A salary slip that felt entirely disposable the month it arrived can suddenly matter years later — a pension calculation, a dispute over unpaid overtime from years back, a mortgage application asking for more history than expected.
A reasonable baseline for employees: several years, minimum
Keeping at least 5-7 years of salary slips covers most practical situations, and pension or retirement calculations in some systems can look back over an entire career — worth keeping everything if storage isn't a real constraint (and digitally, it rarely is).
Employers typically need to keep records even longer
Payroll records often need to be retained for audit, tax, and labor dispute purposes well beyond what an individual employee might keep — check your local labor and tax authority requirements, since penalties for inadequate record-keeping can be significant.
Digitize as you go, don't wait to catch up
Scanning or saving each slip as a PDF the month it's issued is far less work than trying to reconstruct years of paper slips later — a simple habit that pays off disproportionately when a record is actually needed.
Organize by year, not just one giant folder
A folder structure by year (with months inside) makes finding a specific slip from three years ago fast, rather than scrolling through a single unsorted pile of files.