Slack caps audio and video clips at five minutes. Slack's help page for the feature opens with it: "Share audio and video clips up to five minutes long in Slack to communicate easily with your team, regardless of their time zone or location. Anyone in a channel or direct message (DM) can play clips and reply in thread with a clip of their own."
Five minutes is the whole answer, and it does not vary by plan. But on a free workspace it is the wrong thing to optimise for, because the clip you record today has a shelf life measured in months, not minutes.
The limits, at a glance
| Item | Slack's documented value |
|---|---|
| Clip length | "up to five minutes long" |
| Plans with clips | "Available on all plans" |
| Who can record and share | "All members and guests" |
| Clip retention | "Clips follow the same retention policy as other files in Slack." |
| Free workspace: visible and searchable window | "the last 90 days" |
| Free workspace: permanent deletion threshold | "more than one year old" |
| Regular file upload size cap | "You can add files up to 1GB in size." |
| Duration cap for a regular video file upload | Not stated in Slack's documentation |
Every cell above is quoted from Slack's own help centre. The last row is the one to read twice: Slack publishes a duration limit for clips, and none at all for ordinary video files you attach to a message.
Five minutes is a clip limit, not a Slack video limit
A clip is what you record inside Slack, and that is what the five-minute cap governs. A file upload is a video you already have on disk, attached to a message like any other file. For that path Slack states one number: "You can add files up to 1GB in size."
So a twelve-minute screen recording is not blocked by the five-minute rule. It simply cannot be a clip. Attach it as a file and the only documented ceiling it has to clear is size, not length — which is why sending a long video in Slack is a different problem from recording a clip.
One caveat. Slack's clip documentation does list "Upload an existing video as a clip." as an option, but that page does not state which containers or codecs that path accepts, or whether a size or length threshold applies to it. Treat it as undocumented territory rather than as a way to turn a long recording into a clip.
Clips are files, and on a free plan files expire
Slack's note on the clips page is easy to skim past: "Clips follow the same retention policy as other files in Slack." That sentence pulls clips into the free-workspace rules, and Slack's usage-limits page names them explicitly:
"You can view and search messages and files from the last 90 days. Files include things like clips, PDFs, documents, images, screenshots, and audio and video files. When your workspace reaches the visibility limit, Slack will start hiding messages and files older than 90 days to make room for new ones. Messages and files more than one year old will be permanently deleted."
Two different mechanisms live in that paragraph:
- 90 days — hidden, once the workspace reaches its visibility limit. The trigger is conditional, not a timer: hiding starts "When your workspace reaches the visibility limit," and what it hides is content older than 90 days. The clip is then out of view and out of search, but not gone. Slack's page on the free-plan history change puts a number on what is still there: "you'll have full access to the past 90 days of message and file history, and the remaining 275 days will become available should you upgrade to a paid plan."
- One year — deleted. Slack's plan comparison footnote states it flatly: "Messages and files on the Free plan will only be stored for one year. Any content in your workspace more than a year old will be permanently deleted." Slack adds that starting "August 26, 2024," data older than one year "may be deleted on a rolling basis" from free-plan workspaces. And on recovery, the FAQ is a single sentence: "It will not be possible to restore messages and files once deletion occurs."
So on a free workspace, "how long can a Slack clip be" has two answers. Five minutes long. One year alive.
The setting that turns 90 days into permanent
There is a way to lose a clip well before the one-year mark, and it is a workspace setting. From Slack's data retention section:
"Workspace Owners can use basic data retention settings: either keep all messages and files for one year, or delete them after 90 days. If you choose to delete messages and files after 90 days, this will automatically delete any that become hidden by the message and file limit."
Read that against the 275-days-restored promise above. If your Workspace Owner picked "delete them after 90 days," then hitting the visibility limit does not hide your clips — it deletes them, and upgrading later restores nothing. Worth confirming before you rely on Slack as the place a clip lives.
