Efficient and persisting immune memory is essential for long-term protection from infectious and malignant diseases. The yellow fever (YF) vaccine is a live attenuated virus that mediates lifelong protection, with recent studies showing that the CD8⁺ T cell response is particularly robust. Yet, limited data exist regarding the long-term CD8⁺ T cell response, with no studies beyond 5 years after vaccination. We investigated 41 vaccinees, spanning 0.27 to 35 years after vaccination. YF-specific CD8⁺ T cells were readily detected in almost all donors (38 of 41), with frequencies decreasing with time. As previously described, effector cells dominated the response early after vaccination. We detected a population of naïve-like YF-specific CD8⁺ T cells that was stably maintained for more than 25 years and was capable of self-renewal ex vivo. In-depth analyses of markers and genome-wide mRNA profiling showed that naïve-like YF-specific CD8⁺ T cells in vaccinees (i) were distinct from genuine naïve cells in unvaccinated donors, (ii) resembled the recently described stem cell–like memory subset (Tscm), and (iii) among all differentiated subsets, had profiles closest to naïve cells. Our findings reveal that CD8⁺ Tscm are efficiently induced by a vaccine in humans, persist for decades, and preserve a naïveness-like profile. These data support YF vaccination as an optimal mechanistic model for the study of long-lasting memory CD8⁺ T cells in humans.