How long do VoDs stay on Twitch?
Twitch stores a past broadcast, the VoD of a full stream, for 7 days by default. Affiliates get 14 days. Partners, and any broadcaster whose own account has Twitch Turbo or is on Prime, get 60 days. Twitch's help center lays out the same three tiers, and none of it applies unless Past Broadcast storage is switched on in Stream Settings before you go live.
The three numbers, plainly: 7 days for an account without Affiliate or Partner status and without Turbo or Prime, 14 days once you're an Affiliate, 60 days for Partners and for Turbo or Prime accounts regardless of Affiliate status. All three are calendar days counted from the end of the broadcast, not from the last time anyone watched it.
7, 14, or 60 days: which one applies to you
Your tier is set by your own broadcaster status, not your viewers'. Affiliate and Partner are channel program tiers Twitch grants you; Turbo and Prime are things tied to your own Twitch account, the one doing the broadcasting. A brand-new, unaffiliated channel with no Turbo or Prime gets 7 days flat, no exceptions.
There is one wrinkle: 2K streams and Dual Format (vertical) streams. The higher-quality file, the 2K version or the vertical version, expires after 7 days no matter what tier you're on. After that, the standard file, 1080p or the horizontal version, keeps going for the rest of your normal window, 14 or 60 days depending on tier.
The 60-day tier: Partners, Turbo, and Prime
The 60-day window is the one editors ask about most, usually phrased as does Turbo give you 60 days of VoD storage. Yes. Twitch's help page groups it as one tier: Partners, Twitch Turbo subscribers, and Prime accounts all get 60 days, and Turbo or Prime alone is enough, you do not need Partner or even Affiliate status to unlock it.
That makes Turbo the fastest way for a small, unaffiliated streamer to buy their editor more time. Affiliate status alone only gets you to 14 days; stacking Turbo on top of an Affiliate or Partner account does not push you past 60, it is a flat ceiling, not a bonus.
Highlights, uploads, and clips do not follow the same clock
Highlights, segments a streamer manually promotes out of a VoD, and Uploads (Affiliate/Partner only) are not on a day-based clock at all. Twitch stores both indefinitely, but the two share one combined 100-hour limit, so a streamer with a lot of Highlights eventually has to delete old ones to make room for new ones. Full VoDs do not count against that 100-hour cap.
Clips are a separate, third thing, and the table on Twitch's help page marks their storage as not applicable, meaning they sit outside this whole retention system. If you only need one specific moment preserved long-term and do not want it eating into the 100-hour Highlights budget, a Clip is the lighter option; a Highlight is better when you want a longer, curated cut.
Do Twitch clips expire?
Short answer: no, clips do not expire when the VoD does. A clip is its own object, separate from the broadcast, so it keeps playing after the source broadcast is deleted. It only goes away if its creator or the broadcaster deletes it. That matches what the clip vs VoD breakdown covers, and it is why the table above has no row for clips.
The catch is what a clip leaves behind. It is capped at 60 seconds and carries no chat, so a clip made on day 6 of a 7-day window preserves one moment and throws away the rest of the stream. If you need a longer cut, a run of moments, or the chat reactions around them, the clip is not a substitute for the VoD. You need the source before the deadline.
For an editor, the practical order is: pull the VoD and chat first, then cut. A tool like Voding's clip creation lets you set any length on the VoD while it is still there, and the chat from that window comes along. Highlights and uploads sit outside the day-based clock too, though they share the 100-hour cap described above.
What happens when a Twitch VoD expires
When the window closes, the VoD is deleted from twitch.tv, not hidden or archived, deleted. Twitch's own support FAQ is explicit that it cannot recover a broadcast once it is gone, whether the cause was the retention window, an unchecked Store Past Broadcasts toggle, or a bad stream config. No third-party tool can pull it back either; once it is off Twitch's servers, it does not exist anywhere Twitch-side.
Clips and Highlights made from the VoD before it expired keep working, they are stored separately. What you lose is everything outside those clipped moments, plus the chat replay attached to the VoD page. If you never pulled the chat log, it is gone with the video, which matters if your editing workflow, like this one, reads chat activity to find the moments worth clipping in the first place.
A VoD can disappear before its window closes
The 7, 14, and 60-day windows are the outer bound, not a guarantee. A DMCA claim, a mature-content flag, or a Twitch policy violation can pull a VoD early, and Twitch notifies the streamer but does not restore editor access. From the outside it looks identical to a VoD that simply expired on schedule.
None of the workarounds below help once a strike has already landed. The only real protection is downloading or highlighting the VoD early, before either the retention clock or a possible strike catches up to it.
Chat retention runs on the same rough clock
Twitch does not document a separate retention period for chat replay data; in practice it tracks the video, when the VoD is deleted, the chat log attached to it goes too. Editors sometimes see a chat log outlive the video by a day or two, but this is inconsistent and unofficial, so treat it as a rounding error, not a plan.
If a project only needs chat, not the full video, pulling chat is cheap, on the order of a few API calls per hour of stream, worth doing early even if the video pull happens later. A clip-render or a chat-activity graph only needs the chat log, not the source video, so grab it as soon as a VoD publishes rather than waiting for edit day.
How to keep a VoD past the retention window
Three options, in order of effort. Mark the moment as a Highlight before the window closes, indefinite storage, but capped at 100 hours shared with Uploads, and it only saves what you clipped, not the full broadcast. Download or export the full VoD, there is a full walkthrough of the tools here, and budget time for it since a VoD download is not always fast. Or ingest it into a cloud editor that pulls the source the moment you request it, so nothing has to sit on your drive and the 7-to-60-day countdown is no longer something you have to track by hand.
For editors working with a streamer on a schedule, the safest habit is to ingest within 24 hours of every broadcast, either with an automated daily pull or with a tool that fetches the VoD and chat at request time and holds them for as long as your storage tier allows. Waiting for edit day against a 7-day clock is how a whole stream gets lost.