How can I prevent my Power Automate approval flow from expiring after 30 days?

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Posted on by VS-30010302-0

I understand that the standard “approval” action in Power Automate has a 30‑day timeout. I also know there are design patterns where each approval can be handled in separate flows to avoid this limit.

However, my current flow already contains many approval stages inside a single flow, and some of these approval steps can take longer than 30 days to complete. Because of this, once the approval action hits the 30‑day limit, the flow expires and I lose visibility on where it stopped or what happened.

Is there any workaround besides reconstructing the entire flow and splitting each approval into separate child flows or parallel flows?

I’m looking for any alternative methods to avoid the 30‑day expiry or at least preserve traceability after expiration.

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CU27021306-0 8 on at

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To clarify, the "30 day" thing is the maximum run time for a flow. It needs to do whatever it needs to do within 30 days of starting or it times out. Approvals actually don't time out...ever. They'll sit there for weeks, months, even years waiting for the approver to act on them. However, if the flow that created them timed out, whatever actions are supposed to happen after the Approval is completed won't run. Because the flow's timed out.

This video (which is several years old, but still relevant) describes how to handle long-running approval processes: https://youtu.be/h6Eb-F0P6Hs?si=DJd9cLZNOQZCOnwI

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wyattdave 493 Moderator on at

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Approvals are stored in Dataverse tables, if you need a long running approval you can use the table as the trigger (Dataverse update item), it will require some additional complexity to get all the data but should be do-able.

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