Microsoft Teams gives new meeting recordings and transcripts a default expiration time of 120 days. When that day arrives the file does not vanish — it moves to the recycle bin of wherever it was stored, and a second, shorter clock starts running.
The 120 days is a default your IT admin can change, and Teams has two other expiration numbers that have nothing to do with it. Merging them is how people end up surprised.
The expiration numbers, at a glance
| What | Value | Where it applies |
|---|---|---|
| Default expiration time | 120 days | Meeting recordings and transcripts |
| Minimum an admin can set | 1 day | Same policy setting |
| Maximum an admin can set | 99999 days | Same policy setting |
| Never expire | -1, PowerShell only | Same policy setting |
| Maximum default expiration for A1 users | 30 days | A1 licensing |
| Published recordings for Teams events | 30 days, extendable to 90 days | Event recordings, not meeting recordings |
Microsoft's admin documentation states the default in one sentence: "Meeting recordings and transcripts have a default expiration time of 120 days."
The range is spelled out just as plainly. "The expiration value is an integer for days that you can set as follows:" — "Minimum value: 1", "Maximum value: 99999", and "-1 (PowerShell only) so the recordings and transcripts never expire."
That last row is the one worth reading twice. The documentation labels -1 as PowerShell only, so an admin looking for a "never expire" choice in the admin center is looking in the wrong place. The cmdlet the docs give is:
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity <policy name> -NewMeetingRecordingExpirationDays <days>What "expired" actually means
Expiration in Teams is storage housekeeping, not deletion. Microsoft describes the purpose of the setting directly: "This setting allows you to manage storage by reducing the space that older recordings and transcripts use. OneDrive and SharePoint automatically monitor the expiration settings for all recordings and transcripts, moving them to the recycle bin once they reach their expiration date."
So the sequence is: the expiry date arrives, the file moves to the recycle bin of the location it was saved in, a recycle bin retention window starts, and only then is it really gone. On that last step the docs are blunt: "Once recordings are purged from recycle, they cannot be recovered."
Anyone who opens the old link in the meeting chat after that gets a banner reading "The recording is currently unavailable. Please check with organizer whether it's still being uploaded, has expired, or has been deleted."
How long is the recycle bin window? Two official pages frame it differently and both are useful. The end-user page says the owner of the recording "will get an email when it expires. At that point, they'll have up to 90 days to recover it from the recycle bin. Once recovered, the recording will no longer expire automatically." The admin page splits it by account type: for a Microsoft personal account, items in the recycle bin are "automatically deleted 30 days" after they are put there; for a work or school account they are "automatically deleted after 93 days", with the qualifier "unless the administrator has changed the setting."
That qualifier is why 93 is not a number to plan around. Treat 90 days as the practical recovery window and move sooner than that.
Three expiration numbers that are not the same number
The 120-day figure covers meeting recordings and transcripts. Two notes in the same documentation carve out different values, and both are easy to miss:
- "The maximum default expiration time for A1 users is 30 days." On A1, 30 days is the ceiling for the default — not merely a different starting value.
- "Published recordings for Teams events have an expiration of 30 days that's extendable to 90 days." This is about event recordings published for later viewing, a separate lane from the recording of an ordinary meeting.
If your organization runs on A1 or publishes event recordings, the 120 days you read about elsewhere is not your number.
The two things you cannot change after the fact
Policy changes are not retroactive. In Microsoft's words: "Any changes to this setting only affect newly created recordings and transcripts. You can't change the expiration time on existing meeting recordings and transcripts." Raising the tenant default today does nothing for the recording made last month.
Per-recording changes need edit permission. The end-user page says "Meeting recordings expire after a period of time set by your IT admin. Organizers can change recording expiration dates." The detail page adds the condition: "Your admin settings determine a recording's expiration," and "You must have edit permission for the recording to change the expiration date. Generally speaking, the meeting organizer and co-organizers are automatically granted edit permission." If you were an attendee rather than the organizer, changing the date is not yours to do — ask the organizer.
What to do with a recording you want to keep
The durable answer is to get a copy out of the expiring location. Download it, then store it where the policy does not reach.
Budget the space before you start. The only size estimate Microsoft publishes is in its storage planning guidance: "The size of a one-hour recording is 400 MB." It also notes that "Teams meeting recording files live in OneDrive and SharePoint and are included in your quota for those services," so archiving by copying into another OneDrive folder still spends the same quota.
That is where compression earns its keep. A recording is an MP4 file, and an hour of screen share plus talking heads compresses hard with very little visible loss — the picture is mostly static slides and slow motion, which is the easiest possible material for a codec.
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. Nothing is uploaded, which matters for an internal meeting recording more than for most files. For the rest of the toolbox, see all Clapr tools or the video compressor on its own page.
Gotchas worth knowing before the clock runs out
Watching a recording does not buy it more time. The documentation is explicit: "Watching the recording won't affect the expiration date." Plenty of people assume a recently viewed file is a protected file. It is not.
The expiry warning sticks around even after you remove the expiry. Again, verbatim: "The message indicating that your recording will expire will persist on the recording in the chat even if you remove the expiration date. But don't worry—if you've selected No expiration, it won't expire." If you cleared the date and the chat still warns you, the warning is stale, not wrong about your settings.
FAQ
How long do Microsoft Teams recordings last by default? 120 days. Microsoft's admin documentation says meeting recordings and transcripts have a default expiration time of 120 days, and an admin can set any value from 1 to 99999 days.
Can Teams recordings be set to never expire?
Yes, using the value -1, which the documentation marks as PowerShell only. Individually, someone with edit permission on a recording can choose No expiration for that file.
What happens to a Teams recording when it expires? It moves to the recycle bin of the location where it was saved, and the owner gets an email. Once recordings are purged from the recycle bin they cannot be recovered.
Does watching a recording extend its expiration date? No. Microsoft states that watching the recording won't affect the expiration date.
Why does my Teams recording expire in 30 days instead of 120? Two documented cases produce 30 days: the maximum default expiration time for A1 users is 30 days, and published recordings for Teams events expire after 30 days, extendable to 90. Your admin may also have set a shorter tenant default — check with them, or check the official documentation for your plan.
Is this the same as Zoom deleting free-account recordings? No, they are separate policies on separate platforms. See Zoom's 30-day rule for free accounts for that one.
Need the rest of the platform ceilings in one place? The limits library collects file size, duration, and retention rules per platform. Figures here are cited from Microsoft's Teams documentation as captured on 16 September 2026 — Microsoft revises these pages, so confirm against the current official documentation before relying on them.
