AR · state guide

Arkansas background screening law

How the courts here are organized

Arkansas does not organize its trial courts by county, and that is the fact that decides how a search here is scoped. Amendment 80, "having taken effect on July 1, 2001, eliminated separate courts of law and courts of equity in Arkansas. Circuit courts are general jurisdiction trial courts. Effective January 1, 2002, circuit courts shall consist of five subject matter divisions: criminal, civil, probate, domestic relations, and juvenile." A felony is therefore a circuit court matter, and the circuit is not the county.

There are twenty-eight circuit designations, counted from the Administrative Office of the Courts judge directory: the First Circuit through the Twenty-Third, with 8N and 8S, 9E and 9W, 11E and 11W, 18E and 18W, and 19E and 19W carved out of the larger numbers. Judicial candidates for circuit judge "run in nonpartisan elections and are required to have been licensed attorneys in the state for six years preceding the date of assuming office", and circuit judges serve a six-year term. A search scoped to a circuit is scoped differently from a search scoped to a county, and in the divided circuits the two do not line up at all.

District courts are the misdemeanor tier and they have their own geography. The Administrative Office of the Courts states that they "exercise territorial jurisdiction within judicial districts established by the General Assembly. This jurisdiction may be city-wide, countywide, or may combine more than one county into a judicial district." Their subject matter jurisdiction covers "traffic violations, misdemeanors offenses, violations of state law and local ordinances, preliminary felony matters, and civil matters involving contracts, damage to personal property and recovery of personal property where the amount in controversy does not exceed $25,000.00", with a small claims division to $5,000.00, and referrals from circuit court under Administrative Order 18. "As of January 1, 2025, forty one (41) District Court Judicial Districts have been established, which are served by seventy (70) full-time district court judges."

Because preliminary felony matters sit in the district court, a felony can exist in two courts whose districts are not the same shape. Felony defendants make their first appearances and have bail set in a district court, and the disposition is entered in the circuit court, so a search that reaches only one tier holds part of the matter and a search that assumes one tier per county holds less than that. The count of seventy-five counties comes from the emergency clause of Act 137 of 2015, which found "that there are seventy-five (75) counties and five hundred (500) cities and towns in the state", and it is the reason an Arkansas run cannot be priced or planned as a county-by-county sweep.

Arkansas publishes a public case search. The Administrative Office of the Courts names it "Search ARCourts" and links it at caseinfo.arcourts.gov/cconnect/PROD/public/ck_public_qry_main.cp_main_idx, and a separate court records link points at caseinfo.arcourts.gov. What that portal covers, whether district and circuit courts both feed it, and whether it charges are unverified for this page: every attempt to read it from the environment this research ran in returned HTTP 403, live and through the reader proxy. The routing conclusion that does hold is structural, which is that the organizing units are the circuit and the district court judicial district, not the county.

The repository question has two answers in the code and the page states both. Subchapter 15 governs what may be released and to whom: "All conviction information and felony arrest records may be disseminated as provided in this subchapter", and the Department of Arkansas State Police "shall provide criminal history information to any person upon proper request and payment of the requisite fee and without requiring written consent of the subject of the request." That is an open channel on its face, and consent from the person whose record it is is not part of it. Subchapter 10 governs the noncriminal justice request instead: information "may be requested by a noncriminal justice agency and shall be made available after a review and express approval of dissemination by the director", on a request that states what is being asked for, who will have access, how it will be used and protected, and who the named temporary custodian is, with the release limited to offenses that occurred in Arkansas. Which of the two governs a commercial screening order was not resolved by this pass, and no attempt is made on the page to prefer one.

The limit that travels with a commercially obtained state record is in the same section that opens it. Section 12-12-1506(a)(4)(A)(i) requires a requestor granted access on the subject's written consent to maintain the consent document "for a period of at least three (3) years", and (a)(4)(A)(iii) provides that "Any requestor that is granted access to criminal history information under this subchapter shall not disseminate the criminal history information." A screening firm that obtains the record is therefore inside a use restriction that its client is not, and a channel that starts open ends narrow.

A check that must be run through the state police has its own procedural condition. Section 12-12-1005(d)(1), as amended by Act 784 of 2023, provides that "A background check request for a noncriminal justice purpose that must be completed under state or federal law through the Division of Arkansas State Police shall be submitted to the division by livescan through the Online Criminal Background Check System", the words "electronic means" having been struck and "livescan" added. The duty attaches to a request that must be completed under law rather than to every request, so the sensible reading is that a mandated check goes by livescan and a discretionary one is not addressed by the subsection at all.

