Data Retention Periods of Major Cell Service Providers

United States Department of Justice seal

Updated August 11, 2026: New research added; the leaked chart remains the baseline.

The leaked DOJ chart

This is the chart the article originally published in 2011. The ACLU obtained the Department of Justice’s August 2010 guide through a public-records request. It was prepared for law enforcement and gave specific retention periods across carriers and record types.

For this update, we reviewed current carrier notices and other public material. We found no newer public source comprehensive and specific enough to replace the ACLU release.

Since the original post, the surveillance apparatus available to state agencies has grown alongside the volume of data generated by phones. Without evidence of shorter retention, we think it is safe to treat the leaked figures as a baseline—not to assume the underlying practices suddenly became less restrictive. That does not make every 2010 number a verified 2026 schedule; it means carriers and government have not published a sufficiently detailed replacement.

DOJ retention chart released by the ACLU, August 2010

Record	Verizon	T-Mobile	AT&T / Cingular	Sprint	Nextel	Virgin Mobile
Subscriber information	Postpaid: 3–5 years	5 years	Depends on length of service	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Call detail records	1 rolling year	Prepaid: 2 years; postpaid: 5 years	5–7 years	18–24 months	18–24 months	2 years
Cell towers used by phone	1 rolling year	Over 1 year	From July 2008	18–24 months	18–24 months	Retained by Sprint
Text-message detail	1 rolling year	Prepaid: 2 years; postpaid: 5 years	Postpaid: 5–7 years	18 months	18 months	60–90 days
Text-message content	3–5 days	Not retained	Not retained	Not retained	Not retained	90 days with search warrant
Pictures	If uploaded to website	Until deleted	Not retained	Unknown	Unknown	Not retained
IP session information	1 rolling year	Not retained	Non-public IP retained 72 hours	60 days	60 days	Not retained
IP destination information	90 days	Not retained	Non-public IP retained 72 hours	60 days	60 days	Not retained
Bill copies	3–5 years	Not retained	5–7 years	7 years	7 years	Unknown
Payment history	3–5 years	5 years	Depends on length of service	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unknown
Store-surveillance videos	30 days	2 weeks	1–2 months	Depends	Depends	Unknown
Service applications	3–5 years	Not retained	Not retained	Depends	Depends	Not retained

Download the original DOJ chart as a PDF.

Sprint, Nextel, and Virgin Mobile no longer exist as the independent national carriers represented here, and other ownership and network arrangements have changed. The table is the last detailed cross-carrier baseline we could verify, not a claim that every cell still describes a current system exactly.

The “official narrative” in 2026

Current public-facing policies mostly say records are retained for as long as the provider considers necessary for service, business, tax, security, or legal purposes. They rarely publish the concrete, record-by-record periods shown in the leaked chart. “No fixed schedule” below means the public notice does not provide one; it does not mean the provider keeps no records.

Carrier or brand	What its current public notice says
AT&T	No fixed schedule. Retention depends on the type of information, how long it is needed to operate the business or provide service, and contractual or legal obligations.
Cricket Wireless	No fixed network-record schedule. Cricket uses the same kind of business, tax, and legal criteria. Its notice separately gives a defined limit for biometric information, illustrating that different data classes can have different rules.
Verizon	No fixed schedule. Verizon says sensitive and personally identifiable records are retained only as long as reasonably necessary for business, accounting, tax, or legal purposes.
Visible	No fixed schedule. Visible says it keeps information only as long as reasonably necessary for business, accounting, tax, or legal purposes.
TracFone brands — Straight Talk, Total Wireless, Simple Mobile, SafeLink, Walmart Family Mobile	No current per-record timetable found. The TracFone privacy center provides access, correction, deletion, and advertising-choice requests, including requests for former-customer service history. These brands are part of Verizon’s value portfolio.
T-Mobile and Metro	No fixed schedule. T-Mobile considers the amount, nature, sensitivity, purpose, risk of harm, and applicable legal, accounting, and reporting requirements.
Mint Mobile and Ultra Mobile	No fixed schedule. Mint’s notice includes phone-call records among the identifiers it may collect and says retention lasts only as long as needed for stated business purposes unless law permits or requires longer.
Boost Mobile	No fixed schedule. Boost says it may collect call and data-use history, location, websites visited, and apps used, and keeps personal information as needed for service, legal or tax requirements, fraud prevention, and other business purposes.
Xfinity Mobile and NOW Mobile	No fixed schedule. Xfinity says it keeps identifying information while a person subscribes and may retain it afterward for business and legal needs. Its policy identifies call history, IP addresses, mobile geolocation, DNS searches, and network traffic among collected information.
Spectrum Mobile	No fixed schedule. Spectrum’s policy describes account, device, network-traffic, service-use, and location information, but does not publish a comprehensive mobile-record timetable.
Google Fi Wireless	No Fi-specific fixed schedule. Fi says it maintains information about calls, texts, data use, connectivity, device performance, and location. The Google Privacy Policy supplies the broader retention framework.
Consumer Cellular	No fixed schedule. Its policy says categories are retained for periods based on business needs, legal requirements, and regulatory obligations unless a specific period applies.
US Mobile	No fixed schedule. US Mobile identifies account details, payment records, call and data-use logs, and device identifiers, and says retention may continue for security, business, tax, anti-fraud, dispute, and legal purposes.

What the official language leaves unanswered

Retention can differ between systems inside the same company. Public notices leave the exact periods for several important record types unanswered:

Subscriber and account records: name, address, account identifiers, activation history, plan, SIM or eSIM identifiers, and device identifiers.
Billing and payment records: invoices, taxes, payment history, installment information, and collections records.
Call and message metadata: the numbers involved, time, duration, routing, and delivery information. Metadata is different from the content of a call or message.
Location and cell-site records: information created when a device connects to towers, Wi-Fi systems, location services, or emergency services.
IP and data-session records: assigned addresses, connection times, data use, network diagnostics, and related session information.
Website and application activity: carrier websites, account apps, advertising identifiers, cookies, support chats, and customer-service recordings.
Communication content: voicemail, cloud-stored messages, or other content held by a provider. Whether content exists depends on the service and technology; it should not be inferred from a metadata-retention statement.

A retail mobile brand can also operate on another company’s network. The retail provider may hold account, billing, application, and support data while a network supplier processes network and location records. A prepaid or low-cost brand is not necessarily a single-data-holder arrangement.

The federal preservation rule

Under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(f), a provider that receives a qualifying government request must preserve records already in its possession for 90 days. A renewed request can extend that for another 90 days.

That rule does not create a universal 180-day retention schedule. It preserves material the provider already has after a request; it does not reveal how long the provider normally keeps each record.

Bottom line

The leaked DOJ chart is old but specific. Current carrier notices are newer but vague. Until carriers or government publish a comprehensive replacement, the honest presentation is to show both: the documented baseline and today’s official narrative.