AL · state guide

Alabama background screening law

How the courts here are organized

Alabama is a two-tier criminal state organized on county lines, and the county is the filing unit. Section 12-11-1(a) provides that "There is provided in every county in the state a circuit court with all the jurisdiction and powers that are conferred on the circuit court by the Constitution and laws of this state." A felony is filed in the circuit court of the county where it happened, so a search that scales with the number of counties scales correctly here, which is the opposite of how a unified system behaves.

The circuits are enumerated in the code and there are forty-one of them. Section 12-11-2 divides the state "into judicial circuits for the circuit courts, numbered and composed of counties", and the enumeration runs from "(1) First circuit - Choctaw, Clarke and Washington" to "(41) Forty-first circuit - Blount". Some circuits are a single county, including the Tenth (Jefferson), the Thirteenth (Mobile), the Fifteenth (Montgomery), the Twenty-third (Madison) and the Twenty-eighth (Baldwin). Others group three, four or five counties, among them the Fourth (Bibb, Dallas, Hale, Perry and Wilcox) and the Seventeenth (Marengo, Greene and Sumter). The circuit is the venue, and the counties inside it each keep their own filings.

The circuit court holds the felony business. Section 12-11-30(2) gives it "exclusive original jurisdiction of all felony prosecutions, unless the defendant is a minor", with the district court empowered to hold preliminary hearings and to take guilty pleas in felonies not punishable by death. On the civil side § 12-11-30(1) sets exclusive original jurisdiction above $20,000 and concurrent jurisdiction with the district court above $6,000, which matters only because it is the same court file.

Below the circuit court sit three further tiers, and two of them generate records a screening program will meet. The district court, under § 12-12-32(a), "shall have exclusive original trial jurisdiction over prosecutions of all offenses defined by law or ordinance as misdemeanors", subject to three exceptions for municipal-court prosecutions, prosecutions that also involve a felony, and misdemeanors already indicted by a grand jury. The municipal court, established for each municipal corporation by § 12-14-1(a), has jurisdiction over "all prosecutions for the breach of the ordinances of the municipality within its police jurisdiction" and concurrent jurisdiction with the district court over state-law violations prosecuted as ordinance breaches. A city ordinance conviction is therefore a separate record from the state case arising out of the same conduct, and a search that reaches only one of the two holds half of it. The probate court at § 12-13-1 is the fourth tier and its enumerated jurisdiction is estates, guardianship, dower, partition and name changes, so it is not a criminal record source.

The court system publishes its own description of itself and it is not reachable from here. judicial.alabama.gov resolves to 12.11.94.43 and times out on ports 443 and 80 on every attempt, so the courts' own pages were read through Internet Archive raw replay instead. The archived Judicial System Chart page and the archived home page confirm the four trial tiers and the existence of a dedicated "Judicial Circuits" section on the site, but the circuits page itself is not in the archive under any of the three URLs tried. The forty-one circuit count on this page therefore rests on § 12-11-2, which is the enumerating statute, and not on the courts' own listing. The circuit count is solid; the courts' own description of their search facilities is not available and no claim is made about it.

The repository is ALEA's and the access routes are narrower than the system's name suggests. The agency's own Criminal Records Identification Unit page states that the unit "includes the Records Check Section, which is responsible for responding to inquiries of criminal history and background matters and provides requested criminal background information as applicable by law", and that the Criminal History Section "maintains fingerprint files for all arrested offenders in the state of Alabama, as well as deceased persons". The Alabama Background Check page describes the system itself as "a secure, web-based site that allows qualifying employers to access the most up to date, comprehensive Alabama criminal records available for current and prospective employees". What makes an employer qualifying, what the access fee is, and whether a consumer reporting agency can hold access in its own right or only in contract with an employer are not stated on the pages read, so this page does not state them.

The subject-initiated route is the one whose terms are published, and it puts the applicant inside the transaction. The agency's description: "The applicant will have to be fingerprinted, provide a copy of the current photo ID, the AL CHRI application, and a payment of $25.00 in the form of a money order or Cashier's check (each additional copy is $5.00 extra) in person at 301 S. Ripley Street, Montgomery, AL 36104 (Adams Ave side) or by mail at PO Box 1511, Montgomery, AL 36102-1511." A fingerprint-based, applicant-driven state check is a different product from a name-based commercial search of court files, and the two should not be described as the same thing in a process document.

