AZ · state guide

Arizona background screening law

How the courts here are organized

Arizona has 15 counties and three tiers of court below the appellate courts. The Superior Court is the general trial court, established for each county by A.R.S. §12-123, which gives it original and concurrent jurisdiction and makes it concurrent with justices of the peace over misdemeanors where the penalty is a fine of $2,500 or less or imprisonment for six months or less. The justice courts sit at A.R.S. §22-201, with civil jurisdiction up to $10,000. The municipal courts sit at A.R.S. §22-402, are established by city ordinance, take the city’s ordinance violations, and are concurrent with justices of the peace over state law violations committed within the city limits. The counties are those listed at A.R.S. §§11-103 through 11-117.

The statewide case search is the Arizona Judicial Branch product called Public Access to Court Information, with a case-search page headed Public Access Case Lookup. It is reached from the Case Search link on the azcourts.gov homepage and it runs on apps.azcourts.gov, which is the host the Administrative Office of the Courts publishes. The product page states that it provides a resource for information about court cases from 177 out of 184 courts in Arizona, and that sentence is the whole coverage claim: 184 is the denominator the state itself uses, and seven courts are outside it before any question of case types is asked.

The exclusions are listed by the state in its own words. Sealed cases, cases involving Orders of Protection, mental health and probate cases, and victim and witness data are excluded from search results. Juvenile incorrigible and delinquency case information cannot be viewed, though other case types in which juveniles are parties, traffic cases among them, may be displayed. Certain administrative functions carried out by superior court clerk’s offices are not included, passport application processing and private process server registration among them. Charges stemming from local ordinance violations are not included. Sealed cases come first in that list, which is worth noticing, because sealing is also the state’s main route to removing a record from view.

The product then disclaims its own completeness in five separate sentences. The information may not be a current, accurate, or complete record of the case. The information is not the official record of the court. Not all cases from a participating court may be included. The information should not be used as a substitute for a thorough background search of official public records. And on freshness: case information is updated weekly, each Friday, to reflect case information through the Wednesday of the same week. Those are the vendor’s disclaimers, but they sit on the state’s own page, which is why they are worth carrying.

The gaps are enumerated court by court on a page headed Unavailable Courts, which opens by saying that the courts that follow are not accessible or display only a portion of their case population. Maricopa Superior Court is listed as displaying only criminal cases. Pima County Superior Court and Pima Consolidated Justice are listed as unavailable through the site. Justice of the peace courts, Chandler Municipal, Gilbert Municipal, Mesa Municipal, Paradise Valley Municipal and Tempe Municipal carry the marker the page defines as courts that only display delinquent cases. Maricopa is the state’s largest county and Pima is the second largest, so the two largest courts in Arizona are a partial display and a blank.

There is a second product for Superior Court documents, called eAccess, described by the judiciary as covering criminal and civil court documents in the Superior Court. It is a document portal rather than a case index, which makes it a different instrument answering a different question from the case search, and the two do not have the same coverage.

The repository side of Arizona is the part that makes the page unusual. Arizona criminal history record information is confidential as against the public by statute, and the release channels are set out in A.R.S. §41-1750 rather than negotiated with the state. The consequence for screening is not that the state’s data is unreliable. It is that the state’s data is not available to the customer at all, so a screening product sold in Arizona is a court-record product, and the honest coverage statement a provider can make about Arizona is a statement about which courts it searched rather than about which repository it queried.

The repository gap in Arizona is a legal bar rather than an access problem, and it changes what a coverage statement can honestly say. A.R.S. §41-1750(G) lists the persons and agencies who may exchange criminal history record information, and the list is exhaustive. Criminal justice agencies are on it. Noncriminal justice agencies are on it only where a statute, ordinance or executive order authorizes the request and the agency submits fingerprints and pays a fee. The board of fingerprinting is on it. So is any individual, for any lawful purpose, on submission of the fingerprints of the subject of the record and the prescribed fee, which is a check the person who is the subject of the record initiates and not one an employer orders on somebody else. The governor is on it, and regional computer centers are on it. No private employer appears on it. No consumer reporting agency appears on it.

