Provided are methods and systems for federated redaction of select content in documents stored across multiple repositories. With the presently disclosed technology, multi-layer redaction policies can be defined in either regular expression or with pattern matching. The redaction policies are associated with one or more document classes, and applied to the associated documents in substantially real-time. Further, document governance policies can be defined such that users of certain roles may view certain content in an unredacted form, despite the presence of a redaction policy for the document.