The General Records Schedule (GRS) Explained

The General Records Schedule (GRS) is a set of retention schedules issued by the National Archives that authorize the disposition of records common across the federal government — the administrative, financial, HR, and IT “housekeeping” records that nearly every agency creates.

The problem it solves

Without the GRS, every federal agency would have to separately appraise and schedule the same routine record types — payroll, travel, routine correspondence, IT operations records, and so on. That would be enormously duplicative and inconsistent. The GRS provides a single, government-wide authority for these common records, so agencies apply it directly and reserve their own scheduling effort for records unique to their mission.

How agencies use it

• For records covered by the GRS, agencies apply its retention periods and disposition instructions as written.
• For mission-unique (program) records, agencies develop their own schedules and submit them to NARA for approval.

This split — GRS for common records, agency schedules for program records — is the backbone of federal records scheduling.

What’s in a GRS item

Each GRS item identifies a category of records, sets a retention period, and specifies the disposition (typically destroy after a set time; some are permanent and transfer to NARA). Many items use broad, “big bucket” groupings so they’re easy to apply consistently across agencies.

Keeping current

NARA periodically updates the GRS, and agencies are expected to apply the current versions. Because it governs how long large volumes of routine records are kept — and when they may be destroyed — the GRS is one of the most consequential documents in federal records management.

Useful beyond government

Even outside the federal government, the GRS is a valuable reference: it reflects decades of NARA appraisal judgment about how long typical business records need to be kept, and it’s a public, citable starting point when you’re building or sanity-checking a retention schedule. See the retention and disposition hub for more.