While you have a SurveyMonkey account, we retain data associated with your account.
If your account is inactive, we may delete your SurveyMonkey Basic (free) account and survey data in accordance with our data retention policy.
In the case of either a SurveyMonkey paid account or SurveyMonkey Basic (free) account, we may retain the data associated with your account longer as required by applicable law.
With per-survey response limits, you can view a set number of responses per survey according to your plan. Responses over the survey’s limit aren’t viewable and will be deleted. However, if you need access to specific over-limit responses to comply with legal obligations, such as to fulfill a data subject request, then please contact customer support.
You may also choose to immediately delete all survey responses over your account limit. Alternatively, we will automatically delete them 1 year after they were collected—in accordance with our retention period.
To view and keep access to those responses, upgrade to a paid plan before they're deleted. You can go to My Surveys or the new Homepage (beta) to see which surveys have responses over your plan's limit if you want to upgrade to a paid plan.
The following sections describe who can delete data, how long it's retained, and whether it can be restored.
You can delete surveys and data from within your account. Once deleted from your account, the survey or data won’t be accessible and you may not be able to restore it. The deleted data is permanently removed from our system within 60 days.
| Type of Data | How to Delete It | Can It be Restored? |
| Questions | Deleting a Question | Yes. See Restoring Deleted Questions |
| Responses | Deleting Responses | Responses can't be restored. |
| Surveys | Deleting a Survey | Surveys can't be restored. |
TIP! If you're on a free (Basic) plan, you can immediately delete all responses over your account limit.
You can delete your account or survey data associated with it at any time. After deletion, the account is disabled immediately. The deleted account and data will be permanently removed from our system within 60 days.
The Primary Admin or Admin of a team can delete an account from their team at any time. The account, including all surveys and data within it, is disabled immediately. The deleted account and data will be permanently removed from our system within 60 days.
If you're on a SurveyMonkey Basic (free) account, responses over your account limit aren’t viewable and will be automatically deleted in accordance with our retention period. However, you can choose to delete these responses immediately.
If you need to access specific over-limit responses to comply with legal obligations, such as to fulfill a data subject request, then please contact customer support.
To delete over-limit responses:
You’ll then receive an email to confirm the deletion of responses over your account limit.
The last time you manually deleted your over-limit responses is shown under the Last manual deletion date. This date does not include automatic deletions of over-limit responses that were removed in accordance with our retention period.
TIP! Close your survey collectors to prevent any more responses from being collected.
Some residual copies of deleted data may remain on backup media up to 90 days after the deletion has occurred, at which point it will be overwritten.
We generally don't use deleted survey data for any purpose, however in limited circumstances, we may retain other data about your account and historical usage for the following reasons:
In these cases, we ensure that access to the data is blocked except for the purposes for which we have been required to retain the information. The data is deleted as soon as that purpose no longer exists. We also retain aggregate anonymous usage and meta data which doesn’t identify you or any of your respondents.
We understand that survey responses can capture a wide range of information, some of which may be sensitive, confidential, or proprietary—both to the account owner and survey takers. SurveyMonkey values the trust that our customers, whether they be individuals or large organizations, place in us by letting us be the custodians of their survey data.
Our Privacy Notice details how we handle your survey data. We aim to be transparent with our privacy practices so there aren't any surprises. We won't use your surveys or information collected from your surveys in any way other than as described in our Privacy Notice.
Our Security Statement and white paper describe the security measures we use to keep your data secure. We make every effort to ensure that your data is handled and stored securely.
We also require you, as a survey creator, to be responsible for good privacy practices for those taking your survey. This can help improve response rates and the survey-taking experience. Learn more about data collection and privacy best practices and adding a consent statement or privacy notice to your survey.
As an international company, we have data centers in the United States, Canada, and Ireland. Depending on your plan type and region, you may have the option to store your survey and response data in a regional data center. Regardless of the data center you use, we may access our other data centers to implement, maintain, repair, or upgrade our services for our customers.
If your data is stored in a regional data center, you can see the location listed in the Account Details on your My Account page. If you don't see anything listed, your data is stored on servers located in the United States.
If your data is stored in a regional data center, expand the section on your region to learn more.
ENTERPRISE FEATURE: The Canadian data center is currently available to new Enterprise customers only. If you're interested, contact sales.
Visit our policy center to read more about our International Data Centers.
Our global customer support team, located in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United States, may need to look at your account to best help you. Accepting support means our global customer service representatives can access your account and data for the purposes of helping you with your questions.
If you’d prefer not to accept customer service outside of Canada, you can let us know in your account.
To accept or deny global support:
TIP! You can turn this setting on and off if you'd only like to accept global support for a short period of time.
The following features are only available when you use them within your own team, whose data is also stored in the Canadian data center:
TIP! You can send a copy of your Survey template instead.
The features below aren't available with Canadian data storage at this time, but we're working to make them available soon:
| Category | Feature |
| Analyze | Sentiment Analysis, Word Cloud |
| Collecting Responses | Text Message collector |
| Integrations | Most existing apps or plug-ins aren't available - including, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Zendesk, as well as Accepting Payments |
| Solutions | Feature Importance (MaxDiff), Price Optimization (Van Westendorp), Usage & Attitudes, Idea Screening, Creative and Concept Testing Solutions (Ad Testing, Concept Testing, Video Testing, Package Testing, Logo Design Testing, Name Testing, Message & Claims Testing) |
ENTERPRISE FEATURE: The EU data center is currently available to new Enterprise customers only. If you're interested, contact sales.
We offer customers EU and UK Standard Contractual Clauses to validate transfers of data outside of the EU. However, we understand that some customers prefer EU data storage. Also, closer data storage is likely to improve site speed for survey creation and survey-taking.
We offer some Enterprise customers the ability to store survey and response data in the EU Data Center in Ireland, using our public cloud infrastructure. Other data, such as login information, billing details, and account metadata may be stored in the United States.
When creating the account, the Primary Admin can request that we store the team's survey and response data in the EU. This setting applies to all users added to the team.
At this time, existing customers aren’t able to choose to migrate their data to the EU data center.
To log in to your SurveyMonkey account, go to eu.surveymonkey.com. It’s a good idea to bookmark the home page since it’s unique for customers storing data in the EU.
On the SurveyMonkey Mobile App, use the Europe region link to log in to the European Data Center.
If you visit surveymonkey.com pages while logged in, you may see an error saying something went wrong. If this happens, return to eu.surveymonkey.com to continue using your account.
The following features are only available when you use them within your own team, whose data is also stored in the EU data center:
The features below aren't available with EU data storage at this time, but we're working to make them available soon:
| Category | Feature |
| Survey Design | Survey gallery |
| Collecting Responses | Text Message collector, Mobile SDK collector, Offline mode |
| Solutions | SurveyMonkey Audience, Audience credits, Benchmarks, Feature Importance (MaxDiff), Price Optimization (Van Westendorp), Usage & Attitudes, Idea Screening, Creative and Concept Testing Solutions (Ad Testing, Concept Testing, Video Testing, Package Testing, Logo Design Testing, Name Testing, Message & Claims Testing) |
| Enterprise | Account Control, SCIM |
| Integrations | Most existing apps or plug-ins aren't available. But SurveyMonkey for Salesforce, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Zapier, and Marketo are available, or you can build new apps to add to the App Directory. |
| Products | Wufoo, Techvalidate, SurveyMonkey Apply, SurveyMonkey Engage |
| Downgrading | Downgrade to another plan type |