How long notaries keep records depends on the state where the notarization was performed. There is no federal standard. Among states that require a journal, the most common retention period is ten years from the date of the last entry, with a sizable group setting seven years and a handful tying the clock to the length of your commission plus a set number of years. Where a state is silent, the widely followed professional default is ten years from the last entry.
The Common Retention Periods
Ten years from the date of the final entry is the benchmark used by states including Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, and Washington. A second group, including Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, and New Jersey, sets the requirement at seven years. A smaller set of states ties the retention period to your commission itself, requiring you to keep the journal for the length of your current term plus a fixed number of years after it ends.
Where your state has no explicit retention rule, the Notary Public Code of Professional Responsibility recommends keeping each journal for at least ten years after its last entry. Following that benchmark gives you a defensible position if an entry becomes relevant to a dispute years later.
The Clock Follows the State of Notarization
The retention period is fixed to the state where the notarial act happened, not the state where you currently live or hold a commission. A notary who moves from a ten-year state to a seven-year state cannot switch to the shorter timeline for acts performed under the earlier commission. If you have held commissions in more than one state, you may be running more than one clock on more than one journal, and each has to be honored on its own terms.
Remote Online Notarization Has Its Own Clocks
Remote online notarization (RON) carries stricter record-keeping obligations than paper notarizations, and it introduces a second record on a separate clock. Nearly every state that authorizes RON requires the notary to maintain both an electronic journal and an audio-visual recording of the session.
Retention for those recordings typically falls between five and ten years from the date of the notarial act. Some states set five years as the minimum for the audio-visual recording while requiring the electronic journal itself to be kept for ten. The recording and the journal are treated as separate records with potentially different retention periods, so check both requirements rather than assuming one number covers everything.
Storage rules for RON records are also more specific. Electronic journals generally must be maintained in a tamper-evident format, and backup copies must be kept for the same duration as the originals. The records must be protected from unauthorized access. Few states name exact encryption standards, but the baseline expectation is that any alteration is detectable and that unauthorized viewing is prevented.
Where the Journal Goes When Your Commission Ends
Retention isn’t only about how long. It’s also about where. When your commission expires, is revoked, or you resign, your journal doesn’t stay on your shelf. Most states with journal requirements give you 30 days to deliver your journals to a designated government office, often the county clerk or recorder of deeds in the county where you last maintained your commission.
Renewing your commission is different. The deposit requirement kicks in when you are leaving office for good, not when you are continuing on. Some states offer alternatives: deposit the journal with the state archives, keep it yourself and notify the secretary of state of its location, or in limited cases leave it with your employer while providing the employer’s contact information to the state.
If the Notary Dies or Becomes Incapacitated
If a notary dies or is declared legally incompetent, responsibility for the journal shifts to the notary’s personal representative, guardian, or whoever has physical possession of the records. That person must deliver the journal to the appropriate government office, typically within the same 30-day window that applies to voluntary departures. For an executor or next of kin, this is easy to overlook in the middle of settling an estate, but the duty is statutory and the timeline is short.
If the Journal Is Lost or Stolen
Losing a journal is serious. It contains personal information about every signer you have notarized and is the only contemporaneous record of your official acts. States that address the scenario require you to notify the secretary of state or the equivalent office promptly, and some specify that the notice must be in writing and submitted immediately upon discovery of the loss.
Beyond notification, a lost journal creates a practical problem no filing can fix: any notarization it recorded is now undocumented on your end. If a dispute arises later, you have nothing to fall back on. This is one reason electronic journals with cloud backups are increasingly favored. They are harder to lose and easier to recover.
When No Journal Is Required at All
About half the states do not require notaries to maintain a journal for standard in-person, paper-based notarizations. That group includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, and roughly twenty others. In those states, keeping a journal is a best practice rather than a legal obligation, and there is no statutory retention period to satisfy for paper acts. The trend, however, is moving the other direction. States adopting versions of the Revised Uniform Law on Notarial Acts (RULONA) generally include a journal requirement, and RON acts are treated separately even in states that don’t require paper journals.
If you keep a journal voluntarily, the ten-year professional standard is the sensible default. It matches what most mandatory states require and gives you a consistent record if you ever need to produce evidence of a past notarization.
What Happens If You Don’t Retain Records
Failing to maintain required records, or failing to produce them when lawfully requested, can lead to consequences ranging from administrative penalties to criminal charges. On the lighter end, a state may suspend or revoke your commission and impose civil fines. On the heavier end, falsifying journal entries, destroying records to conceal misconduct, or failing to deposit journals as required can result in criminal prosecution, including felony charges in some states for conduct that amounts to forgery or fraud.
Even where the direct penalty for a missing journal is relatively modest, the downstream exposure can be steep. A notary who was sued after a signer turned out to be an impostor faced a $250,000 claim in part because the journal lacked a thumbprint that could have helped catch the fraud. The retention requirement exists to protect the notary as much as the public. The cost of holding onto a book for a decade is trivial next to the cost of not being able to produce it when it matters.
Practical Takeaways
Confirm the exact retention period in every state where you have ever held a commission, because the clock is set by the state of notarization and doesn’t reset when you move. Track paper journals and RON records separately, since RON typically imposes two clocks on two records. Calendar the 30-day deposit window against the date your commission ends. And when your state is silent, treat ten years from the last entry as the working rule.