You have heard throughout your professional life that you have to keep your pay slips for life but now and then, from time to time, chance or bad luck happens and you realize that you have lost some of them. Don’t panic. The first instinct is to turn to your former employers. Indeed, according to the Labor Code, they are required to keep a duplicate of the bulletins for at least five years. “ The CNIL repository on data retention advises keeping employee pay slips for at least six years in connection with tax legislation.specifies Elodie Puiroux, Legal Monitoring and DSN manager at ADP. The Commercial Code requires archiving of up to ten years for accounting documents “.
With dematerialization, companies are now required to keep them for at least 50 years or until the employee reaches the age of 75. “ Which implies that if the platform that the employer was using disappears or loses datashe emphasizes. It is up to the employer to upgrade its employees’ safes to respect this archiving period, including for an employee who is no longer there. “. Moreover, according to the expert, the electronic safe remains the most secure way to keep pay slips.
Career record and URSSAF
You can also turn to your pension fund which already has a certain amount of information via the career record : if the periods concerned appear, it is because the contributions have been declared. “ You don’t have to wait until you’re retired to check this kind of information.alerts Elodie Puiroux. This is the advantage of this dematerialization: being able to anticipate the validation of these periods on existing portals “. Like the CPApersonal activity account, bringing together the CPF, Personal training account, the C2P, Professional prevention account and the CEC, Citizen engagement account.
It is also possible to turn to the URSSAF which receives the nominative social declarations (DSN), a employment statement in other words, companies that tell them the amounts paid, periods of employment and social security contributions. It’s up to you to tell them your contact details, social security number, the name of your employer and the period concerned.
Prove your salary
“ Pension organizations also accept employment certificates and employment contracts which prove employment over a given periodadds the expert. These documents must also be kept by employees “. Without forgetting the bank account statements – kept for 10 years by the establishments – which are proof of payment which can be accepted by certain organizations in addition to other papers.


