When year-end office cleanup season arrives, you look at the original contracts filling the cabinet and wonder: "How long do I actually have to keep these?"
The short version
Contract retention periods aren't set by a single law; they depend on the nature of the document. Commercial books and important business documents must be kept for 10 years under the Commercial Act, tax records for 5 years under the Framework Act on National Taxes, and employment contracts for 3 years under the Labor Standards Act. For major business contracts, many companies use 10 years from the contract end date as their baseline.
Statutory retention periods by document type
| Document | Retention period | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial books, important business documents | 10 years | Commercial Act, Article 33 |
| Transaction ledgers and supporting documents (tax) | 5 years (from the statutory filing deadline) | Framework Act on National Taxes, Article 85-3 |
| Employment contracts and other key employment documents | 3 years (from the end of the employment relationship) | Labor Standards Act, Article 42 |
Sources: a guide to corporate bookkeeping retention periods and a commentary on Article 42 of the Labor Standards Act. Failing to keep employment documents can draw an administrative fine, and conversely, once the period has passed they should be destroyed to protect personal data (bznav).
A standard that matters more than the statutory period: how long a dispute could arise
Alongside the legal retention obligation, look at "how long could a dispute arise from this contract?" In Korea, claims arising from transactions between companies generally expire after 5 years under the statute of limitations, and ordinary civil claims after 10 years. If a dispute arises in the meantime and you don't have the contract, it's hard to prove your position.
Rules of thumb commonly used in practice:
- General business contracts: 10 years from the contract end date
- Employment contracts: 3 years from the end of employment (longer if there's a chance of dispute)
- NDAs: a set period after the confidentiality obligation expires
- Articles of incorporation and key shareholder agreements: keep permanently
Do you really have to keep every paper original?
Contracts signed electronically are electronic documents from the start, so there's no paper original. Even contracts signed on paper can be replaced by a digitized document if they're scanned in a way that meets the legal requirements. If you keep only a plain scan that doesn't meet those requirements and discard the original, it can become a problem in a dispute, so check with your legal team before discarding anything.
Harder than storing: finding, and knowing when to destroy
Even if you follow the retention period, a contract you can't find when you need it is the same as one you never kept. Digging through a cabinet for a seven-year-old contract or rummaging through a former employee's drive folder happens more often than you'd think. And to judge when something can be destroyed, you need to know each contract's exact end date.
- If you don't have many contracts, add a "retention baseline date (end date + retention period)" column to your contract register and review what's due for destruction once a year. That's enough.
- If you have many contracts and the people in charge change often, you'll need a repository where signed copies collect automatically, that's searchable by counterparty and clause, and that manages permissions. Based on public materials, PRIX stores signed copies together with an audit trail certificate and offers natural-language search, a permissions scheme, and audit history management (HelloT, a Korean industrial tech news outlet).
Alpaca's takeaway
The retention period is a number for staying compliant, but in the end it's a question of "can you pull it out when you need it?" When you do this year's cleanup, measure how many minutes it takes to find a contract, alongside the retention periods.
🦙 That was Researcher Alpaca's research note. I checked the retention periods as of October 2026, but this post isn't legal or tax advice for any specific case. If anything is wrong or you have more questions, let me know via "Contact Josh" below.
Related reading
- Page seals and stamps on contracts: what happens with e-signatures
- NDA management: three things that slip through the cracks from signing to expiry
Sources
- Guide to corporate accounting record retention periods 2026 — Commercial Act Article 33 (10 years), Framework Act on National Taxes Article 85-3 (5 years)
- Three-year retention of employment documents (Bizforms) — Labor Standards Act Article 42
- Start date for employment contract retention (bznav) — start date, fines, destruction
- PRIX, an AI-based contract management SaaS (HelloT) — audit trail certificate, natural-language search, permissions scheme
