Data deletion

How to delete data from PostHog

You can remove unwanted data from PostHog by:

1. Deleting teams/organizations
2. Deleting persons

This can be done either under:

1. The settings pages
2. The persons & groups pages
3. Using the API

When deleting individual persons, you can also choose to delete all of their events. When deleting teams, all data under the team (including events) are automatically removed.

How to delete persons and related events using the API

Note: Reusing distinct_id values after deletion is not supported. If you wish to delete bad data on some distinct_id values but keep that person's other distinct_id active, you should first split that person with the "Split IDs" button.

Persons and events can be deleted using our API endpoints.

To query all persons in your project, use the GET Persons API endpoint

You can filter for specific subsets of persons using the query parameters. For example, you can get a specific person by filtering by email:

GET https://posthog.example.com/api/projects/{YOUR_PROJECT_ID}/persons?email={EMAIL}

You can paginate through the results using the next and previous parameters returned by this endpoint.

To delete the persons and their events, you can use the DELETE Persons API endpoint

To do that, iterate through the persons returned in the previous step and use the person's id or distinct_id in the DELETE call. To delete the person's corresponding events in addition to the person, add the delete_events=true parameter. For example:

DELETE https://posthog.example.com/api/projects/{YOUR_PROJECT_ID}/persons/{ID}?delete_events=true

Asynchronous data deletion

While most data in PostHog is deleted instantly, event data is not. Instead data is cleared asynchronously during non-peak usage times (weekends on PostHog Cloud).

This is done because data deletion in ClickHouse is expensive and it can impact performance for other users.

On self-hosted, asynchronous deletions happen according to the CLEAR_CLICKHOUSE_REMOVED_DATA_SCHEDULE_CRON environment variable (defaults to Sunday 5AM UTC). Read more on environment variables here.