Sealing changes what can be said as well as what can be held. Section 16-90-1416(a) bars the custodian from confirming that a sealed record exists, and § 16-90-1417(b)(1) lets the person say it does not exist. A report that carries a conviction which has since been sealed is the case where the two meet, and the page states the rule rather than a conclusion about who wins: the non-disclosure duty binds the custodian, the statement right belongs to the person, and § 16-90-1416(b)(1) means that a record held by the Arkansas Crime Information Center is outside the first of those.

The use list in § 16-90-1417(b)(2) is the other half of the sealing regime and it is worth reading before treating a sealed record as gone. It "does not prevent the use of the record of a prior conviction otherwise sealed under this subchapter" for seven purposes, being a criminal proceeding, offender status under the former § 5-64-413, habitual offender status under § 5-4-501 et seq., impeachment on cross-examination, healthcare professional licensure by a state agency or board, any disclosure mandated by Rule 17, 18 or 19 of the Arkansas Rules of Criminal Procedure, and a Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training determination of certification or the ability to act as a law enforcement officer. None of the seven is an employer.

The practical consequence is that an Arkansas answer has to name its source. A repository response is a state record of convictions and felony arrests, released on request and a fee without the subject's consent on one reading of the code, or after a director-approved request on the other, and it carries Arkansas offenses only. A court response is a circuit court matter, and for a felony it may also have a district court layer for the first appearance and bail. Neither is a complete Arkansas criminal history on its own, and both are addressed to units that are not counties.

Nothing in the sealing subchapter requires a consumer reporting agency to do anything, and nothing in it protects one. The obligations run to the custodian, the court, the prosecuting attorney and the licensing boards, and the person's remedies sit against those parties. That is why the page describes Arkansas as a non-disclosure state rather than as a use-restriction state, and why the operational work here is in verifying what a source will confirm rather than in reading a use prohibition that is not there.

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

What Arkansas law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Arkansas 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.

Arkansas adds a state notice duty of its own, and it is narrower than it first looks. The Credit Reporting Disclosure Act of 1989 requires a written notice of adverse action where credit for personal, family or household purposes is denied, and Act 343 of 2025 settled what it must contain: "A statement of the action taken"; "The name and address of the creditor"; and "The name and address of the consumer reporting agency making the report". The Social Security number paragraph was struck, so a letter that still reproduces the consumer's number as a state requirement is overstating the section.

What the custodian can say is the constraint that shapes an Arkansas file. Section 16-90-1416(a) bars disclosure of "the existence of the sealed record" as well as its contents, so a source asked about a sealed matter should not be expected to confirm that it has one. Where a report carries a conviction the person says never occurred, the provisions to check are § 16-90-1417(b)(1), which gives the person the right to say it did not occur, and § 16-90-1416(b)(1), which takes the Arkansas Crime Information Center outside the custodian rule and sends its data to § 12-12-1001 et seq. instead.

The seven use exceptions in § 16-90-1417(b)(2) are the reason a sealed record can still legitimately surface in a regulated process, and none of them is an employer. They cover criminal proceedings, offender status, habitual offender status, impeachment, healthcare professional licensure, disclosures mandated by the Arkansas Rules of Criminal Procedure, and law enforcement certification. A report that surfaces a sealed conviction in a healthcare licensing check is inside (E); the same record surfaced in an ordinary commercial screening is not inside any of the seven.

Section 17-3-102 changes what a licensing letter has to say. A disqualification may not be considered more than five years from conviction, incarceration or the end of probation, whichever is latest, for a non-violent and non-sexual offense with no other conviction in the period; a licensing entity may not use "moral turpitude" or "good character" as a basis, and may not consider an arrest without a subsequent conviction; and a sealed, pardoned or expunged conviction is not a ground at all. A denial letter that leans on any of those is leaning on something the section forbids.

Arkansas has no state adverse-action notice duty for criminal-history reports, no state reporting lookback, no pre-request notice and no ban-the-box window. The federal sequence is the whole of the procedural requirement for a conviction report. The state overlay is the credit report notice above, the licensing rules in § 17-3-102 for licensed occupations, and the cannabis provision in Amendment 98, which does not regulate the form of a decision but does limit what may be relied on.

