Forum Discussion

nvisa1090's avatar
nvisa1090
Copper Contributor
Aug 18, 2026

Deleted labels showing pending deletion status

Hi All, We encountered an issue after deleting a sensitivity label through the Microsoft Purview portal. When we tried to recreate the same label a few hours later, a message indicated that a label ...
Ulrich_Zogo's avatar
Ulrich_Zogo
Copper Contributor
Aug 21, 2026

Hi ​ nvisa1090​ 

This looks like the normal asynchronous deletion behavior for sensitivity labels.

Once the label is in PendingDeletion, running Remove-Label again will return that error because the deletion has already been queued. The label object can also continue reserving its name until backend propagation completes.

You can confirm the state in Powershell with:

Get-Label -Identity "<label name or GUID>" | Format-List DisplayName,Mode

If it shows PendingDeletion, I would leave it rather than trying to delete it again. Microsoft notes that sensitivity label changes can take up to 24 hours, and in some cases 24–48 hours, to fully propagate.

If it is still stuck after that period, I would open a Microsoft support request because the label may need to be checked/cleaned up from the service backend.

Also, before deleting a sensitivity label, make sure it has first been removed from any label publishing policies that reference it.