Wait, Retention Got Shorter! Workflows' Default on Workers Paid Is Now 7 Days

Hi, it's me, Shiichan! Today's news is one of those easy-to-miss but important little changes.

Cloudflare Changelog developers.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Changelog announced a change to how long completed and errored instance state is retained for Workflows created on the Workers Paid plan starting September 10, 2026.

The story so far

Until now, Workflows on the Workers Paid plan retained instance state for 30 days by default. If you were writing code assuming that longer default window for debugging or fulfillment checks, this is worth noting.

What changes

Workflows created on or after September 10, 2026 now default to a 7-day retention period, described as a way to help reduce storage costs by default.

• Workers Paid plan: the default for new Workflows is now 7 days (existing Workflows are unaffected)
• Workers Free plan: still defaults to and caps at 3 days, unchanged
• Maximum retention limit: still 30 days, unchanged

Existing Workflows aren't affected, so nothing you already have will suddenly lose its logs — but it's worth being aware of for anything you create going forward.

Dive Deep

You can set retention per Workflow and per instance by specifying successRetention and errorRetention:

const instance = await env.MY_WORKFLOW.create({
	retention: {
		successRetention: "2 days",
		errorRetention: "30 days",
	},
});

This lets you set different retention windows for successful versus errored instances — handy if you want to keep errors around longer for debugging. You can also configure retention per Workflow or per instance from the Cloudflare dashboard. See the Workflows pricing page and the WorkflowInstanceCreateOptions API reference for more.

Wrap-up

• As of September 10, 2026, new Workflows on Workers Paid default to 7-day retention instead of 30.
• Existing Workflows keep their current retention, so nothing changes for what you already have.
• The maximum retention cap is still 30 days, and successRetention/errorRetention let you extend it per Workflow or instance.
• The Workers Free plan's 3-day default is unchanged.
• If you rely on long-lived Workflow logs for debugging, it's worth setting retention explicitly in code or the dashboard now.