The short answer: keep them at least six years, and seven is the safe habit. Not because any single law says "proof of delivery: six years" — none does — but because a POD sits at the junction of three sets of rules that each independently point to the same number.
1. HMRC record-keeping. A limited company must keep the records that support its tax return — and a POD is the underlying evidence for the invoice it triggered — for six years from the end of the financial year they relate to. If HMRC opens an enquiry into a return, the delivery paperwork behind your revenue is exactly the kind of record they can ask for.
2. VAT. VAT-registered businesses must keep their business records — invoices and the documents that support them — for six years as well. Same number, separate obligation.
3. Contract disputes. Under the Limitation Act 1980, a claim for breach of contract in England and Wales can be brought up to six years after the breach. If a customer alleges in year five that a delivery never arrived, or arrived short, the signed POD is your defence — and if you binned it in year three, you're defending with an invoice and a memory. (In Scotland the general prescription period is five years; the six-year tax rules still apply UK-wide.)
One nuance for international work: claims under CMR run on much shorter limitation periods — generally one year from delivery, three in cases of wilful misconduct. That governs how quickly claims must be raised, not how long you keep documents; the tax rules above still set your retention floor.
"Six years from the end of the financial year" quietly stretches toward seven in practice: a POD from the first month of your financial year needs keeping for the rest of that year plus six more. Rather than calculating retention per document, most firms — and most record-keeping guidance — round up to a flat seven years and stop thinking about it. That's the logic behind HaulBot's 7-year archive: it covers the longest tail of the six-year rules without anyone doing date arithmetic.
Retention that satisfies an auditor and retention that wins a dispute are different standards. A banker's box in the depot loft technically "keeps" six years of PODs. But the test arrives as: a customer disputes a specific delivery from 26 months ago — produce the signed note, today. Paper fails that test not by being absent but by being unfindable inside the hour that matters, and every transport office knows the afternoon-long dig that follows.
Digital retention flips the test: search by PO number, date or customer, and the POD — photo, signature, GPS stamp and all — is on screen in seconds, with the dispute usually over the same day. It also survives the failure modes paper doesn't: the coffee spill, the cab clear-out, the depot move where three boxes didn't make it.
Message a photo of any delivery note to HaulBot on WhatsApp. It comes back read and validated in under a minute — and everything you send during the trial is stored, GPS-stamped and searchable, exactly as it would be for the next seven years. No card, no setup, no app.