How Long to Keep Security Camera Footage

Why 30 days is the common starting point#

Thirty days is where most commercial video retention policies begin, and it is a reasonable default for a reason that has nothing to do with regulation. Most incidents that anyone reviews footage for are reported within a few weeks: a slip and fall, a package theft, a vandalized vehicle, a dispute between employees, a break-in discovered the next morning. Thirty days covers that window with margin, and at typical commercial camera counts it is affordable.

What pushes retention longer: a lender or insurer that names a period in writing, a public agency records schedule, a housing program requirement, a licensing condition, an anchor tenant lease exhibit, or a history of claims that surface late. What pushes it shorter: a bandwidth or storage constraint that cannot be solved economically, or a deliberate privacy position that keeps footage no longer than the operation needs.

The number is a policy decision made by the owner, ideally with counsel, and then executed as a storage calculation. It is not a technical default to be inherited from whatever the recorder shipped with. A system left to overwrite at 14 days because that is what fit on the drives is still operating a retention policy. The drive capacity chose it rather than the owner.

The drivers that actually set the number#

Driver	Who it applies to	What it usually requires	Where to confirm it
Insurance policy or lender covenant	Owners with a policy or loan that names security systems	Commonly 30 days, sometimes 60 or 90 for higher risk classes	The policy or loan document, in writing from the carrier or lender
Public records and agency retention schedules	State and local public agencies	No universal length; the agency’s adopted records retention schedule governs, and existing footage that is a public record is subject to the California Public Records Act at Government Code section 7920.000 and following	The agency’s adopted schedule and its counsel
Housing program requirements	HUD assisted and other subsidized properties	Set by the program, the regulatory agreement, the management plan or the owner’s own policy rather than one federal number	The regulatory agreement, management plan and program guidance
State licensing conditions	Regulated premises, such as licensed cannabis operations	A specific minimum written into the licensing agency’s regulations	The regulations for that license type, verified at design time
Litigation hold and preservation duty	Any party once a claim or investigation is reasonably foreseeable	Preserve the relevant footage immediately, regardless of the routine period	Counsel; the hold overrides the schedule
Labor agreements and employment policy	Employers whose agreements address surveillance	Notice, access and retention terms as negotiated	The agreement and employment counsel
Lease and brand standards	Landlords, anchor tenants, franchise operators	Whatever the lease exhibit or brand standard specifies	The lease exhibit or franchise operations manual

Two of these are frequently missed. The first is the lender covenant, because it lives in a loan document nobody on the facilities side has read. The second is preservation duty, because it is not a retention setting at all: it is an obligation to stop the ordinary overwrite for specific footage the moment a claim becomes foreseeable. A system with a perfectly compliant 30 day policy still loses the case if the relevant clip was overwritten on day 31 after the owner knew a claim was coming.

California specifics worth checking#

There is no single California statute setting a retention period for commercial video surveillance. Several specific programs do set one, and a property may fall under one without knowing it.

Licensed cannabis premises are the clearest example. Under the Department of Cannabis Control regulations at California Code of Regulations title 4, section 15044, surveillance recordings must be kept for a minimum of 90 calendar days. Any design for a licensed cultivation, distribution, manufacturing or retail premises should be sized against that floor rather than against a 30 day default.

Public agencies have a different structure. For a city or city and county department, Government Code section 34090.6 permits destruction of recordings of routine video monitoring after one year, with the approval of the legislative body and the written consent of the agency attorney, and the section defines routine video monitoring to include building security recording systems. Recordings that are evidence in a pending claim or litigation are excepted. Counties, special districts and state agencies work from their own adopted records retention schedules, so the schedule has to be checked rather than assumed. Agency projects should settle this before the recorder is sized, not after. Our government and public works page covers the other procurement items that come with agency work.

For everyone else, the retention number is contractual and policy driven. That is not a loophole; it means the obligation comes from the insurer, the lender, the lease, the program or the owner’s own written policy, and each of those has to be read.

Storage math: from retention policy to terabytes#

One conversion turns a retention policy into capacity. A stream of 1 Mbps running continuously writes about 10.8 GB in a day, so the raw requirement is bitrate times 10.8, times camera count, times retention days.

The table below uses these planning assumptions: H.265 compression, 15 frames per second, continuous 24 hour recording, moderate scene motion, decimal terabytes, and raw video before array parity and free space. Add roughly 20 to 25 percent of installed capacity on top for parity and headroom. Real bitrates come from the manufacturer’s calculator for the specific model and scene, and those figures should replace these before a purchase order is written.

