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September 2026 — For Flight Instructors & Flight Schools

How Long Should a Flight School Keep Student Pilot Records? A Practical Retention Guide for FAA and EASA Schools

The question every chief CFI dreads

It usually arrives as an email on a Friday afternoon: a former student needs proof of a solo endorsement they completed with your school in 2022. Or an inspector, during a routine oversight visit, asks to see the training records for a student who graduated two years ago and has since moved on.

The question is the same either way: do you still have it? And if you do, can you actually find it?

Record retention is the least glamorous part of running a flight school, but it is one of the few compliance areas where the rules are genuinely clear on both sides of the Atlantic. The problem is not the rule. The problem is that paper logbooks fade, binders get lost in an office move, and a departing instructor takes their own copy of the records with them.

What the rules actually require

The requirements differ between a training organisation (the school) and an individual instructor, and between the FAA and EASA frameworks. Here is the side-by-side view.

FAA (United States)

• Part 141 pilot schools — 14 CFR §141.101. The school must retain each student record required by the regulation for at least 1 year after the student graduates, transfers, or their enrolment is terminated. In practice, most schools keep them far longer, because the 1-year floor is a minimum, not a target.
• Part 61 instructors — 14 CFR §61.189. Each individual flight instructor must keep a record of the endorsements they have given (notably solo flight endorsements, with the student's name and the date of the endorsement) and retain those records for at least 3 years. This is the instructor's personal record, separate from the school's student file.
• Part 61 schools have no equivalent school-level retention floor to Part 141, which is exactly why many Part 61 operations adopt the 3-year instructor standard as their house policy for the whole organisation.

EASA (Europe)

• Approved Training Organisations (ATOs) — Part-ORA.GEN.200 and associated acceptable means of compliance (AMC). An ATO is expected to keep training records for a minimum of 5 years after the training is completed or the student leaves. Some national civil aviation authorities (CAAs) impose longer periods locally, so it is worth checking the specific requirement your oversight authority applies — but 5 years is the common EASA floor.
• Individual instructors under Part-FCL. The Part-FCL appendices also expect the instructor who delivered the training to keep their copy of the training records for at least 5 years after completion.

The practical takeaway: in both frameworks, the instructor and the organisation each have a recordkeeping duty, the timelines are measured from completion or departure (not from the first lesson), and EASA's 5-year floor runs noticeably longer than the FAA's 1-to-3-year floors.

Why the minimum is not the maximum

Notice that every figure above is a minimum. There are at least three good reasons to keep student records well beyond the regulatory floor:

• Insurance and liability claims. A former student who has an incident years later — or whose insurer comes looking — may need the training history. Litigation windows in aviation can extend well past the regulatory retention period.
• Licence verification and future training. A student who trained with you may return for an additional rating, an instructor upgrade, or a type-specific course. Their prior records are the starting point for the next syllabus, and reconstructing them from scratch is expensive.
• Your own quality assurance. You cannot analyse stage-check pass rates, drop-off points, or instructor effectiveness over time if you have shredded the evidence.

A sensible house policy for most schools is to retain the complete student file for the longer of the regulatory minimum or 7 years, which comfortably covers both the FAA floors and the EASA 5-year requirement and lines up with common liability windows. Some schools go further and retain indefinitely, since electronic records cost almost nothing to store.

Where electronic records change the math

The original reason for the "1 year and shred" habit was physical: paper is heavy, file cabinets take rent, and paper logbooks degrade. None of that applies to a well-structured electronic record.

When a student's logbook entries, endorsements, stage-check results, and progress notes live in a single dated, searchable system:

• Retention becomes nearly free. There is no shelf to fill and no move to survive.
• Findability stops being a project. A request for a 2022 endorsement is a search, not an afternoon in a back office.
• The instructor-vs-school split disappears. Because the record lives with the school and not in the instructor's personal notebook, a departing CFI no longer takes a chunk of your compliance history with them.

This is the real case for moving off paper, and it has nothing to do with flashy features. It is simply that the economics of retention flip: the cheapest, safest thing to do with an electronic training record is to keep it.

A practical retention checklist

If you are writing or revising your school's retention policy, make sure it answers each of these:

• Who owns the record — the school, the instructor, or both? (Both, in both FAA and EASA frameworks.)
• What is the trigger date — first lesson, completion, graduation, or departure? Use completion or departure, whichever the regulation specifies.
• What is your house minimum — the regulatory floor, or the longer of the regulatory floor and 7 years?
• What counts as the record — logbook entries, endorsements, stage-check and progress-test results, ground-school attendance, syllabus completion, and any correspondence about training deficiencies.
• How do you find an old record — if the answer involves a filing cabinet and a guess, the policy is not really a policy.
• What happens when an instructor leaves — their personal records go with them; the organisation's copy must stay with the organisation.

If your answer to any of those involves a shrug, that is the gap an inspector — or a Friday-afternoon email — will eventually find.

The bottom line

Record retention is the kind of task that is invisible until it is urgent, and by then it is too late to fix it. The rules on both sides of the Atlantic are reasonable and reasonably clear: keep your student training records for at least a year (Part 141), at least three years (Part 61 instructors), or at least five years (EASA ATOs and Part-FCL instructors), and measure from completion or departure.

The smart move is to keep them longer than the floor, in a system where "keep" and "find" are the same verb. Electronic records make that cheap. Paper makes it impossible. The policy you want is the one that still works the day a former student's insurer comes calling — not the one that looked tidy on the day you wrote it.

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