What to do when five minutes is not enough
In order of how well they actually work:
- Record two clips instead of one. Slack assumes short-form: anyone in the channel or DM can "reply in thread with a clip of their own," so a threaded pair reads naturally. Splitting is the only approach that keeps it a clip.
- Attach it as a regular file. Length stops being a documented constraint; size takes over at 1GB.
- Keep the master copy somewhere you control. Given the one-year deletion, treat Slack as distribution, not storage.
For the second option, shrink the file first. Two documented behaviours make a smaller file the safer bet: Slack's developer docs describe a file_upload_size_restricted error meaning "The size of provided file is too large, as the team has restricted uploads of large files" — so a workspace can be stricter than 1GB — and a storage_limit_reached error that "occurs when free teams have uploaded 5GB of files." That 5GB figure comes from the developer error-code reference rather than a current user-facing help page, so treat it as context for why an upload might fail, not as a published storage allowance.
Try it right here
Runs in your browser. Your file is not uploaded anywhere.
This runs entirely in your browser tab — the file is read from disk, re-encoded locally, and handed back, with nothing uploaded to a server. If your source came off a Mac or iPhone as a QuickTime file, MOV to MP4 converts the container the same way, and all Clapr tools covers the rest.
Slack-specific gotchas
- Do not zip a long recording for a Slack Connect channel. Slack blocks a specific list of extensions in Slack Connect channels and DMs, and
.7z,.gzand.tarare on it while.mp4is not. Compressing an archive around your video turns a file that would have gone through into one that cannot. This list applies to Slack Connect only, not to your internal channels. - You cannot save a clip from your phone. Slack states it plainly: "On your mobile device, you can only download image files." If you want a local copy of a clip before the retention clock runs out, do it from desktop.
- Preview thresholds are documented for images and Office files, not video. Slack publishes numbers for inline image previews and for Office files over 50 MB, and nothing equivalent for video — so there is no official threshold to check a non-previewing video against.
- Deleting is one at a time. Per Slack: "Files must be deleted individually, but we offer API methods to help you manage files in your workspace or Enterprise organization."
FAQ
How long can a Slack clip be? Five minutes. Slack's clips page says you can "Share audio and video clips up to five minutes long in Slack," and lists the feature as "Available on all plans."
Does the clip length limit go up on a paid plan? No — Slack documents clips as "Available on all plans" with the same five-minute wording, and publishes no per-plan clip length table. What the plan does change is how long the clip survives afterwards.
Is there a length limit for video files uploaded to Slack? Slack's documentation does not state one. The five minutes applies to clips. For a video attached as a file, the documented limit is size: "You can add files up to 1GB in size." Individual workspaces can restrict uploads further, so check with an admin if a smaller file is refused.
Do Slack clips get deleted? On a free workspace, yes. Clips "follow the same retention policy as other files in Slack," which means they start being hidden once the workspace reaches its visibility limit and, per Slack, "Messages and files more than one year old will be permanently deleted." Slack also says restoration after deletion is not possible.
My old clip disappeared — can I get it back by upgrading? It depends which mechanism caught it. Content hidden by the message and file visibility limit comes back on upgrade — Slack says "the remaining 275 days will become available should you upgrade to a paid plan." Content deleted at the one-year mark does not, and neither does anything removed by a Workspace Owner's "delete them after 90 days" retention setting.
Why can't I download a clip on my phone? Because Slack limits mobile downloads to images: "On your mobile device, you can only download image files." Use the desktop app to save a video clip.
Can I turn a longer video into a clip by uploading it? Slack lists "Upload an existing video as a clip." as an option, but documents no size, length or format requirements for that path. Check the official documentation before planning around it.
Related limits worth knowing before you send a recording anywhere: Discord's upload cap and what it actually measures, and the rest of the platform limits we have checked.
Figures quoted from Slack's help centre articles on adding files, recording clips and free-workspace usage limits, plus Slack's developer documentation, checked 16 September 2026. Verify against the official pages before relying on them.