System	2 MP cameras at 2 Mbps	4 MP cameras at 3 Mbps	8 MP cameras at 6 Mbps
8 cameras, 30 days	5.2 TB	7.8 TB	15.6 TB
16 cameras, 30 days	10.4 TB	15.6 TB	31.1 TB
24 cameras, 30 days	15.6 TB	23.3 TB	46.7 TB
24 cameras, 60 days	31.1 TB	46.7 TB	93.3 TB
24 cameras, 90 days	46.7 TB	70.0 TB	140.0 TB

Two of those assumptions are already carrying the table, and two further settings move the result in one direction or the other. Check each against the project before treating a figure as a budget.

• H.265 is assumed. It roughly halves bitrate against H.264 on most scenes at the same visual quality, so a fleet that cannot run it produces close to double the figures above. Confirm the recorder and every camera support it, because a mixed fleet falls back to the lowest common codec.
• Fifteen frames per second is assumed. Frame rate is close to linear, so a project specified at 30 fps roughly doubles the table and one that accepts 10 fps takes about a third off it. Fifteen rarely costs an investigator anything useful.
• Variable bitrate with a quality target lets quiet scenes drop to a fraction of the ceiling while busy scenes hold detail, which pulls the real number below the table. Constant bitrate wastes storage on an empty corridor at three in the morning and pushes it above.
• Motion based recording is not assumed here, because the table is sized for continuous 24 hour recording. It helps enormously on cameras that see nothing overnight and helps very little on a busy lobby or a windy exterior view where trees trigger continuously. Never size a whole system as if every camera benefits.

None of those settings moves the total as far as adding a camera or raising a resolution does, so settle the count first. Our guide on how many security cameras a building needs sets out the method.

Why calculated retention and real retention differ#

The retention a system delivers is almost never the retention it was designed for, and the gap is usually in the wrong direction.

Bitrate assumptions are the main cause. A parking lot camera watching an empty lot at 2 a.m. produces very little data; the same camera in wind, rain or heavy snow produces a great deal, because noise and motion both raise bitrate. Cameras facing traffic, foliage or a busy corridor run above their planning bitrate all day. Infrared at night raises noise and therefore bitrate on many models. Two cameras of the same model on the same recorder can differ by a factor of three based on scene alone.

The other causes are operational. Cameras get added and nobody resizes the array. Someone raises a camera from 15 to 30 frames per second to chase a detail problem. A firmware update changes the default encoder profile. A drive fails and the array runs degraded with less usable capacity.

The fix is a habit rather than a design change. Two weeks after the system goes live, open each camera and note the oldest recording available. Compare that to the policy. Adjust bitrate ceilings, frame rate, recording schedule or capacity while the project is still open, and record the verified retention in the closeout package. Then repeat the check annually, which is one of the items a service and maintenance agreement should cover explicitly. Where recording lives also changes how this is corrected: adding capacity to an on-premise recorder is a purchase order, while cloud retention is a subscription tier. Our guide on where recorded video should live compares those paths.

Audio is a separate decision in California#

Video retention and audio retention are not the same question, and the answer is usually different.

California treats the recording of private conversations differently from video. Penal Code section 632, part of the California Invasion of Privacy Act, makes it unlawful to intentionally record a confidential communication without the consent of all parties to that communication. A camera in a lobby or corridor may record conversations that participants reasonably believed were private, and the presence of a video surveillance sign does not resolve consent for audio.

For that reason microphones on commercial camera systems are commonly left disabled unless the owner’s counsel has reviewed the intended use and the owner has decided how notice and consent will be handled. Cameras are frequently shipped with microphones enabled by default, so this is an active configuration step, not an absence of one. The setting belongs in the closeout documentation for every camera, so the owner can show what was recorded and what was not. Our security camera systems page describes how that is documented.

Where audio genuinely serves a purpose, such as an intercom station or a call point, it is generally handled as a live intercom function rather than a continuously recorded stream, which keeps the question narrower.

Do not keep footage longer than the policy requires#

There is a practical argument for the shortest retention that meets the obligations, and it has nothing to do with drive cost.

Every additional day of retained video is additional material that can be requested in discovery, requested under a public records law, exposed in a breach of the recording platform, or misused by someone inside the organization. A property that keeps 365 days of footage without a reason has created a year long searchable record of the movements of residents, employees and visitors, and it will be asked to produce it. Residents in multifamily and affordable housing are particularly sensitive to this, and a written policy stating the retention period and who may review footage is easier to defend than an open ended archive.

A workable policy states four things: the retention period and the reason for it, who is authorized to review footage and under what circumstances, how an export is requested and logged, and how a preservation hold is placed when a claim becomes foreseeable. That document costs nothing, and it is what turns a camera system into something an owner can explain.

Next step#

Send the camera count, the resolution you are planning and the retention the property is obligated to meet, and we will return the storage sizing and a recording recommendation with the assumptions shown. Start at request a bid. General contractors bidding Division 28 can start at for general contractors for our prequalification packet.