The misuse provisions are criminal and they are the sharp edge of the repository. Section 41-9-601 provides that any person who "willfully requests, obtains, or seeks to obtain criminal offender record information under false pretenses or who willfully communicates or seeks to communicate criminal offender record information to any agency or person except in accordance with this article" is, for each offense, to be fined not less than $5,000 nor more than $10,000 or imprisoned in the state penitentiary for not more than five years or both. Section 41-9-602 makes knowing communication outside the article a misdemeanor with a fine of $500 to $10,000 or 30 days to one year, or both. The agency repeats the warning in its own words on the ABC page: "Any person who willingly requests, obtains, or seeks to obtain criminal offender record information under false pretenses is subject to felony criminal penalties. All transactions are monitored and logged by ALEA."

Two dated facts belong in any Alabama file. Act 2026-374 amends § 41-9-590 and § 41-9-594 effective 1 October 2026, and the two amendments are visible in the Legislature's own section data as separate versions distinguished by effective date. In the version in force at the review date, § 41-9-594(d) lets the Alabama Justice Information Commission "adopt rules and policies that permit ALEA to perform background checks for noncriminal justice purposes" and charge "a fee not to exceed twenty-five dollars ($25)", and § 41-9-594(e) lets the police department of a college or university offering medical, nursing or health care education, or operating a hospital, request a check on "any person who applies for employment with the college or university". The 1 October 2026 version drops both subsections and rewrites the definitions, adding "BACKGROUND CHECK", "CRIMINAL EVENT", "IDENTITY HISTORY DATA", "NONCRIMINAL JUSTICE PURPOSE" and "RAP BACK" among others. Any Alabama policy document that quotes § 41-9-594 currently should be re-read against the version that takes effect on 1 October 2026.

Court access is the gap that was not closed. judicial.alabama.gov is network-blocked from this environment, so whether the Alabama courts publish a statewide criminal case search, to whom, and at what fee was not established, and the archived pages do not answer it. What the structure does establish is what a search has to cover: the circuit court file for the felony, the district court file for the misdemeanor or the preliminary hearing, and the municipal court file where the conduct was prosecuted as an ordinance breach. Nothing in the instruments read suggests those three collapse into one record.

The federal baseline

Federal law sets the floor here as it does everywhere. It is at 15 U.S.C. §1681 et seq., it binds the agency and the employer separately, and it does not vary by state. The FCRA article covers it section by section, including the seven-year limits, the salary threshold and the adverse action sequence, so that this page does not restate any of it.

What follows is only the overlay: what Alabama adds on top of that floor, and where it departs from it.

What Alabama law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Alabama law. Where a row says “federal only”, the state has set nothing and 15 U.S.C. §1681c governs.

Adverse action here

The federal sequence applies unchanged: pre-adverse action notice with a copy of the report and the summary of rights, a reasonable opportunity to dispute, then the adverse action notice with the agency's details and a dispute route. The FCRA article sets it out in full. Alabama adds no state pre-adverse or adverse notice duty for a criminal-history report, and no state section read imposes one.

What Alabama adds at the decision end runs the other way and belongs in the file before a letter is written. Section 12-26-9(k) gives an employer immunity from a negligent-hiring claim where it knew of the employee's order of limited relief at the time of the alleged negligent hiring. That is a defense which depends on the employer having the document, so a process that obtains and files the order is in a stronger position than one that does not, and a withdrawal decision made without checking whether an order exists may be giving up a statutory defense for nothing.

The expungement rule changes what a letter can say about a discrepancy. Section 15-27-6(b) provides that the petitioner "shall not have to disclose the fact of the record or any matter relating thereto on an application for employment, credit, or other type of application". Where an Alabama expungement is in play, a form answer that denies a record and a vendor report that shows one can both be accurate, and a letter drafted on the assumption that the applicant concealed something is asserting a fact the section says is not so. The duty to disclose survives only against government regulatory or licensing agencies, utilities and their agents and affiliates, and banks or other financial institutions, and § 15-27-14 removes the Alabama Securities Commission from the chapter entirely.