What sits behind that list is A.R.S. §41-1756, titled Unauthorized access to criminal history. A person commits the offense by intentionally, knowingly or recklessly permitting unauthorized access to the Arizona criminal justice information system or to criminal history record information; by using either for a purpose other than as §41-1750 provides; or by releasing or procuring the release of criminal history information. The offense is a class 6 felony. Both definitions the section uses, for the system and for the information, are the ones in §41-1750, so the two sections have to be read together, and read together they say that a private employer asking the state for a job applicant’s criminal history is asking for something the state may not give and the request itself engages the misuse provision.

The routing follows from that. An Arizona employment search is put together from the Superior Court in the county or counties of interest, from the justice and municipal courts in the cities and precincts of interest, and from the federal courts, which are not subject to the state provision at all. Each of those sources is a separate index with its own coverage, and the state’s own case search documents the limits of one of them rather than papering over them.

That is why the coverage language matters more here than the speed. A provider that describes an Arizona search as a statewide criminal record check has described a product that cannot exist under Arizona law. The accurate version names the court tiers searched, and if the answer came from a multi-state database rather than from the courts directly, it says so, because the database is a republisher of court records and inherits every gap in them.

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 Arizona adds on top of that floor, and where it departs from it.

What Arizona law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Arizona 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.

Arizona adds a state-law exposure on the provider side of the sequence rather than the employer side. A.R.S. §44-1695 requires reasonable procedures to ensure the maximum possible accuracy of the information in a consumer report, and it opens the door to punitive damages and attorney fees where the conduct was grossly negligent or willful or malicious. In a state where the record has to be assembled from a case search the state itself describes as not the official record of the court, an accuracy challenge has an obvious route: the report can be compared against the court file, and the comparison is the whole argument.

The repository bar also changes the shape of a dispute. In a state with a central repository, the provider points at the state’s record and the consumer disputes the state’s data. In Arizona the provider is the one who assembled the record from court sources, so the question on a dispute is which court was searched and when, and the answer is a fact about the provider’s process rather than about a third party. That is worth knowing before a dispute arrives rather than during one.

Sealing changes what the report should have carried rather than what the notice should say. A.R.S. §13-911 took effect from 31 December 2022 and reaches arrests, convictions and sentences before, on or after that date, and sealed cases are excluded from the state case search. A report that carries a sealed Arizona case has therefore drawn it from a source other than the public index, or from a stale copy of the index, and the corrective action is removal rather than annotation.

The negligent-hiring shield cuts the other way from a notice requirement and is worth weighing separately. A.R.S. §12-558.03 makes a prior conviction inadmissible in a negligent-hiring action pleaded on other theories and shields the employer from liability for the hire, subject to the carve-outs, so the presence of a record in a report does not by itself create the exposure an employer might assume it does. Where the search does matter is the exception at subsection (C), knowledge of a direct relationship plus gross negligence, which is a question about what the employer did with the report after it arrived.

For the provider rather than the employer, the operative Arizona fact is provenance. Because there is no state repository channel, every Arizona criminal record in a report came from a court or from a database built on courts, and the two claim different coverage. A product that says it checked Arizona without saying which courts it checked has said nothing that can be verified and nothing that can be relied on.

Screening in Arizona: what your process needs

• Do not describe an Arizona search as a state repository check. A.R.S. §41-1750(G) does not authorize a private employer or a consumer reporting agency to receive criminal history record information, and A.R.S. §41-1756 makes procuring the release a class 6 felony.
• Name the court tiers actually searched. Superior Court, justice court and municipal court have different coverage, and the state’s own case search documents the gaps in each.
• Check the two largest counties by hand. Maricopa Superior Court is listed by the state as displaying criminal cases only, and Pima Superior Court as unavailable through the state’s case search.
• Treat a state case search result as provisional. The product states that it is not the official record of the court, that it may not be a current, accurate or complete record, and that it should not be used as a substitute for a thorough background search of official public records.
• Account for the weekly refresh. Case information is updated each Friday to reflect the Wednesday of the same week, so a search run on a Thursday is up to eight days behind on a filing.
• Search the justice and municipal courts separately where the role involves driving, alcohol-related offenses or city ordinance violations, because ordinance charges are excluded from the state search entirely.
• Confirm whether the record is sealed before reporting it. Sealed cases are excluded from the state case search, so a sealed Arizona case in a report came from somewhere else or from a stale copy.
• Where a candidate has an Arizona conviction, read A.R.S. §12-558.03 before the adverse action discussion, because the shield may already have removed the negligent-hiring exposure and subsection (C) is the exception that matters.
• Do not ask about criminal history on the application for a state agency role. Executive Order 2017-07 postpones the question until after the application and the initial interview, and it does not apply to private employers.
• Check medical marijuana status separately from a positive test. A.R.S. §36-2813(B) protects cardholder status and a registered patient’s positive test, and the exception is use, possession or impairment at work rather than the test result alone.
• Do not rely on a drug-testing policy to dispose of a medical cannabis case. The adult-use statute preserves employer policies for recreational use, and it does not displace the medical protection.
• Keep the report’s sources documented against a dispute. The Arizona record was assembled from court data, so the answer to a challenge is which court was searched and on what date.
• Watch for a republished mugshot record being used as a source. A.R.S. §44-7902 restricts the operators of those sites, and a record drawn from one carries no more authority than the court file behind it.
• Re-check the sealing deadline figure. The court’s window under A.R.S. §13-911(D) was thirty days from 2022 and sixty days from 14 September 2024.
• Note that Arizona’s fair-chance rule covers state agencies only, so a private employer’s application form is governed by federal law and by whatever city ordinance applies in the city where it hires, which was not researched here.