Screening in Arkansas: what your process needs

• Do not cite Arkansas for a ban-the-box rule. No prohibition on asking about criminal history was located in the instruments read in full, the phrase returns zero results across the sessions searched, and the only bill found that would have barred the question on a public employment application died at sine die in 2013.
• Do not treat a sealed Arkansas record as invisible. Section 16-90-1416(a) stops the custodian confirming it, and § 16-90-1417(b)(2) keeps seven uses alive, none of them an employer. Whether a sealed conviction can be relied on in a hiring decision is a question the sealing subchapter does not answer, and the page does not answer it either.
• Read § 16-90-1416(b)(1) before assuming a repository check follows the sealing rule. It provides that "As used in this section, 'custodian' does not mean the Arkansas Crime Information Center", and (b)(2) sends ACIC access to § 12-12-1001 et seq.
• Ask which repository channel is being used. Section 12-12-1506(d) allows the state police to provide criminal history information to any person on request and a fee without the subject's written consent, and § 12-12-1010(c)(1) requires a noncriminal justice agency request to go through the director's review and express approval. The two were not reconciled by this pass, so a vendor should be able to say which one its Arkansas product relies on.
• Check whether a mandated check is being run the right way. Section 12-12-1005(d)(1) requires a request that "must be completed under state or federal law through the Division of Arkansas State Police" to be submitted by livescan through the Online Criminal Background Check System.
• Do not re-disseminate a state record. Section 12-12-1506(a)(4)(A)(iii) provides that "Any requestor that is granted access to criminal history information under this subchapter shall not disseminate the criminal history information", and (a)(4)(A)(i) requires the written consent document to be kept for at least three years.
• Expect the immediate sealing timeline and price it in. Section 16-90-1405(a) and § 16-90-1406(a) allow a petition "immediately" after sentence completion, and § 16-90-1419 bars the clerk from charging a filing fee, so a record can move from reportable to sealed without a waiting period or a cost.
• Check the five-year window in § 17-3-102(c) before relying on an old conviction for a license. It runs from conviction, or from the end of incarceration or probation, whichever is latest, and it does not apply to a violent or sexual offense or to a person with another conviction in the period.
• Strike "moral turpitude" and "good character" from any licensing-facing document. Section 17-3-102(d) forbids a licensing entity to use vague or generic terms including those phrases, and forbids it to consider an arrest without a subsequent conviction.
• Treat the sealed-conviction carve-out at § 17-3-102(a) as an instruction. A conviction sealed under the Comprehensive Criminal Record Sealing Act of 2013, or previously sealed, pardoned or expunged under prior law, is not a ground for disqualification from licensure.
• Do not refuse to hire a registered medical cannabis patient because of status. Amendment 98 § 3(f)(3)(A) bars discrimination based on past or present status as a qualifying patient or designated caregiver, from nine employees up.
• Do not rest a decision on a positive test alone. Amendment 98 § 3(f)(3)(B)(ii)(b) provides that "a positive test result for marijuana cannot provide the sole basis for the employer's good faith belief" that the person was under the influence at work, and § 2(23)(B) excludes a belief formed with gross negligence from good faith.
• Do not read the cannabis provision as a bar on refusing to hire in every case. Subsection (C) lists the authorized actions and includes "(vi) Refusing to hire an applicant", so the protection is of status and the permission list is the operative text.
• Do not scope an Arkansas search by county. The felony tier is the circuit, there are twenty-eight circuit designations, district courts sit in forty-one judicial districts that may combine counties, and the seventy-five counties are not the unit that holds the records.
• Plan for two tiers on a felony. Preliminary felony matters sit in the district court and the disposition sits in the circuit court, so a search that reaches one tier holds part of the matter.
• If a credit component runs, read the § 4-93-104(a) notice requirement as it now stands. It requires a statement of the action taken, the creditor's name and address, and the consumer reporting agency's name and address; the Social Security number paragraph was struck by Act 343 of 2025.
• Do not check whether a local ordinance goes further without checking § 14-1-403(a) first. A county or municipality may not adopt an ordinance that "creates a protected classification or prohibits discrimination on a basis not contained in state law", and the carve-out for its own employees is the only exception in the section.
• Expect the employee to be inside a reference disclosure. Section 11-3-204(a)(1) is keyed to written consent from the current or former employee, and the ten permitted categories include pay rate and wage history and drug or alcohol test results from the previous year.
• Read § 25-1-128 before describing Arkansas as regulating automated hiring. Its human-decision requirement binds a public entity, and nothing in it reaches a private employer.
• Ask before you assume on salary history. No Arkansas prohibition on requesting salary history was located, and it was not verified as absent.

Related states

• Louisiana. Louisiana bars a private employer from requesting or considering an arrest or charge that did not result in a conviction, with no age limit on the bar and no salary exemption attached to it, and it gives the applicant a right on written request to the background check information that was used. Its felony line turns on whether an offense carries death or imprisonment at hard labor rather than on a maximum sentence, and the section creating its judicial districts states that there are forty-one and then creates a forty-second in the same text.
• 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.
• 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.