A letter that relies on an ALEA record has to be able to say how the record was obtained. Section 41-9-601 makes it a felony to willfully obtain criminal offender record information under false pretenses, or to willfully communicate it outside the article, punishable by five years and a fine of $5,000 to $10,000 for each offense, and the agency states that "All transactions are monitored and logged by ALEA". The subject-initiated Alabama CHRI route is fingerprint-based and applicant-driven, and the ABC route is described by the agency as open to "qualifying employers". A process that cannot say which of those two routes produced the record, or on what basis it qualified for it, is holding something it cannot account for.

Two date checks belong in the file. Act 2026-374 amends § 41-9-590 and § 41-9-594 effective 1 October 2026, and the current text of each carries the bracketed warning "AMENDED BY ACT 2026-374, EFFECTIVE OCTOBER 1, 2026. SEE ACT FOR REVISED LANGUAGE." Any Alabama policy document quoting § 41-9-594 now, including the sentence permitting ALEA to perform noncriminal justice background checks and the subsection letting a college or university police department check its own employment applicants, should be re-read against the version that takes effect on that date. Separately, the Alabama Personal Data Protection Act at Title 8, chapter 44 takes effect 1 May 2027 and is not state law at the review date on this page.

There is no state adverse-action notice duty, no state lookback rule, no state salary threshold, and no state ban-the-box provision in Alabama. For a conviction report the federal sequence is the whole of the procedural requirement, and the state overlay is the expungement rule at § 15-27-6, the order of limited relief at § 12-26-9 and the repository access rules at §§ 41-9-590 to -603.

Screening in Alabama: what your process needs

• Do not describe Alabama as a ban-the-box state and do not build a process on the assumption that one exists. No section read prohibits an employer's criminal-record inquiry at either level. The finding is about the 59,044-record code table of contents and the section texts read in full.
• Ask, on every Alabama file, whether the applicant's record has been expunged under Title 15, chapter 27. If it has, § 15-27-6(b) means the applicant was not obliged to disclose it on the application, and a discrepancy between the form and the report is not evidence of concealment.
• Check whether an order of limited relief under Title 12, chapter 26 is on file before a withdrawal decision is taken. Section 12-26-9(k) gives an employer immunity from a negligent-hiring claim where it knew of the order, and (l) confines a retention suit to two situations. The order is the employer's document to hold.
• Read § 20-2A-6 before writing anything about cannabis in an Alabama policy. The state is not employee-protective here: (a)(3) permits adverse action regardless of impairment, (a)(4) preserves any drug testing policy, (a)(5) permits a card-disclosure requirement, and (a)(7) forecloses a cause of action. The program is live, with the first dispensary opened on 4 June 2026, so this is not a contingent provision.
• Re-read any Alabama policy that quotes § 41-9-594 or § 41-9-590 against the version that takes effect on 1 October 2026. Act 2026-374 rewrites both, drops the subsection permitting ALEA to perform noncriminal justice background checks at a fee of up to $25, drops the subsection letting a college or university police department check its own employment applicants, and replaces the definitions.
• Do not cite Title 26, chapter 20 for anything. The chapter heading reads as a live requirement to check sex crime records for employees supervising minors and every section in it was repealed by Act 2000-775 effective 1 November 2000. The live requirement is Title 38, chapter 13, which is broader and covers care employers, facilities, the Department of Human Resources and child placing agencies.
• Do not describe the Alabama Personal Data Protection Act as Alabama law. Title 8, chapter 44 was enacted by Act 2026-552 and takes effect 1 May 2027. When it commences it excludes employment-context data under § 8-44-2(16) and exempts small businesses, so it is not a screening instrument either way.
• Scope the court search to the venue, not to the state. A felony sits in the circuit court of the county where it happened, a misdemeanor in the district court, and an ordinance prosecution in the municipal court, and the last of those is a separate record from the state case arising out of the same conduct. The forty-one circuits are the venue map, and the counties within them each keep their own filings.
• Establish which ALEA route produced any state record. The subject-initiated CHRI is fingerprint-based, applicant-driven and $25 by money order or cashier's check. The ABC system is described by the agency as open to "qualifying employers", and the criteria, the fee and whether a screening firm may hold access are not published on the pages read.
• Treat § 41-9-601 as the governing risk on the repository. Willfully obtaining criminal offender record information under false pretenses, or willfully communicating it outside the article, is a felony carrying up to five years and a fine of $5,000 to $10,000 for each offense, and the agency states that all transactions are monitored and logged.

