The short answer is her whole life
Your dog's medical records are not like household receipts with a tidy expiry date. A vaccination given as a puppy explains a blood result at ten; a reaction to an anaesthetic at three must still be visible to the vet anaesthetising her at twelve; a lump removed years ago shapes how a new one is judged. Vets build decisions on accumulated history, and gaps force them to repeat tests or guess. So the working rule is simple: the core record, vaccinations, chip details, operations, chronic conditions, allergies and reactions, behaviour notes from the clinic, stays for her lifetime, and keeping it a while afterwards helps if insurance or a breeder question ever surfaces.
What counts as core, and what can be thinned
Core paperwork includes vaccination certificates and the clinic's summaries of any significant illness, surgery, dental work, or ongoing management plan, plus imaging or lab summaries your vet flagged as important. Keep microchip registration proof and any specialist referral letters in the same set. Routine material is thinner ground: duplicate appointment reminders, boarding forms for a single stay, and invoices for minor one-off visits can be discarded once the visit itself is captured in a summary and any claim windows you rely on have passed. When in doubt, scan before you shred; a digital copy costs nothing and weighs nothing.
Why the history matters at every handover
Records earn their keep at transitions. A new vet inheriting a complete file can continue a management plan in the first appointment instead of restarting investigations your dog has already endured. An emergency clinic at night treats faster and safer when allergies, current conditions, and recent procedures are in front of them rather than reconstructed from a worried owner's memory. Boarders, insurers, and even a future owner if life forces a rehoming all rely on the same trail. Each handover that goes smoothly is an argument for the folder you kept when it felt like clutter.
Store the lifetime set so it survives your filing system
Paper alone is fragile, and a single phone is not much better. Keep the paper originals of certificates together in one labelled folder, scan or photograph everything into a digital set named by date and subject, and back that set up in a second place, cloud storage or a drive kept elsewhere. Check the digital copies are legible before you trust them; a blurred vaccine date is no copy at all. Tell your partner or a family member where the records live, and bring the set, or its digital twin, to every first appointment with a new provider rather than promising to forward it later.
Review once a year and prune with care
An annual tidy keeps the archive usable instead of intimidating: file the year's new summaries, confirm the vaccination record is current, remove true duplicates, and check that contact and chip details on the oldest documents still match reality. Resist the big clear-out that treats anything older than a recent year as junk; in a medical file, age is often the point. Preserved as one set in KinsLe's Pet Passport, your dog's lifetime medical history stays a single portable packet, ready for vet visits, travel, boarding, and every handover her life involves.