in our guide to the CCTV regulations homeowners need to know.
Shops, supermarkets and retail
Retail tends to settle around 30 days, with busier or higher-value sites running to 60 or 90. The driver is how long disputes take to surface: a theft spotted at the next stock count, a refund or chargeback challenge, a customer slip-and-trip claim that lands weeks after the visit. A month covers most of that; supermarkets keep longer because the volume of incidents and the lag on loss-prevention cases is simply higher.
Whatever the number, the expectation is the same: a written retention policy, footage overwritten on schedule, and any clip pulled for an investigation extracted and stored separately so it isn't lost when the loop comes round. That extraction step is the bit shops most often get wrong, the camera was working, but the clip was gone before anyone exported it.
Schools, pubs and other regulated settings
Some settings have their number effectively chosen for them. Licensed premises, pubs, clubs and many late-night venues, usually run to a retention period written straight into the premises licence as a condition, commonly around 28 to 31 days, and the footage has to be made available to police and licensing officers on request. Get the period or the availability wrong and it's a licensing problem, not just a data one.
Schools typically work to about 30 days as a baseline, holding anything tied to a safeguarding or behaviour incident for longer under a separate policy while the routine footage overwrites. Banks and ATMs commonly run to 90 days because card fraud and disputes surface late. The pattern across all of them is the same: a default period for ordinary footage, plus a clear process for ring-fencing the clips that relate to an actual incident.
Requesting footage: how long you actually have
Because most systems overwrite on a loop, the practical deadline for getting hold of footage is far shorter than people assume. If something happens and you, the police, or someone in your footage want a copy, the clip has to be exported before the loop reaches it. On a system holding two weeks, you've got two weeks, not a moment longer. The single most common reason footage "isn't available" is simply that nobody exported it in time.
If you're in someone else's footage, you can make a subject access request for it, and the operator generally has one month to respond. If the police want footage as part of an investigation, they can request it directly from the operator. Either way the message is the same: move quickly, and if you're the operator, pull and preserve the relevant clip the moment you know it matters rather than waiting.
Overwriting, deletion and keeping the clip that matters
Automatic overwriting is a feature, not a flaw. A system that loops on a sensible period is doing exactly what data protection asks: not keeping footage longer than needed. What you don't want is the opposite failure, footage you needed vanishing because the retention was too short for the way you actually use the cameras, or because the export never happened.
The clean setup is a default retention you can justify, automatic overwriting once it's passed, and a simple habit of exporting and separately storing any incident clip straight away. That keeps you compliant on the routine footage and safe on the footage that counts. It's the kind of thing worth confirming is configured correctly on a regular maintenance visit, rather than discovering after the fact that the drive was looping faster than anyone realised.
Designing for the retention you want
Retention is a design decision, made before anything goes on the wall. Decide how far back you'd realistically want to look, then size the cameras, recorder and drive to hit it at the resolution and recording mode you've chosen. Aim for too little storage and you lose footage before disputes surface; oversize it blindly and you've spent money keeping footage the rules would rather you didn't.
That's the conversation we have at the free site survey: what the cameras are for, how long the footage needs to last, and what drive that implies. It applies just as much to a home CCTV system as to a business CCTV install, where a written retention policy is part of doing it properly.
About this guide
Who wrote this
This guide is written by the Doberman install team - CCTV system designers and installers working across homes and small businesses in Leicester. Sizing storage to a retention period is something we do on every job, so the figures here reflect what we actually configure and get asked about, not theory.
How this guide was produced
The legal framing draws on the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 storage-limitation principle and the ICO's video surveillance guidance, which sets no fixed period and asks operators to choose a proportionate one. The sector figures are common real-world retention periods we see in practice, deliberately framed as typical ranges rather than legal limits, because the only hard rule is the principle itself.
Why we wrote it
"How long is footage kept?" is one of the first things people ask, and the honest answer, that it's set by purpose and storage rather than a date in law, gets lost in confident wrong numbers online. This exists to give you the principle and the practical defaults so you can set a sensible period for your own cameras.
Disclosure and disclaimer
Doberman designs and installs CCTV systems, including sizing storage to a chosen retention period, so we have a commercial interest in people installing properly, and we're upfront about that. This is general guidance, not legal advice; retention obligations can be tightened by sector rules or licence conditions, so check the current ICO guidance or take advice for your own situation.
FAQ: how long CCTV footage is kept
Is there a legal CCTV retention period in the UK?
No. UK data protection law sets no fixed period. The rule is storage limitation: keep footage only as long as you genuinely need it for the purpose you installed the cameras, then delete or overwrite it. The operator chooses a proportionate period, writes it down, and sticks to it. In practice that lands around 30 days for most systems.
How long do most CCTV systems keep footage?
Around 30 days is the common default for homes and small businesses, because that covers the delayed thefts, claims and disputes that usually surface days or weeks later. Some settings run longer: banks and ATMs often to 90 days, supermarkets to 60-90, licensed premises to a fixed licence condition. Home cameras have no minimum and simply keep whatever the drive holds.
How long do shops and supermarkets keep CCTV footage?
Smaller shops typically keep around 30 days. Supermarkets and larger retailers often run to 60 or 90 days because they handle more incidents and more loss-prevention cases that come to light weeks after the event. Whatever the period, any clip needed for an investigation should be exported and stored separately before the system overwrites it.
How long do schools keep CCTV footage?
Schools commonly work to about 30 days for routine footage, while keeping anything linked to a safeguarding or behaviour incident for longer under a separate policy. The baseline overwrites on schedule; the incident clips are ring-fenced. The exact period is set by the school's own retention policy rather than a national rule.
How long does home CCTV footage last?
As long as your hard drive holds before it loops, which for most home systems is two to six weeks depending on camera count, resolution and whether it records continuously or on detection. There's no legal minimum for home cameras. If they capture anything beyond your own property, keep the footage proportionately and be ready to handle requests for it.
What decides how many days my system keeps?
Your hard-drive size against four things: how many cameras, their resolution, the frame rate, and whether they record 24/7 or only on motion. The recorder overwrites the oldest footage when the drive fills, so retention is really "how many days fit before it loops". Raising resolution or switching to continuous recording shortens it; a bigger drive lengthens it.
Can I get CCTV footage of myself, and how long do I have?
Yes. You can make a subject access request to the operator for footage of yourself, and they generally have one month to respond. The catch is time: if the system has already overwritten the footage you're after, it's gone. Make the request as soon as possible, ideally well inside the system's retention period.
Should I keep footage longer just in case?
No, that's the thing data protection specifically discourages. Keep a default period you can justify, let the rest overwrite, and export any incident clip straight away so it survives outside the loop. That keeps you compliant on routine footage and safe on the footage that actually matters, without hoarding months of recordings you'll never look at.