How long does fresh pasta last in the fridge?

Short version: a sealed, commercially packaged fresh pasta can carry a use-by date that reaches surprisingly far out, sometimes a couple of weeks from when it was made, because of how it is packaged rather than because it is unusually stable. Once that pack is opened, or if the pasta is unpackaged — made at home, or bought loose from a counter — the window shortens fast, down to around two to three days. Filled pasta like ravioli or tortellini sits at the shorter end of whatever range applies, because the filling, not the dough wrapped around it, is usually the more perishable part. None of this lines up with how dry pasta behaves, and that is the point: fresh pasta is a different food that happens to be shaped the same way.

The same dough, at a different point in its life

Dry pasta and fresh pasta start from a similar idea — flour, water, sometimes egg — but they part ways at exactly the step that decides how long each one keeps. A box of dry spaghetti has had almost all its moisture removed before packing, which is why it barely ages on a shelf. Fresh pasta skips that step entirely. It goes into the fridge at roughly the moisture content of bread dough, and dough left in the fridge is never a long-term proposition, whatever shape it has been rolled or cut into. That single difference — water still in the food — is the whole reason fresh pasta belongs with the fridge's perishable dough and batter items rather than with the pantry shelf one aisle over.

What is wrapped around the filling decides the rest

Plain fresh pasta — fettuccine, tagliatelle, lasagne sheets. Just dough, so the dough itself is what you are judging. This sits at the longer end of the fresh-pasta range once opened.
Egg-heavy fresh pasta. More egg in the dough means more of a protein-rich, moisture-carrying ingredient for anything to work with, which nudges the safer window a little shorter than a plain flour-and-water dough.
Filled pasta — ravioli, tortellini, agnolotti. The filling is usually cheese, meat, or both, sealed inside raw dough. Treat this the way the rest of this site treats any dish built around cheese or meat: the filling sets the clock, and the pasta wrapped around it does not buy extra time.

Why the unopened date can look unusually generous

A commercially made fresh pasta that reaches the supermarket chiller with a date weeks away is not lying to you — it is almost always packed in a sealed, low-oxygen environment that slows down the organisms that would otherwise spoil a moist dough quickly. That packaging is doing real work, and the date on it reflects that specific, unopened, still-sealed state. The moment the seal is broken, the pack is back to behaving like any other fresh dough exposed to a normal fridge atmosphere, and the printed date stops being the number that matters. This is the same shift covered elsewhere on this site for other sealed products: the date on the front answers a question about the sealed pack, not about the open one sitting half-used on a shelf.

Freezing is the better move here, not just a backup

Unlike a lot of cooked dishes, uncooked fresh pasta freezes genuinely well, plain or filled. Dust it lightly with flour or semolina so the pieces do not weld together, freeze it in a single layer until firm, then bag it — and it can go straight from freezer to boiling water with no thaw needed, cooking a minute or so longer than it would fresh. Because the unopened-fridge window is already short, freezing whatever will not be cooked in the next couple of days is usually the better call than hoping the fridge stretches it, rather than a fallback you reach for only once something is about to turn.

What actually tells you a batch is done

A grey or dulled surface, rather than the pale, slightly translucent look of fresh dough, is the first sign. It usually shows up before anything smells wrong.
Sliminess or a tacky film is a clearer signal than colour alone, especially on sheets or long shapes that have been sitting stacked together.
A sour or fermented smell means it goes, the same standard as any other dough or batter in the fridge.
On filled pasta, check the seams first. That is where filling meets the outside air, and it is usually where a problem shows itself before the rest of the piece does.

What actually helps

Keep an unopened pack sealed until you are ready to cook it, rather than opening it early to check on it — opening it starts the shorter clock immediately.
Once opened, treat it like a two-to-three-day ingredient, plain dough at the longer end, filled pasta at the shorter end.
Freeze what you will not cook within that window instead of leaving it in the fridge hoping the printed date still applies — it does not, once the seal is broken.
Cook straight from frozen. Thawing first mostly adds a soggy, stuck-together mess for no benefit.

Fresh pasta is one of the easier fridge items to lose track of precisely because the packaging looks similar to the dry pasta a shelf over, and the instinct is to treat the date the same way. Munch logs each item by the day it was added and where it is stored, fridge, freezer or pantry, so an opened pack of tagliatelle is tracked on its own shorter countdown from the day it was opened rather than quietly inheriting the sealed pack's original date — and a bag pushed into the freezer for later shows up as exactly that, not as a fridge item slowly going ungraded in the background.

The short version worth keeping: fresh pasta is dough that was never dried, so it keeps like dough — fine for a couple of weeks sealed, closer to two or three days once that seal is broken, and better frozen than left to test how far the fridge will stretch it.