NZ Quality & Compliance Hub
General Business · Employer knowledge

Records & evidence

Keep the records the law requires, retain them for the correct period, protect personal information and use operational evidence to see whether the business's controls are actually working.

There is no single retention period for all business records

Different laws create different record-keeping obligations. For example, Employment New Zealand states that wage/time and holiday/leave records must be kept for 6 years. Under HSWA, records of a notifiable event must be kept for at least 5 years from the date the regulator was notified.

Other records can have different periods under tax, company, sector-specific or contractual requirements. Do not use one blanket destruction date for every record.

Manager evidence map

People & payrollEmployment agreements and the required wage, time, holiday and leave records, including the statutory six-year records.
Health & safetyRisk decisions, worker engagement, training or supervision evidence, incidents, corrective actions and the five-year statutory record for notifiable events.
Privacy & informationAccess controls, privacy requests, breach assessments and retention decisions. Principle 9 means personal information should not be kept longer than required for a lawful purpose.
Contractors & operationsUseful evidence of consultation, exchanged risk information, agreed controls, monitoring, reviews and other operational decisions where these help demonstrate how the business managed its work.

Manager check

  • Do we know which records are legally required and which are management evidence?
  • Does each statutory record category have the correct retention rule rather than a generic company-wide period?
  • Can authorised people retrieve records when needed?
  • Are personal records protected and disposed of when they no longer have a lawful purpose to be retained?
  • Are notifiable-event records retained for at least five years from notification?
  • Are wage/time and holiday/leave records retained for six years?
  • Do our records show actions being completed and controls being checked, rather than only forms being filed?
Step 5 · Review

Turn records into improvement

SEELook for incidents, complaints, overdue actions, worker feedback, payroll errors, privacy events and repeated problems.
DECIDEDetermine what needs to change, who owns it and the priority based on legal requirements and actual risk.
ACTImplement the change — control, process, training, supervision, system setting, document or other corrective action.
VERIFYCheck that the action was completed and that it solved or reduced the underlying problem. Record the result.

Records support compliance; they are not compliance by themselves. The objective is an effective business system with enough reliable evidence to understand what happened, demonstrate required actions and improve the way work is managed.

Employment records →WorkSafe notifiable events →Back to General Business Hub

NZQC provides practical educational information. It is not legal advice and does not certify that a provider is compliant. Check the official source and the requirements that apply to your service, contracts and scope.