What happens to your Harvest data after you cancel: ten days or six months, depending on which button you press

Harvest's help center has one article on leaving: "Version 2 billing and Free accounts: Cancelling your subscription or closing your account". It describes two ways out, and they put your data on very different clocks. If you schedule a cancellation, the account closes at the end of the term and Harvest holds the data for six months. If you close the account immediately, the data is removed after 10 days, and the download link Harvest emails you lasts one week. This post goes through both, quotes what the page says, and lists what to download while the account is still active. Whichever way you leave, the question is one of trust: what can you still get back afterwards, and for how long.

Two ways out, two clocks

The article opens with the choice: "you can schedule its cancellation or close the account immediately." It also says who can do each. "Any Administrator can schedule (or withdraw) a cancellation, since Administrators have billing access. Closing the account permanently can only be done by the Account Owner".

So the short clock sits behind a button only one person can press, and the long clock sits behind one any Administrator can press. The numbers are these:

• Schedule the cancellation: the account stays active to the end of the billing period, then closes. The data is held for six months.
• Close the account immediately: the data is removed after 10 days.
• The emailed download link after an immediate close: one week.

If you schedule the cancellation

Harvest describes this option as one that "allows you to keep using Harvest until the end of the subscription, at which point the account will automatically close." After that, the clock is six months: "If the account isn't reactivated after six months, it'll be permanently deleted along with any data in it."

Inside those six months the account can come back. "Any Administrator can restart a cancelled account within six months." The page is also clear that the data is not on the export link's timer: "Your data is retained for around six months after the account goes on hold, so there's no rush to export before reactivating. The expiry date on an export link is just that link's expiry — it isn't a deadline for your data."

Note the word "around". The same page says "six months" in one place and "around six months" in another. Plan on less than six.

What six months of retention does not give you

Held is not the same as reachable. Two things on the page matter here.

The first is invoices. Harvest says: "the invoice report and payments-received report (Invoices → Report) require Administrator access and can't be run once your plan has lapsed, so download them — for tax or accounting records — while the account is still active." If you miss that, the route back is support: "we can grant a short courtesy reactivation so an Administrator can run and export them." That is a favour you ask for, not a setting you control.

The second is what it costs to let yourself back in. "Reactivating starts a brand-new subscription at current pricing. It does not resume the subscription you cancelled, so any time remaining on a prepaid term is not restored, and a legacy or discounted rate you were on previously does not carry over." If you were on an older rate, getting back to your own data through the Renew button means paying the new one. The 2026 pricing post covers what the new one is.

There is one exception worth knowing. If you cancelled part-way through a term you had already paid for, the page says to contact support before reactivating: "We can often restore the account for the remainder of the term you paid for, but only if it hasn't already been reactivated." Write to them first. Pressing Renew yourself closes that door.