What we do

Arkansas is a non-disclosure state with an open repository, and the two are the same fact seen from different sides. Section 16-90-1416(a) bars the custodian of a sealed record from disclosing its existence or releasing it except to seven classes of requester, none of them an employer or a screening firm, and § 16-90-1417(b)(1) lets the person whose record it is say that the conduct never occurred and that no record exists. Subsection (b)(1) of the same section then takes the Arkansas Crime Information Center out of the custodian rule by name, and § 12-12-1506 permits the state police to release criminal history information to any person on request and a fee without the subject's written consent. Sealing is available immediately after sentence completion for most felonies and misdemeanors, with no filing fee, and Act 341 of 2021 removed the bar that had excluded anyone who served prison time. There is no ban-the-box rule, no salary history prohibition, no employment credit restriction and no reporting lookback, and local overlays are preempted. Our Arkansas work keeps the two channels apart, says which one answered a question, stops at what a custodian is allowed to confirm, and reads the sealing timeline rather than assuming a state's sealing law is old. If your current vendor treats Arkansas as a state where a sealed record is invisible, or prices it by county, this is where that shows.

Sources

• Ark. Code Ann. § 16-90-1416, Release of sealed records, as it stands after Act 151 of 2019 (HB1248)
• Act 1460 of 2013 (HB1638), which created the Comprehensive Criminal Record Sealing Act of 2013 and repealed the former Subchapter 9 at §§ 16-90-901 to -906
• Act 139 of 2017 (HB1202), which added the healthcare licensing boards and the Arkansas Crime Information Center to § 16-90-1416(a)
• Act 680 of 2019 (HB1831), immediate misdemeanor sealing, the struck filing fee, and the automatic-sealing intent
• Act 341 of 2021 (HB1256), which struck the prison-time ineligibility bar and added "regardless of when the felony occurred"
• Act 117 of 2023 (HB1352), the current § 16-90-1406(a) and the one-year re-petition bar at § 16-90-1413(a)(2)
• Ark. Code Ann. § 12-12-1010 and § 12-12-1005, repository functions and the livescan condition, as amended by Act 519 of 2019 (SB266) and Act 784 of 2023 (SB524)
• Ark. Code Ann. § 12-12-1506, dissemination of conviction information and the open route at subsection (d), as amended by Act 1185 of 2015 (HB1727)
• Ark. Const. Amend. 98, the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment of 2016, § 3(f)(3) and the definitions at § 2(22) and § 2(23), read in the 2025 edition of the Election Laws of Arkansas and Constitution of the State of Arkansas of 1874
• Ark. Code Ann. § 17-3-102, occupational criminal background checks, as created by Act 990 of 2019 (SB451) and amended by Act 762 of 2021 (HB1520) and Act 516 of 2023 (HB1580)
• Ark. Code Ann. § 4-93-104(a), the adverse action notice under the Credit Reporting Disclosure Act of 1989, as amended by Act 343 of 2025 (SB240)
• Ark. Code Ann. §§ 4-110-101 et seq., the Personal Information Protection Act of 2005 (Act 1526 of 2005, SB1167)
• Ark. Code Ann. § 14-1-403, preemption of local protected classifications, Act 137 of 2015 (SB202)
• Ark. Code Ann. § 25-1-128, artificial intelligence and automated decision tool policy for public entities, as amended by Act 848 of 2025 (HB1958)
• Ark. Code Ann. § 11-3-204(a)(1), employment reference disclosures, as amended by Act 369 of 2025 (HB1643)
• 11 CAR §§ 13-101, 13-102, 13-104, 14-101 and 25-131, the Division of Labor rules on drug testing cost, illegal drugs, penalties, social media accounts and the drug-free workplace program
• Arkansas Judiciary, Circuit Courts and District Courts, read through captures of arcourts.gov and arcourts.gov/courts/district-courts, with the judge directory used for the circuit designations
• Route note: the General Assembly's bill search, its FTPDocument act-download path, codeofarrules.arkansas.gov and sos.arkansas.gov were reachable live and were used directly. arcourts.gov and caseinfo.arcourts.gov return HTTP 403 to direct requests, and the reader proxy that previously reached arcourts.gov now returns 403 for it, so the Administrative Office of the Courts pages were read through captures already held and the case search portal could not be read at all. law.justia.com, dps.arkansas.gov and the ACIC's own hosts were unreachable, so no Arkansas case law was read. The Internet Archive answered no request during the final hour of this pass, on a control query as well as on the target, which is a transport failure rather than a finding that no captures exist. Act 593 of 1989 and one act PDF from 2025 would not decode cleanly, so quotations are taken from the amending acts that reproduce them, and the derived citation at "Act 593 of 1989, § 3" is paired with the read text of § 4-93-104(a) rather than presented as a read section number. No file was moved, renamed or deleted in producing this page.

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.