How Long US Nurses Must Keep CE Records: Four to Six Years, or Forever

A US nurse who keeps continuing education certificates for four years is compliant in three large states and short in two others. One state requires certain records indefinitely. Three publish no period at all. And one state runs two different clocks on the same licence.

The published periods

Ohio and Texas are the longest at six years. Ohio's rule is flat: a licensee "must keep proof of completion of continuing education for six years". Texas expresses it two ways in the same breath — records must be kept "for a minimum of three consecutive licensing periods or six years" — which amounts to the same span given a two-year period, but the licensing-period framing is the one that governs.

Pennsylvania requires five years: a registered nurse "shall retain documentation of the registered nurse's completion of continuing education for at least 5 years".

California, Georgia, Michigan and New York sit at four. California tells licensees to keep certificates or grade slips for four years in the event of an audit. Georgia requires four years from the renewal date. Michigan requires documentation for four years after the date of applying for renewal. New York's four-year duty attaches to the infection control attestation, and the Education Department is explicit that nothing should be sent in: "do not send your certificate of completion or a copy of the document to the Education Department."

Texas keeps one record type forever

Buried in the Texas scheme is an obligation with no counterpart elsewhere in these ten states. Records relating to the Forensic Evidence Collection requirement "must be kept indefinitely" — not for six years, not for three licensing periods, but permanently.

A nurse applying a single retention rule across their whole file will eventually discard something they were required to keep. The practical answer is to hold forensic evidence collection documentation separately from the general CE file, because it is the one category where the ordinary purge is wrong.

Michigan runs two clocks on one licence

Michigan's general CE retention is four years. But its implicit bias training carries its own rule: a licensee "shall retain documentation of meeting the requirements of this rule for a period of 6 years after the date of applying for licensure, registration, or renewal".

So the same nurse, in the same cycle, owes four years on most of their record and six years on the implicit bias component — and the implicit bias hours also count toward the twenty-five, so they sit inside the same tally they are retained differently from.

This is a familiar pattern rather than an oddity. Irish care providers face seven-year and four-year statutory clocks on the same category of staff training document depending on the centre type, as set out in our guide to HIQA staff training records and the two statutory periods. Anyone who tells a Michigan nurse or an Irish provider that "the rules don't specify a period" is wrong twice over.

Three states state nothing, and that is not permission

Florida, Illinois and North Carolina publish no retention period for licensees.

In Florida there is no retention rule in the relevant chapter and none on the Board's renewal or CE pages; compliance runs through an electronic tracking system instead. Illinois imposes a five-year retention duty on CE sponsors but states no period for licensees, telling them only that they are responsible for keeping records and must be prepared to produce them on request. North Carolina's guidance is simply to keep documentation and send it in only if audited.

An absent rule is not an exemption. In all three the nurse still has to produce evidence when asked, which makes the effective retention period "however long the board might reasonably look back" — and since Florida and Illinois both run two-year cycles with audit powers, planning for anything less than the length of a cycle plus an audit window is a gamble.

The distinction between a stated absence and no statement at all matters here too. Florida and Illinois have been checked and genuinely publish nothing; North Carolina's position comes from the documents that could be read, as its detailed rules are protected against automated access. The three are not equally established.

What a compliant record has to contain, not just how long it is kept

Duration is only half the obligation, and two states specify contents in a way that defeats retrospective reconstruction.

Ohio prescribes exactly what a provider's certificate must contain, including the OBN approver number and, where applicable, the number of category A hours. A certificate lacking those elements may not evidence the hour even if the hour was completed. Georgia's logbook equivalent requires each activity to be recorded as clinically or scientifically based, or not — a classification that cannot be reliably rebuilt three years later.

So the useful discipline is to capture the classification and the approver details at the point of completion, not at the point of audit.

How this compares internationally

A four-to-six-year range with three silences is a narrower spread than the equivalent picture in the UK, where periods run from three years by rule to a regulator that explicitly specifies none at all, as set out in our comparison of CPD record retention periods across UK regulators. The difference is that US states are more likely to publish a number and more likely to pair it with prescribed record contents.

Which topics each state mandates, and which hours those records have to evidence, is covered in our guide to US nurse CE mandated topics by state.

Every period above was read at the state board's own site or the state administrative code in early November 2026. Retention rules are amended, and the three silent states could publish one at any time, so confirm before relying on a figure — Ohio's rule is published in the Ohio Administrative Code at rule 4723-14-06.