Related states

• Georgia. Georgia’s First Offender Act says a discharge is not a conviction and "shall not be used to disqualify an individual in any application for employment or appointment to office in either the public or private sector", and the section opens by excepting Code Section 42-8-63.1: a discharge can still disqualify applicants to schools, child welfare agencies, child and after-school care, long-term care, day care for elderly persons and facilities for people who are mentally ill or developmentally disabled, on one offense list for discharges before 1 July 2016 and a different one after, and any discharge involving a felony or a crime involving moral turpitude can bar a peace officer certification. The superior court is the felony tier in circuits carrying all 159 counties, and a magistrate court sits in every one of them.
• Tennessee. Tennessee sells its own criminal history to anyone: the Bureau of Investigation offers a "Tennessee Only" check at "$29" with "FINGERPRINTS NOT REQUIRED", while the nationwide product is $50 and does require them, so the state report on a named person is the cheaper and more open of the two and no employment purpose has to be established to buy it. The expunction paragraph every summary quotes is gone: Public Chapter 268 of 2025, Senate Bill 1055, rewrote § 40-32-101 as a definitions section and re-enacted the "never occurred" rule and the bar on collateral consequences at § 40-32-110(b) and (c), so a page citing § 40-32-101(g) for the effect of an expunction is citing a paragraph that no longer exists. The mechanism is deletion rather than sealing, which is what separates a Tennessee expunction from a screening file built before the order: § 40-32-110(a) entitles the petitioner "to have all public records of the expunged conviction destroyed in the manner set forth in this chapter", and the bureau describes its own practice as "At TBI, the charges are actually deleted from the defendant’s record" and "we do not ’seal’ records". The courts are 95 counties run through 32 judicial districts, and General Sessions, which sits in every county, is where a misdemeanor is decided whenever the defendant waives the grand jury and the jury, so the tier that holds most misdemeanor dispositions is not the circuit file.
• Florida. Where Florida law requires a criminal history check or makes one a condition of a privilege or benefit, the check has to include a Florida criminal history provided by the Department of Law Enforcement, and a private vendor may supply it only if that information is obtained directly from the department for each request. The state regulates categories of employment rather than employers: Chapter 435, "Employment Screening", opens at § 435.01(1)(a) with "Unless otherwise provided by law, whenever a background screening for employment or a background security check is required by law to be conducted pursuant to this chapter, the provisions of this chapter apply", and everything the chapter does is downstream of that condition, so a private employer outside a covered category is outside the chapter and no Florida statute bans the criminal history question in the private sector. Where the chapter applies it fixes the standard, with a Level 1 check under § 435.03(1) running "statewide criminal correspondence checks through the Department of Law Enforcement, and a check of the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website" and a Level 2 check under § 435.04(1)(a) adding "fingerprinting for statewide criminal history records checks through the Department of Law Enforcement, national criminal history records checks through the Federal Bureau of Investigation", which puts local records checks below the state level and decides how a search here has to be scoped. The disqualifying list at § 435.04(2) runs from (a) to (zz) and reaches a person who has "been arrested for and are awaiting final disposition of" a listed offense, so a pending case disqualifies before any conviction, and § 435.06(1) leaves one ground on which to contest it: "The only basis for contesting the disqualification is proof of mistaken identity." For public employment the restraint sits on the decision rather than the inquiry, at § 112.011.

What we do

Alabama is the thinnest screening-law state we cover, and the honest answer to what your process needs here is that the state imposes almost nothing and the federal sequence does the work. There is no ban-the-box provision at either level, no state consumer reporting act, no lookback rule and no salary threshold, and the finding rests on the whole Code of Alabama 1975 table of contents plus the text of every section cited. What Alabama does have runs in the employer's favor and is easy to miss: an expungement rule that removes the record from the applicant's answer while the state repository keeps it indefinitely, a negligent-hiring immunity for employers that hold an employee's order of limited relief, a medical cannabis chapter that permits adverse action regardless of impairment and forecloses a cause of action for it, and a repository whose misuse provisions are felonies with transactions logged. Our Alabama work reads the expungement question first, checks whether an order of limited relief is on file before a withdrawal decision, scopes the court search to the circuit, district and municipal venues separately, and states which ALEA route produced any state record. If your current vendor treats Alabama as a ban-the-box state, or reports an expunged Alabama charge without asking what the applicant was entitled to answer, this is where that shows.

