Announcing enhanced Explore performance with a 37-month data retention limit

Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends
January 6, 2025 | July 7, 2025 | December 19, 2025

Important: For operational reasons, we have canceled any further rollout of the 37-month data retention limit. If you previously had this limit applied, you will begin to see data older than 37 months again in your account as we stop removing data going forward.

Why was the rollout stopped?
After the initial rollout phase, we reassessed the data retention policy and determined it was not the right approach for our customers at this time. The retention limit was originally introduced to improve query performance in Explore, but after evaluating the results across affected accounts, we concluded that a uniform 37-month retention policy did not consistently deliver the expected benefits for all customers. Based on this, we decided to stop the rollout.

What is the current data retention state:
Most accounts retain all historical data as they always have. For the approximately 6% of accounts that had a retention limit applied, their data will not be further reduced, and they will progressively accumulate more data going forward. Currently, they have the last 3+ years and any additional data since we stopped the process.

For customers whose older data was removed:
If you need historical data restored, contact Zendesk Support.

Zendesk is introducing a 37-month data retention limit for Explore starting July 7, 2025, to improve report loading speeds.

This announcement answers the following questions:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

How will the data retention be applied?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

Today, Explore reporting allows users to interact with all the data associated with their account from its origination. That’s why customers with longer tenures and large data sets experience slow performance when executing complex reports, even when date filters are applied.

To best align our in-product experience with observed usage and boost report loading times, we’re introducing a 37-month limit on the data available in Explore.

Important: The new retention limit will not impact other Zendesk features. Users can still access all Agent Workspace, Guide, account export, and API data.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Customers who voluntarily limited their data availability to 37 months experienced significant enhancements in the report loading speeds. The research showed that most Explore reports and dashboards are filtered by recent time ranges like last month or last week and rarely by time ranges longer than 12 months. Introducing a 37-month limit will provide a significant performance boost to reports with minimal negative impact on the overall reporting experience.

How will the data retention be applied?

A new background Explore process will remove closed tickets that were solved more than 37 months ago. This will impact most of the Support, Chat and Talk, and AI Intelligent triage datasets. For other datasets, like Guide or Answer Bot, we will remove all data recorded more than 37 months ago.

User, organization, and custom object data will not be removed.

What do I need to do?

This change happens automatically after July 7, 2025, and any reports you have configured that use data longer than this new limit will no longer show data older than 37 months. Selecting a date range older than this limit in the reports or dashboards will not retrieve any results apart from unsolved tickets.

If your organization relies on Explore to retrieve data older than 37 months, you can export your reports and dashboards that look at data older than 37 months before the limit is applied. You can also adapt your workflow and start consuming this historical data from other sources, such as:

Searching in the Agent Workspace,

Exporting ticket and user lists from the  Admin Center data export feature,

Accessing the historical raw, unprocessed data from your account using the API.

If you have feedback or questions about this announcement, visit our community forum, where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.