What is the General Records Schedule (GRS)?

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

What problem it solves

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

How agencies use it

• For records covered by the GRS, agencies apply the GRS retention and disposition instructions as written.
• For program records unique to the agency’s mission, the agency develops its own schedules and submits them to NARA for approval.

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

Keeping current

NARA periodically updates the GRS, and agencies are expected to apply the current versions. Because it determines how long large volumes of common records are kept (and when they can be destroyed), the GRS is one of the most consequential documents in federal records management. It’s also a useful reference outside government: it reflects decades of appraisal judgment about how long typical business records need to be retained.