Systems and methods are disclosed for scalable bucket merging in a data intake and query system. Various components of a bucket manager can be used to monitor recently-created buckets of data in common storage that are associated with a particular tenant and a particular index, apply a comprehensive bucket merge policy to determine groups of buckets that qualify for merging, merge those group of buckets into merged buckets to be stored in the common storage, and update any information associated with the merged buckets and pre-merged buckets. These components may be shared across multiple tenants, and some of these components may be dynamically scalable based on need. This approach may also provide many additional benefits, including improved search performance from merged buckets, efficient resource utilization associated with discriminate merging, and redundancy in case of component failure.