How Long to Keep Dental Employee Records

The personnel file is the folder for everything that is neither payroll nor a clinical chart: the job application and resume, the offer letter, copies of licenses and certifications, performance reviews, written coaching and discipline.

Several separate federal rules set minimum retention periods for pieces of this file — and they run on different clocks.

Under the ADEA, which covers employers with twenty or more employees on the working-day and calendar-week test the statute sets, job applications, resumes and other personnel records must be kept for 1 year from the date of the personnel action to which they relate.

Title VII, the ADA and GINA — covering employers with 15 or more employees — set a one-year minimum for applications, hiring, discharge and pay records: one year from the date the record was made or the personnel action occurred, whichever is later.

After an involuntary termination, those records stay for one year from the termination itself.

One override to remember: where a discrimination charge under Title VII, the ADA or GINA has been filed, all relevant personnel records must be preserved until final disposition of the charge.

The one-year schedule does not retire a file that is part of a live dispute.

California runs longer than the federal floor.

Employers there must keep a copy of each employee's personnel records for not less than three years after termination of employment.

The federal minimums at a glance

The sections below take each bucket in turn, with the state rules layered on top of the federal ones.

If you are building these files as you hire rather than untangling them afterward, the dental hiring hub collects the guides that feed them.

Form I-9 retention runs on its own clock: three years after the date of hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is later.

For anyone employed longer than two years, the termination date controls — an assistant hired five years ago who resigns this year keeps the form alive for one year after leaving, because that outlasts three years after hire.

Keep current and former employees' forms together and retrievable.

Employers get at least three business days' notice before a government inspection of Forms I-9 — enough time to produce the file, but only if you know where every form sits, including the ones belonging to people who left years ago.

If the form side itself — completing it on time, fixing mistakes — is the open question, our Form I-9 guide walks through that process.

The FLSA requires employers to preserve payroll records for at least 3 years.

The ADEA has its own 3-year payroll file for covered employers — name, address, date of birth, occupation, pay rate and weekly compensation — which in practice the same payroll system produces.

The shorter clock belongs to supplementary basic records — time cards and wage-rate tables — which stay on file for at least 2 years.

Where staff are paid hourly, this is the set that documents the hours behind each paycheck, so it is the first place a wage question looks.

If your practice is FMLA-covered — 50 or more employees on the working-day and workweek test the statute sets — FMLA records carry their own minimum: no less than three years.

California layers a state rule on top: payroll records showing daily hours and wages must be kept on file for not less than three years.

OSHA currently has no standards written specifically for dentistry — the general standards apply, and two of them set the long clocks for clinical staff.

The bloodborne pathogens standard requires training records to be kept for 3 years from the date on which the training occurred, and the record has to show more than attendance: the dates of the training sessions, the contents or a summary of them, the names and qualifications of the people conducting the training, and the names and job titles of everyone who attended.

A sign-in sheet alone does not capture those required fields.

Employee medical records run far longer: at least the duration of employment plus 30 years.

That is where hepatitis B vaccination status and exposure follow-up live, and the bloodborne pathogens standard and OSHA's general medical-record rule set the same employment-plus-30-years minimum.

Who needs the hepatitis B series and what the documentation must show is its own topic — our guide to hepatitis B records covers it.

Injury and illness logs are the partial exception: offices of dentists (NAICS 6212) are on OSHA's list of partially exempt industries, so you do not have to keep OSHA injury and illness records unless the government asks you to.

Partial exemption does not touch reporting — any work-related incident resulting in a fatality, in-patient hospitalization, amputation or loss of an eye must still be reported to OSHA.

HIPAA sets a six-year clock on its required documentation — the policies a covered entity operates under, with training documentation among them.

The six years run from the date the documentation was created or the date it was last in effect, whichever is later, so a policy you revise this year starts its own six years at the revision.

What the training has to cover and how to deliver it to a mixed clinical and front-office team is laid out in our guide to HIPAA training for dental staff.

HIPAA is not the only training paper with its own clock — state harassment-training records carry theirs.

California employers must keep documentation of harassment training for at least two years, including the names of the employees trained and the date of training.

New York City employers must keep records of employees' harassment training for three years.

Maine employers must keep a record of harassment training, including which employees received it.

Retention runs one way; access runs the other where state law says so.

California gives current and former employees a right to inspect their personnel records on a short deadline, and Illinois' Personnel Record Review Act creates inspection rights of its own.

In California, current and former employees may inspect their personnel records within 30 calendar days of the date the employer receives a written request — extendable by written agreement, but to no more than 35 days.

Illinois' Personnel Record Review Act applies to employers with 5 or more employees, excluding the employer's parent, spouse, child or other members of the employer's immediate family.

Under it, on a written request an employer must grant at least 2 requests to inspect in a calendar year and respond within 7 working days, with up to 7 more calendar days when needed.

A request that arrives through an attorney, or alongside a dispute, is a different matter from a routine inspection — route those to employment counsel.

What the deadlines reward is a file that is current and in one place: the practice that can produce a clean copy quickly rarely has to think about the clock.