The transparency notice retention period under EU Regulation 2024/900 is five years from the end of the advertisement's publication period. Article 12 PAR establishes this requirement — and it applies to the notice itself, its revision history, and supporting documentation. Deleting a notice before the retention period expires is itself a compliance violation.
What Art. 12 Requires
Article 12 sets out the retention obligations in straightforward terms. Every transparency notice created under Art. 9 must remain publicly accessible for a minimum of five years after the advertisement ceases to be published. During this period, the notice must be available in its published form, with all mandatory fields intact.
The retention obligation applies to:
- The transparency notice — All Art. 9 fields as they appeared at the time of publication
- The revision history — Every amendment made to the notice after initial publication, with timestamps
- Supporting documentation — Records that substantiate the information in the notice, which must be retained for seven years
The distinction between five and seven years is important. The notice itself must be publicly accessible for five years. The underlying documentation — contracts, invoices, targeting reports, and similar records — must be retained for seven years, though this documentation does not need to be publicly accessible.
Why Five Years?
The retention period serves multiple purposes. It allows citizens to review past political advertising long after a campaign has ended, which is important for democratic accountability. It gives regulators a window to investigate potential infringements, even if complaints or suspicions arise years after the fact. And it creates a historical record of political advertising activity that researchers and journalists can use to study trends and patterns.
Five years aligns with the maximum period between European Parliament elections, ensuring that the transparency record for one election cycle remains available through the next.
What Must Be Preserved
The Published Notice
The complete notice as it appeared when first published: sponsor identity, payer information, payment amount, ad description, publication period, territory, language, targeting criteria, distribution method, publisher details, and data controller information. Every Art. 9 field, in its original form.
Revision History
If any field is updated after publication — for example, the publication period is extended, or the payment amount is corrected — both the original value and the updated value must be preserved, along with the date of the change. This creates an unbroken chain of evidence showing what was disclosed and when.
The revision history is particularly important for financial fields. If a sponsor initially reports a payment of EUR 5,000 and later corrects it to EUR 15,000, both figures and the date of correction must be retained. Regulators can then assess whether the initial disclosure was a good-faith estimate or a deliberate understatement.
Supporting Documentation
The seven-year documentation requirement covers records that are not part of the public notice but that substantiate it. This includes:
- Contracts between the sponsor and the publisher
- Invoices and proof of payment
- Targeting configuration exports from ad platforms
- Internal approval records
- Correspondence related to the ad placement
These documents do not need to be published, but they must be available for production to competent authorities upon request.
What Happens If You Delete Early
Deleting a transparency notice before the five-year retention period expires constitutes an independent infringement of the regulation. This is true even if the original notice was complete and accurate at the time of publication. The deletion itself violates Art. 12, and penalties under Art. 29 apply.
In practice, early deletion can happen for several reasons:
- Organisational changes — A party restructures or a campaign entity dissolves, and its records are not properly transferred.
- Platform migration — An organisation switches compliance tools and fails to migrate historical notices.
- Accidental deletion — A team member deletes notices, mistakenly believing they are no longer needed after the campaign ends.
Each of these scenarios is avoidable with proper processes, but they underscore why the choice of compliance platform matters.
Self-Hosting vs. Platform Hosting
Some organisations consider building their own transparency notice infrastructure — a web page or database that stores notices and makes them accessible. While this is technically permissible, it creates a significant operational burden over the five-year retention period.
The Self-Hosting Challenge
You must ensure that:
- The hosting infrastructure remains operational for five years — including domain registration, server maintenance, SSL certificates, and uptime monitoring
- Notices remain accessible at their original URLs (QR codes printed on physical materials point to these URLs and cannot be updated after distribution)
- Revision history is captured and stored for every amendment
- Supporting documentation is archived for seven years
- The infrastructure survives staff turnover, budget changes, and organisational restructuring
For a party or campaign that may not exist in its current form five years from now, these are non-trivial commitments.
The Platform Hosting Solution
A dedicated platform like Taurus assumes the retention obligation on behalf of the sponsor. Notices are hosted on infrastructure designed for long-term availability. URLs are permanent. Revision history is captured automatically. The five-year clock is tracked per notice, and nothing is deleted before the period expires.
This approach decouples compliance from the sponsor's own IT infrastructure and organisational continuity. Even if a campaign entity dissolves, the notices remain accessible.
Practical Steps for Compliance Teams
If you are responsible for political advertising compliance within an organisation, the retention requirement has immediate implications:
- Choose your compliance platform now — Do not store notices in systems that may not be available in five years.
- Establish documentation policies — Ensure that contracts, invoices, and targeting exports are systematically archived alongside each notice.
- Assign retention responsibility — Designate a person or role responsible for ensuring that notices are not deleted and that documentation is preserved.
- Plan for organisational change — If your entity may restructure or dissolve, establish procedures for transferring compliance records to a successor.
Secure Your Compliance Record
The retention requirement is not something you address at the end of a campaign — it is a commitment you make at the beginning. Explore how Taurus handles long-term notice retention automatically, so you can focus on your campaign today and know that your compliance record will be intact five years from now.