Two different people land on this question for two different reasons. One had something happen — a break-in, a car scratched in the driveway — a few weeks ago, and wants to know if the footage is still sitting there. The other runs a café, bar, or retail store in Perth and needs to know whether their system meets what WA requires. Both are really asking the same thing: how long is CCTV footage kept in Australia, and what determines the answer for their specific setup?
There isn’t one number that covers both. This guide gives you the real answer for each — residential and commercial — along with the one factor that matters more than any calendar rule: storage.
How long is CCTV footage kept in Australia? (The direct answer)
For residential CCTV systems, there is no legal minimum in Australia — most home systems overwrite footage after 30–60 days, depending on storage capacity and recording mode. For WA venues where a licence condition applies, the required minimum retention is 28 days.
Those are two genuinely different answers for two genuinely different situations, and mixing them up is the most common mistake people make when researching this. A homeowner doesn’t need to think about the 28-day figure at all. A hospitality or retail business in WA needs to know whether that figure applies to them specifically, which depends on the type of licence they hold, not just the fact that they’re licensed at all.
Residential CCTV: how long footage is stored and what determines the window
No law sets a minimum or maximum retention period for a private home system. What determines how long your footage sticks around comes down to drive capacity and recording mode. A system recording continuously fills its drive and starts overwriting the oldest footage far sooner than one set to record only on motion. Resolution matters just as much — a 4K camera generates several times the file size of a standard-definition one for the same length of footage, which shortens how far back your system can reach.
In practice, most residential systems land somewhere between two and eight weeks of retained footage, with motion-triggered recording on a reasonably sized drive comfortably reaching the higher end.
Business CCTV retention in Western Australia — what the law requires
There’s no single, blanket retention law that applies to every business in WA the way people sometimes assume. What applies depends on the type of business and, for certain venues, specific licence conditions layered on top of general good practice. The Australian Privacy Principles, which apply to businesses with turnover above $3 million (and some others), require that footage identifying people only be kept as long as needed for the purpose it was collected — not indefinitely “just in case.” Most Perth retailers, cafés, and small operators sit outside that threshold, but the same principle is good practice regardless: know why you’re keeping footage, and don’t keep it longer than that reason requires.
Licensed premises in WA: the actual retention condition, and who it applies to
This is the one area where a specific number does apply — and it’s worth getting exactly right, because it’s commonly misquoted. Western Australia’s Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries sets a CCTV condition, under its Safety and Security at Licensed Premises policy, requiring recordings to be kept for 28 days and made available to WA Police within 24 hours of a request. This condition specifically applies to permanent licences trading beyond 1am, and to venues or events where the Director of Liquor Licensing has imposed it as a condition — nightclubs, higher-risk venues, and events expecting more than 1,000 people. It is not a universal requirement for every liquor-licensed premises in the state.
In Brillare’s CCTV installation team’s experience installing systems for Perth hospitality venues, the most common compliance gap isn’t retention duration — it’s storage capacity. A 1TB NVR installed in 2019 may now overwrite footage in under two weeks if additional cameras or higher resolution have been added since, even though the venue’s owner still assumes the system is meeting the 28-day condition it was originally sized for.
Need to upgrade your system to meet WA’s licensed-premises retention condition? Brillare installs and upgrades commercial CCTV systems across Perth — including NVR expansion sized correctly for your current camera count and resolution, not the setup you started with.
Does CCTV footage delete automatically?
Yes, for almost every modern system. Rather than filling up and stopping, an NVR or DVR overwrites its oldest footage automatically once the drive is full — normal operation, not a fault. (If the difference between an NVR and a DVR isn’t clear, it’s worth understanding before the storage maths below, since the two store footage differently.) The practical implication people miss: if an incident needs to be preserved, export that specific footage separately straight away — waiting even a few days risks losing it to the system’s own overwrite cycle.
How much storage do you actually need? (A camera-by-camera calculation)
This is where the two audiences in this article actually diverge, because the right answer depends on real numbers, not a general rule. Space needs to scale with three things: camera count, resolution, and recording mode. As a rough guide, a single higher-resolution outdoor camera recording continuously can use somewhere in the range of 60–100GB per day; the same camera set to motion-triggered recording only — the more common residential setup — typically uses a quarter to a third of that, since it’s only writing footage when something moves in frame.
Scale that across a typical system: four cameras on motion-trigger only will need less capacity than four recording continuously, even though the hardware is identical. This is why two systems with the same camera count and drive size can hold genuinely different amounts of retained footage — and why the 1TB-drive example above is a real, common gap, not an edge case. Sizing correctly for your actual camera count and recording mode is the only way to know your system holds what you assume it does. Brillare’s guide to CCTV installation and NVR storage cost in Perth breaks down what a correctly-sized upgrade actually costs.
Can police or your insurer access old CCTV footage?
If footage still exists — meaning it hasn’t yet been overwritten — police can request it directly, and most systems allow footage to be exported for exactly this purpose. Insurers generally accept exported footage as part of a claim in the same way. Individuals have their own access rights too: the OAIC sets out when you can request footage that identifies you, separate from any police or insurance process. The catch running through this entire guide still applies: none of this is possible once the footage has already been overwritten, which is why exporting anything incident-related immediately, rather than assuming it’ll still be there next month, is the safer habit. For the separate question of what your own cameras are legally allowed to record in the first place under the Surveillance Devices Act 1998 (WA) — including footage that might capture a neighbouring property — Brillare’s guide to CCTV privacy laws in Western Australia covers that in full.
The bottom line
How long is CCTV footage kept? There’s no single answer — the honest one is “it depends on your storage, not the calendar” for residential systems, and “it depends on your specific licence conditions” for WA businesses. Know which category you’re in, check your actual system settings rather than assuming, and export anything that matters the moment you realise it matters.
Call 08 9415 0762 to check whether your current system’s storage is adequate — or to discuss a compliance-grade upgrade for your Perth business.
@brillareelectricians
brillare_electricians
brillare electricians
brillare perth electrician 
@brillareelectricians