How Long Does Turnitin Keep Your Paper? Retention, Deletion and What Your School Decides

Turnitin has no single official retention period. How long your paper and its Similarity Report stay accessible depends on your institution's policy and contract, its storage settings (repository vs. no repository), and the class account's own expiry window (typically about 12 months from creation, with 180 days of contractual access after the class end date). Students cannot delete a paper themselves — removal runs through your institution's Turnitin administrator.

Official university pages show the range students actually face:

• Utrecht University (privacy statement): "The plagiarism report is kept for 22 months. The submitted work is added to Originality Check's international database."
• University of Malta (official FAQ): "Students' work is stored indefinitely." — but the same FAQ notes an assignment can be configured to check submissions without storing them in the repository.
• University of Washington (official guide): work is stored in the database for the duration of UW's contract with Turnitin; a student who objects can request that the paper be stored only for the quarter, after which it is deleted.
• City, University of London (EdtechGuides): "Turnitin are contractually obliged to make reasonable attempts to store assignments for up to 180 days after the class end date" — with a class end date typically 12 months from creation (six months for modules created before February 2023).

The spread — 22 months, the contract term, a single quarter, 180 days, indefinitely — is not an inconsistency in Turnitin, it is the point: retention is a per-institution decision. The first question to ask is not "how long does Turnitin keep papers" but "what does my university's policy say."

Whether your paper enters the similarity repository (the standard/institutional library, in Turnitin's terms) is a school decision — covered in depth in our guide on whether Turnitin stores your paper. What matters here is the consequence for the future:

• In the repository, your paper becomes part of the material future submissions are checked against — including, after the due date, other students' papers in the same assignment (the collusion check, explained in our guide on collusion).
• Not in the repository, your paper can't be matched by later submissions at all. Malta's FAQ states the risk plainly: "there is a risk that such work may then be resubmitted by other students and Turnitin would not detect plagiarism."

So "stored" and "not stored" are both deliberate, defensible choices by the institution — but only stored work protects authorship against later copying that Turnitin would catch. If you are deciding what to submit to a draft-checking setup, this is the trade-off your school has already made for you.

Separate from repository storage, the class account has its own clock. City's guide again:

"A class has a default end date which is typically twelve months from the creation date, or set to the date of the latest post date for the Turnitin assignments in the class. The expiration length of twelve months was introduced in February 2023. Modules created before this date will still be subject to the old six-month expiration period."

"Although Turnitin make every effort to keep papers accessible in perpetuity, in some rare scenarios, papers may become inaccessible."

Practically: a course from last year may simply not open anymore — the link fails because the class expired, not because your report was "deleted." If you might need the report later (an appeal, a review, a misconduct conversation), download the PDF while the class is still active. Our guide on downloading a Similarity Report PDF covers what the download contains.

There is no student-facing delete button in Turnitin. The deletion path that exists:

• QMUL policy: "Whilst students cannot prevent their work being checked by Turnitin, they can request that their file is subsequently deleted from the repository on certain grounds. Such requests must come from the staff member in charge of the assignment and should be submitted to their school's Turnitin contact." Valid grounds include an incorrect file uploaded and commercially sensitive content — and importantly, "a concern about intellectual property is not a valid reason": the copy in Turnitin does not alter ownership of the work.
• City's guide: "paper deletion requests can be made by the Turnitin Account Administrator... all requests for paper deletions from the Turnitin database must be submitted in writing by the University's Turnitin Administrator."
• UW: a student who objects to long-term storage must let the instructor know no later than the first week after the start of the class.

So the pragmatic student path is: if you uploaded the wrong file or your work is commercially sensitive, talk to your instructor and have them raise a deletion request with the Turnitin administrator. Deleting a submission inside the LMS (Canvas/Moodle) does not delete the paper from Turnitin's repository — the two are separate systems.

• Check your institution's policy first. Search for "turnitin [your university] retention/privacy" — most universities publish a policy page with the actual number.
• If you need the report as evidence, download it now. Class accounts expire (~12 months), contract access ends (180 days after the class), and reports don't last forever. The PDF, not the link, is the durable artifact (see our download guide).
• If the file is wrong or sensitive, use the deletion path. Talk to your instructor — students initiate, but instructors and admins execute; LMS deletion doesn't touch the repository.
• Don't treat "not in repository" as "safe." Your school chose the setting; knowing it helps you understand matching, not hide from it.

No official retention number exists because retention is per-institution: from 22 months (Utrecht) to indefinitely (Malta, QMUL) to the contract term (UW), with the class account itself expiring around 12 months after creation. Repository storage is the school's choice, and it determines whether your paper can be matched later — including in the collusion check. Deletion is not self-service for students: it flows through your instructor and the institution's Turnitin administrator, with limits on what counts as a valid reason. If a report matters later, download it now — the PDF outlives the link.