Records Manager Job Description

A records manager owns the rules for what an organization keeps, for how long, and what happens to it afterward. The work is part policy, part systems administration and part evidence handling. When an auditor asks for five years of vendor contracts, when a subpoena lands, or when a department wants to purge an old share drive, the records manager is the person who knows which files must survive and which can go.

The anchor document is the retention schedule. It lists every record series the organization creates, from personnel files and purchase orders to board minutes and engineering drawings, and assigns each one a retention period, a legal or business justification and a disposition action: destroy, transfer to an archive or keep permanently. Writing it means interviewing department heads about what they actually produce, then matching those series against tax, employment, industry and public-records requirements. Keeping it current is a standing job, because statutes change and departments invent new record types without telling anyone.

In a modern program, the schedule lives inside software. A records manager configures retention labels and file plans in platforms such as Microsoft Purview, OpenText, Laserfiche or Hyland OnBase, decides which metadata fields are required, and works with IT so that deletion jobs follow policy rather than storage budgets. Email, chat channels, shared drives and cloud folders are the hard cases, since staff create records there without thinking of them as records.

Litigation is where the program gets tested. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e), amended effective Dec. 1, 2015, a court can sanction a party for lost electronically stored information only after finding that the information should have been preserved, that the party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and that it cannot be restored or replaced through other discovery. The Federal Judicial Center notes that the rule does not create a duty to preserve ESI; that duty still comes from common law. In practice, that puts the records manager in the room with counsel when a dispute is anticipated: issuing hold notices, freezing deletion for named custodians and systems, logging each step, and lifting the hold only when counsel releases it.

Paper has not disappeared everywhere. A program with physical records runs offsite box storage, with an index of every carton, a retrieval process, a vendor contract and a chain of custody that ends in a certificate of destruction. The records manager signs off on each destruction run after confirming that no hold applies.

The rest of the week goes to people. Records coordinators in each department need training, auditors need evidence, and executives need a short answer to the question of whether the organization can find what it is required to keep. Public-sector records managers add open-records requests to that list, which turns search and retrieval into a deadline-driven, legally reviewed process.

As a rough guide, a records manager comes to the job with a bachelor's degree and several years in records, compliance, legal support, archives or office administration. Common degree paths include business or public administration, information science and history. A master's in library and information science with a records or archives concentration is one route into university, museum and government programs, though it is not a universal requirement. The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry-level education for administrative services and facilities managers, the occupation group that includes records and information managers, and less than five years of related work experience.

Typical paths run through records clerk, records analyst or records coordinator jobs, often inside a legal department, a hospital's health information office or a city clerk's office. Paralegals and e-discovery specialists also cross over, since they already understand holds and collections. As a rough guide, three to seven years of progressively responsible records or compliance work precedes a first manager title.

Credentials. The Information Governance Professional (IGP) is awarded by ARMA International. Its handbook, last revised in August 2026, says the certification shows that holders have demonstrated competency in eight key areas of information governance. ARMA's recommended background for candidates is a four-year degree and a minimum of three years of management or leadership experience in fields that include records and information management, law and compliance. Other credentials a candidate might pursue depend on the setting: the Certified Records Manager (CRM) from the Institute of Certified Records Managers for a records-only career, and the Registered Health Information Administrator (RHIA) from AHIMA for hospital and clinic records programs.

Technical skills. Expect to administer at least one content or records management platform, configure retention policies in Microsoft 365, and read enough of an e-discovery workflow to brief counsel. Comfort with spreadsheets and basic database queries helps when the job is reconciling a box inventory or mapping thousands of shared-drive folders to schedule categories. Familiarity with the relevant retention authorities matters more than any single tool: for a federal contractor, that means agency schedules; for a city, the state archives' local schedules; for a bank or hospital, the regulator's own recordkeeping rules.

Working style. The records manager does not control the departments whose files they govern. The job rewards people who can explain a rule plainly, write a policy a busy manager will read, document every decision as if a judge will review it, and say no to an early deletion request without starting a feud. Project management skills carry weight too, since a schedule rewrite or a platform migration can run for a year.

BLS projects employment of administrative services and facilities managers, the group that includes records managers, to grow 5 percent from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations, with about 36,100 openings a year on average across the group. Administrative Services Managers alone accounted for 263,960 jobs in the May 2025 wage survey. BLS does not report records managers separately, so those figures describe the wider occupation rather than this specialty.

Federal rules have set the direction of the work. The Office of Management and Budget and the National Archives and Records Administration issued memorandum M-23-07, which required federal agencies to manage all permanent records electronically by June 30, 2024. NARA told agencies that after that date it would no longer accept transfers of permanent or temporary records in analog formats, only electronic records with appropriate metadata. For agency records officers and the contractors who support them, the memo made metadata standards, digitization quality and electronic transfer packages part of the core job. Outside government, the same skills apply wherever a regulator or a court expects electronic records to be found on request.

Artificial intelligence has added a new category of material to schedule. On Aug. 21, 2026, NARA sent federal agency records officers guidance on applying the Federal Records Act to AI materials, covering inputs, outputs, data, audit trails and software. The guidance says that an agency's use of an AI platform does not, in and of itself, create federal records, but that later use of AI-generated material in agency business can, depending on factors such as whether the agency relies on it in decision-making or circulates it to others. It also confirms that AI-related federal records may be disposed of only under a NARA-approved records schedule. Private employers face no such memo, but the same question, which prompts and outputs are records, lands on the records manager's desk wherever generative AI tools are deployed.

Read the pay band with care. The band on this page comes from the national Administrative Services Managers series, which mixes records managers with facility, office and other administrative leaders, so a given records job can land anywhere in it. A candidate weighing an offer should compare it against the posted range or pay grade for that specific role.

Advancement paths lead to information governance manager, privacy program manager, chief records officer and e-discovery or compliance leadership. Each of those jobs builds on the same base: a schedule people follow, systems that enforce it, and a defensible record of what was kept, held and destroyed.

Dear Hiring Committee,

I am applying for the Records Manager position with the Harbor County Water Authority. For the past six years I have run the records program for a regional engineering firm, where I own the retention schedule, the offsite storage contract and our legal hold process, and I would like to bring that work to a public utility.

When I arrived, the firm's schedule was a twelve-page document nobody had updated since a merger. I interviewed every department lead, rebuilt the schedule around the records they actually create, and walked it through review with our general counsel. I then mapped each series to retention labels in Microsoft 365, so project files, contracts and drawings now carry their disposition rules from the day they are saved. Shared-drive cleanup that had stalled for years moved forward because staff could finally see which folders were safe to retire.

Legal holds are the part of the job I treat most carefully. I built a simple tracker that records every custodian notice, every system where deletion was suspended, and the date counsel released each hold. During a construction dispute last year, outside counsel asked for our preservation steps, and I produced the full log the same afternoon.

I also train. I run a short session for each new hire and a refresher for our department records coordinators every spring, and I write policies in plain language so that a project manager can follow them without calling me.

I know a utility adds open-records requests and state retention schedules to the work, and I am ready for that. I would welcome a conversation about your program and where you want it to go.

Sincerely, Dana Whitfield