Sources

• Ala. Code § 15-27-6, Order of Expungement; Certification; Inspection of Expunged Records, including the non-disclosure rule at (b)
• Ala. Code § 15-27-8, Records Forwarded to and Retained by Alabama State Law Enforcement Agency
• Ala. Code § 15-27-7, Archive of Records; Withdrawal of Records from National Criminal Records Repository
• Ala. Code § 15-27-2, Petition to Expunge Records - Felony Offense, including the pardon condition at (c)(1)
• Ala. Code § 15-27-1, Petition to Expunge Records - Misdemeanor Offense, Violation, Traffic Violation, or Municipal Ordinance Violation
• Ala. Code § 15-27-2.1, Limitations on Number of Expungements Granted
• Ala. Code § 15-27-4, Administrative Filing Fee; Indigency
• Ala. Code § 15-27-14, Applicability - Alabama Securities Commission, and § 15-27-16, Disclosure of Information from Expunged File Without a Court Order; Liability
• Ala. Code § 12-26-9, Time of Ruling; Hearing; Scope; Appeal; Negligent Hiring, including the employer immunity at (k) and (l)
• Ala. Code § 20-2A-6, Application of Chapter; Authorized Use of Medical Cannabis Construed for Medical, Employment, and Child Welfare Purposes
• Ala. Code § 12-11-2, State Divided into Judicial Circuits; Enumeration of Circuits, and § 12-11-1, Circuit Court in Every County
• Ala. Code § 12-11-30, circuit court jurisdiction, § 12-12-31 and § 12-12-32, district court jurisdiction, § 12-13-1, probate court jurisdiction, § 12-14-1, municipal court jurisdiction
• Ala. Code § 41-9-590 and § 41-9-594, criminal justice information definitions and the Alabama Justice Information Commission rulemaking and fee provisions, in the version in force and in the version effective 1 October 2026 under Act 2026-374
• Ala. Code § 41-9-601 and § 41-9-602, criminal penalties for obtaining or communicating criminal offender record information in violation of the article
• Ala. Code § 25-1-40, Electronic Access to Wage Reports, article 4, Use of Consumer Reporting Agencies
• Ala. Code § 8-35-1 and § 8-35-2, Consumer Credit Report Security Freeze Act, including the definition of a consumer credit report and the screening exemption at § 8-35-2(o)(4)
• Ala. Code § 8-44-1 to § 8-44-11, the Alabama Personal Data Protection Act, Act 2026-552, effective 1 May 2027, including the employment-context exclusion at § 8-44-2(16) and the small-business exemptions at § 8-44-4(a)
• Ala. Code § 38-13-3, Criminal History Background Information Check Required for Certain Individuals; Exemptions, and § 16-22A-5, Agencies Required to Conduct Criminal History Background Information Checks
• Ala. Code § 26-20-1 to § 26-20-6, Sex Crime Records of Employees Supervising Children, repealed by Act 2000-775, § 12, effective 1 November 2000
• Ala. Code § 36-1-8, Use of Polygraph Testing Prohibited, and § 11-80-16, Prohibition Against Requiring Employers to Grant or Compensate for Vacation or Leave Not Required by State or Federal Law
• Ala. Code § 15-22-36, Authority to Grant Pardons and Paroles, Remit Fines and Forfeitures, Etc.; Notice of Board Action
• Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, Criminal Records Identification Unit, State Bureau of Investigation
• Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, Alabama Background Check, the ABC system and the Alabama CHRI application route
• Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, Criminal Record Expungement, confirming that a court grants an expungement and that ALEA cannot advise on the process
• Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission, Patients, recording the first dispensary opening on 4 June 2026
• Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, home page, retrieved through Internet Archive raw replay of the 17 November 2018 snapshot
• Alabama Judicial System, Judicial System Chart, the courts' own site, retrieved through Internet Archive raw replay

Last reviewed 23 September 2026. This page is checked on a quarterly cycle, because state screening law changes every legislative session. Nothing here is legal advice; see the terms of use.