A notary is allowed to destroy their journal only after the retention period set by state law has expired, and only if the state permits the notary to destroy it rather than surrender it to a county office. That window runs anywhere from five years to the life of the commission depending on where you’re commissioned, with ten years being the most common requirement. Shredding a journal before the clock runs out, or when your state actually requires you to hand it over, can cost you your commission and expose you to criminal and civil liability.
When the Retention Clock Starts and Stops
Retention periods are set by state statute, and the range is wide. Some states require five years after the last entry. Others set seven years. A large group of states require ten. A few take a different approach entirely, requiring the journal to be kept for the life of the commission or surrendered to a county clerk rather than held by the notary at all.
The clock typically starts on the date of the last notarial act recorded in that particular journal, not the date you closed the book or the date your commission ended. So if your last entry was two years before your commission expired, those two years already count. You cannot destroy a completed journal just because you’ve opened a new one; the retention period applies to the full book from its final entry forward.
Because the rules differ so much from state to state, the only reliable check is with your commissioning authority, usually the Secretary of State. If you cannot confirm your state’s exact rule, holding the journal for at least ten years satisfies the longest common statutory requirement.
What Your State Does When Your Commission Ends
Whether you’re allowed to destroy a journal at all often depends on what your state requires when your commission ends. A commission can end because it expired, you resigned, you moved out of state, or it was revoked. The rules split into two broad camps.
States That Require Surrender
In many states, a former notary must physically deliver all journals and notarial records to a designated public office, typically the county clerk or recorder where the oath of office was filed. The transfer usually must happen within 30 days of the commission ending, though the exact deadline varies. Some jurisdictions charge a small fee. Once the county clerk has the journal, it becomes a public record, and you’re no longer responsible for it. The county office then handles long-term storage and eventual destruction after the applicable retention period. In these states, you do not destroy the journal yourself.
States That Let You Retain the Journal
Other states let a former notary keep the journal after the commission ends, provided you continue to store it securely for the full retention period. This usually comes with a notification requirement: you must tell the Secretary of State where the journal is being kept. A few states also allow you to leave the journal with your former employer, if the employer agrees to maintain it for the required period and you notify the state. Arizona, Colorado, and Oregon are among the states that permit employer retention under specific conditions. In this group of states, once retention has run out, you are the one who destroys the journal.
Electronic Journals and Remote Notarization Recordings
Notaries who perform remote online notarizations usually keep electronic journals along with audio-visual recordings of each session. Many states require those recordings to be kept for at least ten years from the date of the notarization and stored with password protection or encryption. Missouri’s regulations, for example, require secure backups of both electronic journals and audio-visual recordings.
Destroying an electronic journal or recording early carries the same consequences as destroying a paper one. When the retention period does expire and you’re clear to delete, the deletion has to be thorough enough that the data cannot be recovered. Dragging files to the recycle bin is not enough. Secure deletion software or physical destruction of the storage device is the electronic equivalent of shredding a paper book.
How to Destroy the Journal Once You’re Allowed
A notary journal contains names, addresses, signatures, identification details, and sometimes thumbprints. Throwing it in the trash is not an option even after the retention period expires. The goal is to make the personal information permanently unrecoverable.
Acceptable methods for paper journals include:
- Cross-cut or micro-cut shredding. Standard strip-cut shredders leave pieces large enough to reassemble; cross-cut and micro-cut shredders reduce pages to confetti-sized fragments.
- Incineration. Burning the journal completely, not just scorching the edges. More practical in rural areas than in apartment buildings with fire codes.
- Pulverization. Professional document destruction services grind paper into pulp and provide a certificate of destruction.
Document what you did. Record the date of destruction, the method used, and the date range of the notarial entries in the destroyed journal. No state is known to require this memo, but it protects you if someone later asks why you cannot produce the records. A single paragraph stored with your other notarial records is enough.
What Happens If You Destroy a Journal Too Early
Penalties for destroying a notary journal before you’re allowed vary by state, and they can be severe. In some states, willful failure to properly handle a journal after a commission ends is a misdemeanor, carrying potential jail time and personal liability to anyone harmed by the missing records. Other states treat unauthorized destruction, concealment, or defacing of notarial records as a felony. North Carolina, for example, classifies unauthorized destruction of notary records as a Class I felony.
The administrative side can end your notary career independently of any criminal charge. State commissioning authorities have broad power to issue warnings, restrict your commission, suspend it, or revoke it. Revocation can disqualify you from being commissioned again. And because notary bonds and errors-and-omissions insurance policies typically exclude intentional misconduct, you’d be personally responsible for any damages a court awards to someone harmed by your inability to produce a record.
The usual scenario is not a cover-up. It’s a notary who moves, tosses old journals during the packing, and then gets a call from a title company two years later needing verification of a closing. By then there is no fix.
Two Situations That Look Similar but Are Not
A handful of states, including Maine, North Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia, do not require a paper journal at all, though some encourage one or impose rules if you keep one voluntarily. Several other states require journals only for electronic or remote online notarizations. If you kept a journal voluntarily, the common-sense rules about secure storage and proper destruction still apply even if your state hasn’t written them into statute.
A lost or stolen journal is a different problem from destruction, and don’t let the first substitute for reporting the second. Most states require you to notify your commissioning authority immediately on discovering a journal is missing, and some set a specific deadline such as 15 days. If the book was stolen, file a police report and keep a copy. Failing to report a missing journal can trigger penalties on its own, separate from whatever follows from the missing records.