Reference · checked 18 August 2026 · not legal advice
Seven years, five working days, fifteen days, and 25 cents a page.
In short
How long do I keep client records, and what can a client demand?
Seven years from termination or from a minor's 18th birthday, with statutory deadlines and a capped fee for access
7 years, 5 working days, 15 days, 25 cents a pageFour numbers cover most of what a California therapist needs to know about records: how long you keep them, how fast a client may see them, how fast you must copy them, and the most you may charge for it. Each one is in a statute, each is linked below, and each is the kind of figure people misremember by one unit — which is usually the direction that gets somebody into trouble.
How longWhat a client can haveA summary insteadWhen you may declineClosing, and dyingSources
The retention rule
Seven years, and the clock starts when therapy ends — not when the file was opened.
A marriage and family therapist “shall retain a client’s or patient’s health service records for a minimum of seven years from the date therapy is terminated”. That is Business and Professions Code section 4980.49, and the identical rule sits in three other sections for three other license types — all four were added by the same bill, SB 578, in 2014.
| License | Section | Rule |
|---|---|---|
| Marriage and family therapist | 4980.49 | Seven years from termination |
| Clinical social worker | 4993 | Seven years from termination |
| Professional clinical counselor | 4999.75 | Seven years from termination |
| Educational psychologist | 4989.51 | Seven years from termination |
All four added by SB 578 (2014), and all four apply only where therapy terminated on or after 1 January 2015.
Two details do most of the damage when they are missed. For a client who was a minor, the seven years run from the date they reach 18, not from the date therapy ended — so a file closed when a client was nine has to survive until they are 25. And the rule applies to therapy terminated on or after 1 January 2015; anything that ended before that is outside these sections.
Records may be kept on paper or electronically. What that actually costs over seven years, and who is responsible for encryption and retrieval under each option, is worked through on the records-storage comparison.
What a client is entitled to
Inspection in five working days, copies in fifteen, and a fee cap.
On a written request, a patient may inspect their records “within five working days after receipt of the request”. Working days, not calendar days — the only place in this area where that distinction is drawn.
Copies must be transmitted “within 15 days after receiving the request”. Where the request relates to an application for a public benefit program the period is 30 days.
A provider may charge “twenty-five cents ($0.25) per page for paper copies or fifty cents ($0.50) per page for records that are copied from microfilm”, plus reasonable clerical costs. It is not a mechanism for recovering your time.
The request that is not a subpoena
A client asking for their own records and a lawyer demanding them are different events with different rules, and answering one with the procedure for the other is a common way to go wrong. If what arrived is court paper, start at the subpoena page instead — a subpoena is not a court order, and the Evidence Code makes claiming your client’s privilege mandatory rather than optional.
The option most people do not know they have
A provider may prepare a summary instead of handing over the record.
Health and Safety Code section 123130 lets a provider prepare a summary of the record rather than give access to the record itself. It is not a way of saying less: the section lists what the summary has to contain — chief complaints and pertinent history, findings from consultations and referrals, diagnosis where determined, treatment plan and regimen including medications, progress, prognosis, and the reports and results on file.
The deadline is tighter than the one for copies. The summary must be made available within 10 working days of the request. If the record is extraordinarily long, or the patient was discharged within the last ten days, the provider tells the patient and gives a completion date — but “in no case shall more than 30 days elapse between the request by the patient and the delivery of the summary”.
For a therapy file this is often the humane answer and occasionally the wrong one. It is a clinical decision with a statutory shape, and it is worth making it deliberately rather than by default in either direction.
The mental health exception
You may decline — and the moment you do, three duties attach.
Section 123115 lets a provider decline to permit inspection or copying of mental health records where there is “a substantial risk of significant adverse or detrimental consequences” to the patient. That is a real threshold and a high one, and it is not a general discretion to keep a file back because releasing it would be uncomfortable.
Using it obliges you to do all three of these
- Write it down. Make a written record noting the date of the request and explaining the refusal, including the specific adverse or detrimental consequences you anticipate.
- Tell the patient that you have refused, and tell them they may nominate someone to receive the records on their behalf.
- Give the records to the professional they nominate. The patient may designate in writing a licensed physician and surgeon, psychologist, marriage and family therapist or other qualified professional, and that person must be permitted to inspect or receive copies. You also note in the record whether the request was made under that provision.
So the exception is not a door that closes. It redirects the record to a clinician who can put it in context, which is a different thing from withholding it, and the paperwork it creates is the point rather than a formality — it is what makes the decision reviewable later.
What the statute does not say
Nothing in the retention sections says who holds the records if you die.
Section 4980.49 has two subdivisions. One sets seven years; the other limits it to therapy terminated on or after 1 January 2015. There is no third subdivision about death, retirement, incapacity or the closing of a practice, and the same is true of the three parallel sections. That silence is the finding. It is stated here as silence rather than filled with a rule, because a confident-sounding invented answer is worse than none on a question this consequential.
What does survive is the obligation itself. The records still have to exist for seven years after therapy ended — or until a child client is 25 — and somebody has to be able to answer a client asking for them within the periods above. If a practice closes or a therapist dies without an arrangement in place, those duties do not disappear; they simply have nobody attached to them. Whatever arrangement answers that is one to make in advance and in writing, and it is worth asking your own liability carrier what its policy does and does not do here, since the policies differ on what happens at death, disability or retirement.
One thing the record must never become
Whatever the file says, it says. This site’s discipline library carries a matter in which a therapist told a state investigator that subpoenaed records had been shredded, and in which a client’s own signed form was later shown to have been altered. Retention is the cheap half of this subject. The case →
Where every figure came from
Sources.
How long, by license type
- Business and Professions Code section 4980.49 - marriage and family therapists
- The same section, as read for this page
- Section 4993 - clinical social workers
- Section 4999.75 - professional clinical counselors
- Section 4989.51 - educational psychologists
- SB 578 (2014) as enrolled - the bill that added all four, and the source for the 1 January 2015 boundary
What a client can have, and how fast
- Health and Safety Code section 123110 - inspection in five working days, copies in fifteen, and the 25-cent and 50-cent page fees
- The same section, as read for this page
- Section 123130 - the summary, what it must contain, and the 10 and 30 day limits
- The same section, as read for this page
- Section 123115 - the mental health exception and the duties that come with it
- The same section, as read for this page
Carried from pages on this site
- What a subpoena is, and why it is not a request for records
- What seven years of storage costs, and who carries the security duty under each option
- Liability insurance compared - including what happens at death, disability or retirement
- The discipline case in which subpoenaed records had been shredded
- What you already have to tell clients in writing
- The telehealth standard of practice
leginfo blocks automated reading, so each section was read at the mirror linked beside it, and leginfo is linked as the place to read the section itself. Everything above was checked on 18 August 2026 and statutes change. Nothing here is legal advice: whether a particular record may be withheld, summarized or released turns on the client, the request and the clinical picture, and none of those is visible from a web page. This site earns nothing from any link here.
