In many of the Microsoft 365 tenants I work with, Teams meeting recordings and transcripts pile up fast, and even more so since storage moved to OneDrive and SharePoint. IT and users alike lose track of them easily. The built-in Teams recordings expiration options are meant to help with that, but in practice user controls, admin policy and Purview retention interact in ways that surprise most people.
Teams recordings expiration is set in the meeting policy
You configure the default expiration for Teams recordings in the Teams Admin Center under Meetings → Meeting policies → Recording & transcription → Meetings automatically expire. There you specify after how many days new recordings get deleted automatically, unless someone changes the expiration. For most tenants Microsoft currently defaults to 120 days (based on the current announcement, so check your Message Center for the exact setting in your region).
The policy only affects recordings made after you activate it. Existing videos stay as they are. The expiration is saved as metadata on the recording file in OneDrive or SharePoint, and anyone with Owner or Edit access can change the date or remove it entirely in the file details pane. Admins and users regularly misunderstand this. It isn't a hard deletion rule that nobody can undo. It's a default that people with the right permissions can override.
Users can change the expiration date on their own
Picking a strict default for Teams recordings expiration isn't easy. If it's too short, you'll hear complaints once important meetings disappear. If you leave it open, storage grows without limit. Users can adjust or remove the expiration date from the file details menu in OneDrive or SharePoint. From a compliance perspective this cuts both ways. It protects against accidental data loss, but it also means your expiration policy isn't really enforced.
Practical tip: For most environments I recommend a default of 120 or 180 days. Tell users they can extend the expiration date when they need to, and show them where to do it in the file details. The system then cleans itself up by default, and the recordings that matter can still be kept.
Purview retention always overrides recording expiration
I'm often asked what happens when Teams recordings expiration and a Microsoft Purview retention policy both apply to the same file. Retention always wins. If a retention policy is active (seven years, for example), the recording can't be deleted, not when the expiration date passes and not when a user tries to delete it. The regular expiration only kicks in after the retention period has ended. Microsoft documents this behavior in Meeting recording expiration.
So an aggressive expiration setting won't wipe out critical meetings. The flip side is that real cleanup requires you to manage retention and expiration together. Also keep in mind that Purview retention covers transcripts as well, as long as they're stored as a VTT file next to the video in SharePoint.
Meeting policies decide who records and where files end up
Meeting policies also control who is allowed to record. Organizers and presenters can record by default, and you can restrict that per policy. Since Copilot arrived in Teams, the transcript matters more than before, because Copilot relies on it for things like meeting summaries. When a recording expires, its transcript file is deleted with it, unless a retention policy protects it.
Recordings usually land in the organizer's OneDrive, and channel meetings end up in SharePoint. The transcript is stored as a VTT text file in the same folder as the video. Many organizations underestimate how quickly this eats storage, particularly when large meetings are recorded by default.
The flowchart below shows the lifecycle of a Teams meeting recording and how the policies interact:
flowchart TD
TeamsMeeting["Teams meeting"] --> Recording["Recording started"]
Recording --> FileODSP["File in OneDrive/SharePoint"]
FileODSP --> ExpirationTag["Expiration date (metadata)"]
ExpirationTag --> UserEdit["User can edit"]
FileODSP --> PurviewPolicy["Purview retention policy"]
ExpirationTag --> Deletion["Automatic deletion"]
PurviewPolicy -->|"Retention > Expiration"| FileODSP
Figure: Lifecycle of Teams recordings and how retention policies affect it.
Admins get very little visibility into upcoming deletions
There's no tenant-wide dashboard showing which Teams recordings are about to expire, and that's a genuine gap. As a workaround you can search OneDrive or SharePoint for files with expiration dates using custom views, but no native PowerShell cmdlet exposes this metadata. If Purview Audit is licensed and enabled, you can track who changed an expiration date or deleted a recording. Open the Purview portal → Audit and search for "Set expiration date" or "Deleted meeting recording". For everyday storage planning, you'll mostly end up opening the relevant OneDrive or SharePoint libraries and adding the "Expiration date" column to a custom view.
A SharePoint view shows the expiration date per recording
To get an overview of recordings that will expire:
- Open the library with meeting recordings in SharePoint Online
- Add the "Expiration date" column to your current view
- Sort or filter by date to see upcoming deletions
This only catches files where users haven't removed the expiration manually. Still, it's the closest thing to proactive monitoring available today.
Default expiration helps but doesn't replace a lifecycle strategy
As with many Microsoft 365 defaults, Teams recordings expiration is useful, but it won't solve everything by itself. Real lifecycle control means combining it with Purview retention and actively educating users. The hard part is balancing compliance against user flexibility. The more clearly your organization defines which meetings need long-term retention (and which don't), the better this works. Reviewing large or old recordings on a regular schedule pays off for compliance and for storage costs.
For more detailed migration and Teams policy tips, see my post New Microsoft Teams client: Smooth transition in 2024.
