How long does celery last in the fridge?

The short version: a whole bunch of celery, stored properly, is good for two to three weeks in the fridge — sometimes longer. Most people never see that lifespan, because the celery that came home for a stir-fry or a stock only needed two stalks out of eight, and the rest sat in its original plastic bag until it went soft. That softness is almost never spoilage in the sense of bacteria or rot. It is dehydration, and it is largely preventable.

Why celery goes limp instead of going bad

Celery is around 95% water, held inside long, narrow channels that run the length of each stalk — the same structure that makes it snap cleanly when it is fresh. That structure is built to move water up from the root, and once the stalk is cut from the plant, it has no way to replace what it loses. Sitting in dry, circulating fridge air, or in a plastic bag with a few small holes and no real seal, celery just keeps losing moisture with nothing coming back in. A stalk that bends instead of snapping has not gone bad. It has gone thirsty.

This matters because a limp stalk gets treated like a warning sign and thrown out, when it is often still completely fine to cook with — chopped into a soup, a stock, or a stir-fry, where texture matters far less than in a raw snack. The stalk you are right to be suspicious of is a different one, covered further down.

The two storage methods that actually work

Both of these solve the same problem — stopping water loss — from opposite directions, and either one comfortably beats leaving celery in the bag it was sold in.

Wrap it in foil, not plastic. This is the trick people are often surprised by: aluminium foil, wrapped snugly around the whole bunch, keeps celery crisp for weeks longer than a plastic bag does. Celery gives off a small amount of ethylene gas as it sits, and plastic traps that gas right against the stalks, which speeds up softening and yellowing. Foil lets the ethylene escape while still holding enough humidity around the celery to slow water loss. It sounds like the wrong material for keeping something from drying out, and it works anyway.

Stand it in water, like cut flowers. Trim a small amount off the base of the bunch and stand it upright in a jar or container with an inch or two of water in the fridge, the same way you would keep fresh herbs. The cut ends draw water back up the same channels that lost it, which can revive stalks that have already started to go soft, not just prevent it in fresh ones. This method takes up more fridge space than a foil wrap, which is the only real trade-off.

What does not work well is the bag the celery was sold in. It usually has just enough ventilation to let moisture escape slowly, and not enough airflow to stop condensation building up inside, which gives you the worst of both: steady water loss plus damp patches where mould can start on a bruised stalk.

Already limp? It is often reversible

A stalk that has gone bendy but still looks and smells clean can usually be brought back. Trim the base and stand the stalks in a bowl of ice water for fifteen to thirty minutes. Because the water-loss problem runs in one direction, running it backwards for half an hour often works about as well as it sounds like it shouldn't. This is worth knowing before anything gets thrown out on the assumption that limp means finished.

What tells you it is actually finished

Limpness is not the signal to watch for. These are:

Sliminess. A wet, slippery film on the surface, rather than just a soft bend, is bacterial and means the stalk is done.
Dark spots that spread through the stalk. Light browning right at a cut end is just oxidation and is harmless — cut it off and the rest is fine. Dark, soft patches that go deeper into the stalk, or that spread over a day or two, are not.
A sour or off smell. Fresh celery smells faintly grassy or of almost nothing. A sharp or unpleasant smell is a real sign, unlike a stalk that just bends.
The leaves go first. The leafy tops wilt well before the stalks do. Wilted leaves are not a verdict on the stalks underneath — they can be trimmed off and used like a herb, or discarded, without it saying anything about the rest of the bunch.

Already cut it up?

Chopped celery loses water much faster than whole stalks, because there is far more cut surface exposed to the air. Kept in an airtight container, ideally with a barely damp paper towel to slow drying, it is good for about a week. Submerged in water in a sealed container, similar to the whole-stalk method, it holds a little longer, though the texture softens gradually either way. If a recipe only used a third of a bunch, it is worth freezing the rest rather than hoping it stays crisp: celery loses its snap after freezing regardless of method, so it is only worth doing for stuff that gets cooked afterwards — soups, stocks, stews — not for anything eaten raw.

One more thing worth knowing: celery is fairly sensitive to the ethylene given off by other produce, particularly apples and bananas. A bunch stored right next to a fruit bowl in the fridge will yellow and soften faster than the same bunch kept apart from it, for reasons that have nothing to do with the celery itself.

What actually helps

Get it out of the original bag. That bag is close to the worst container available for this particular vegetable.
Foil for low effort, water for stalks already going soft. Either beats plastic; use the water method as a rescue, not just a habit.
Bendy is not the same as spoiled. An ice-water soak often brings a limp stalk most of the way back before you write it off.
Watch for slime and spreading dark patches, not for softness. Those are the actual signs something has gone wrong.
Keep it away from apples and bananas if the crisper drawer is shared with the fruit bowl.

Celery is exactly the kind of thing that goes quiet in a fridge for the wrong reason — it does not smell, it does not visibly rot, so nothing prompts you to check on it until the bunch is more bendy than crisp. In Munch, the leftover two-thirds of a bunch gets logged as its own batch with a location and a date, visible to everyone in the household rather than sitting in one person's memory, and it shows up grouped with recipes that are already close to done — so it surfaces as something specific to use before it gets that far, rather than disappearing into the general impression that there is probably a vegetable in there somewhere.

The whole thing comes down to one substitution: stop thinking of a bendy stalk as a spoiled one, and start thinking of it as a dehydrated one — because that is almost always what it is, and it changes both how you store celery and how quickly you decide to throw it out.