Related states

• Texas. Texas named hiring practices as a field its cities may not regulate, which voids Austin’s private-employer fair-chance ordinance under the text of that provision, and it makes its own criminal history confidential by statute so access runs through a subscription clearinghouse rather than the state.
• Oklahoma. Oklahoma centralizes where almost everyone else fragments. Its court system publishes a county-indexed docket search across all 77 counties from one place, which is the inverse of the county-by-county problem in California and New York.
• California. California bars non-conviction records categorically and sets no salary threshold at all, while its state criminal history repository is statutorily closed to consumer reporting agencies. Every search runs on county superior courts, all 58 of them.

What we do

Arizona is the state where the criminal record is not for sale. The subsection that lists who may exchange Arizona criminal history record information omits both private employers and consumer reporting agencies, and the neighboring section makes releasing or procuring the release of that information a class 6 felony, so a lawful Arizona employment search is a court-record search rather than a repository check. We build it that way: the Superior Court in the counties that matter, the justice and municipal courts where the role makes them relevant, and the state’s own case search treated as what it says it is, a weekly index that is not the official record of the court and that carries Maricopa as criminal cases only and Pima as unavailable. Layered on top is Arizona’s consumer reporting act, with a maximum-possible-accuracy duty and a damages route that reaches punitive damages and attorney fees, a sealing statute effective from 31 December 2022, a negligent-hiring shield with carve-outs for violent and sexual offenses, and a medical marijuana protection that survives a positive test. If your process treats an Arizona record as a repository lookup, the coverage statement is wrong before the search runs.

Sources

• A.R.S. §41-1750, Criminal history record information, exchange list at subsection (G)
• A.R.S. §41-1756, Unauthorized access to criminal history, classification, definitions
• A.R.S. §44-1691, consumer report definition, Arizona consumer reporting act
• A.R.S. §44-1692, permitted uses including employment purposes
• A.R.S. §44-1695, liability and the accuracy duty
• A.R.S. §44-1696, violation as a class 1 misdemeanor
• A.R.S. Title 44 index, consumer reporting article
• A.R.S. §13-911, sealing of arrest, conviction and sentence records
• SB1294, Laws 2021 ch. 432, the act adding A.R.S. §13-911
• SB1639, Laws 2024 ch. 244, amending A.R.S. §13-911(D)
• Arizona general effective dates
• A.R.S. §12-558.03, limited liability for employers hiring ex-offenders
• A.R.S. §12-123, Superior Court jurisdiction
• A.R.S. §22-201, justice court jurisdiction
• A.R.S. §22-402, municipal courts
• A.R.S. §36-2813, medical marijuana employment protection
• A.R.S. §36-2851, Smart and Safe Arizona Act, employer provisions
• A.R.S. §44-7902, mugshot website operators
• A.R.S. §41-1463, Arizona Civil Rights Act, unlawful employment practices
• Arizona Judicial Branch, Public Access Case Lookup and unavailable courts list
• Arizona Judicial Branch, eAccess Superior Court document portal
• Executive Order 2017-07, Establishment Of Arizona As A Second Chance Employer, and the Governor’s Office news release of 6 November 2017

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.