Ask ten driving school owners and you'll get three answers: "seven years," "I keep everything, you never know," and "honestly, I'm not sure."
The third is the most honest. The second is the most common — and it's the one that exposes you most.
Here's the rule, what it actually means day to day, and a calculation you can run on your own files right now.
The short rule
Seven years after the student's service contract ends.
That's the period you must be able to cover. A file newer than that has to stay accessible, presentable and verifiable.
But stopping there misses half the problem.
Two obligations pulling in opposite directions
Record retention isn't governed by one rule. It sits between two requirements that push opposite ways.
On one side, the SAAQ. A recognized school must be able to demonstrate, long after a student has moved on, that the training happened as required. That's exactly what makes an inspection possible. Without the file you have no way to prove anything — and during an inspection, absence of evidence is treated as absence of compliance.
On the other, Law 25. Québec's personal information protection statute sets the opposite principle: you don't keep personal information longer than necessary for the purpose it was collected for.
Both are true at once. They don't contradict each other — they define a window.
Before seven years, you must keep it. After seven years, keeping it becomes a risk rather than a precaution.
It's that second edge almost nobody enforces. The natural instinct is to archive indefinitely, because deleting feels dangerous. But a file you no longer have an obligation or a reason to hold is still fully personal information: to protect, to report in a confidentiality incident, to locate and delete if a former student asks.
Put another way, every expired file you keep "just in case" is a small compliance debt that earns you nothing.
The starting point: contract end, not last lesson
This is the subtlety that derails most calculations.
The clock doesn't start at registration. It doesn't start at the last lesson taken. It starts when the service contract ends.
The distinction sounds theoretical until you think about the most common case in any driving school: the student who quits.
Someone enrols, completes phase 1, gets their learner's licence, does three outings — then vanishes. They don't come back, don't reply, don't ask for a refund. Two years later their file is still sitting there.
Which date do you use? Not the last outing. The date the contract ends by its own terms.
And that surfaces a problem far more common than people expect: many files have no recorded contract end date at all. Not through negligence, but because nobody ever needed to write it down anywhere.
A file with no contract end date sits in a permanently undetermined state. You can't compute its deadline, so you can never know whether it's deletable. It will stay there indefinitely — by default rather than by decision.
If you take one action from this article: check how many of your archived files have a contract end date. It's the gap that blocks every other calculation.
Calculate your deadline
Enter a student's contract end date to get their retention deadline and current status.
The calculation runs entirely in your browser. The date you enter is never sent anywhere.
The calculation reproduces exactly the logic used inside PESR Control Center: seven years from contract end, with a warning when the deadline falls within the next twelve months.
"Keeping" doesn't mean "storing the documents"
Here's the distinction that changes the most, and it's misunderstood almost everywhere.
What an inspection sets out to establish is that the training happened properly: that the contract existed, that the learner's licence was valid at the right time, that required consents were obtained, that the sessions took place.
That does not mean you — or your software — must hold a digital copy of every document.
There are two ways to satisfy the same requirement:
The vault. You scan and store everything: signed contracts, licences, parental consents, proof of payment. Everything is at hand. You have also built, without intending to, a target: a single breach exposes hundreds of pieces of identity documentation belonging to minors.
The evidence register. For each required proof you record: whether it exists, where it's kept ("cabinet A, file 2026-014"), who verified it and when. The original document stays with you, in the cabinet or system you already use.
Both answer the inspector. Only one creates a major breach risk.
The logic fits in a sentence: what you don't store can't leak. And under Law 25, the strongest way to protect personal information remains not holding it at all.
The backup trap
A point almost always overlooked, including by software that otherwise does things well.
You delete a former student's file today, at their request. It disappears from your system. Except your encrypted backups from the last thirty days still contain it.
So the data still exists — until those backups age out and are destroyed by rotation.
That isn't a failure, provided you know it and say so. An honest answer to a deletion request looks like this:
Your data was deleted from our live system on [date]. It will remain in our encrypted backups until [date + backup retention period], after which it will be permanently gone.
What would be a failure is answering "it's deleted" when that's only half true.
What you can do this week
Three concrete actions, in order of usefulness:
- Count your archived files with no contract end date. That's your blind spot. While it exists, no retention policy can function.
- Identify files past seven years. Those are the ones where retention no longer protects you — it exposes you. Decide what happens to them, and record the decision.
- Look at what you actually store. Every scanned document you hold without an obligation is a risk you're carrying for free.
In short
- Seven years, from the end of the service contract, never the last lesson.
- A file with no contract end date is incalculable — that's the first gap to close.
- Past seven years, keeping becomes exposure, not safety.
- An evidence register satisfies an inspection as well as a document vault, and leaks far less.
- Backups outlive deletion: say so rather than ignore it.
This explains the general logic as we encoded it in our own product. For your specific situation — very old files, contracts with no end date, students resuming after abandoning — confirm with the SAAQ or a qualified advisor.