GA · state guide

Georgia background screening law

How the courts here are organized

Georgia does not organize its trial courts by county in the way the county count suggests. O.C.G.A. § 15-6-1 opens "The entire state is divided into judicial circuits, in reference to the jurisdiction and sessions of the superior courts" and then enumerates each circuit and the counties composing it. Reading that enumeration mechanically gives 49 circuit entries and 159 county tokens, of which 159 are unique: no county appears in two circuits and no county is left out. The superior court is the felony tier, and O.C.G.A. § 15-6-2 governs the number of judges in each circuit.

Four other tiers sit around it, and the statutes that create them say different things about how universal each one is. State courts are the least uniform: O.C.G.A. § 15-7-1 defines "state court" as any court created under that chapter or continued as a state court by Article VI, Section X of the state constitution, which means a constitutional tier that not every county has. Magistrate courts are the most uniform: § 15-10-1 provides that "There shall be one magistrate court in each county of the state", so there are 159 of them and every county has exactly one. Probate courts are county offices rather than part of a circuit: § 15-9-1 provides that probate judges are elected by the people of their respective counties, hold office for four years, and take office on 1 January.

Municipal courts also exist in Georgia and are not described on this page. The Code creates them and this pass did not read the sections that do it, so nothing about municipal courts, their number or their reach appears here.

The circuit count is a different matter from the county count, and the page keeps them apart. The enumeration read for this page comes from a mirror stamped 14 October 2016 and shows 49 circuits, and circuits have been added since: the Columbia County circuit was split out of Augusta, which is why the Augusta circuit in that text reads as Burke, Columbia and Richmond. The county count of 159 does not move, because it does not depend on how counties are grouped into circuits and Georgia’s county boundaries have been settled for a century. The circuit count does move, so the page prints no circuit figure at all.

The practical consequence for a search is that the organizing unit is the county and the record-holder is the clerk of the court in it. The superior court clerk holds the felony file, the state court clerk holds the misdemeanor file where the county has a state court, and the magistrate court handles ordinance and small-claims business in every county. There is no single index that covers all 159, which is the fact that decides how a Georgia search is scoped.

A Georgia search is not one search, and the reason is structural rather than technical. The state publishes no free statewide index of trial court cases. What exists is 159 clerks of court, each holding the files for its county, and a state criminal history repository that is closed to walk-up public inspection and reached by private parties through a fingerprint-based channel. A product that describes itself as a Georgia statewide check is describing an aggregation of county work or a repository request, and those two things answer different questions.

The first limit is the repository’s access route. GCIC is the Georgia Crime Information Center, operated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation under O.C.G.A. Title 35, Chapter 3, and it is the state’s computerized criminal history repository. Under Rule 140-2-.02 only criminal justice agencies and noncriminal justice agencies with a statutory entitlement may obtain criminal justice information, so a private employer or a screening firm does not walk up to it. The route that reaches private parties runs on fingerprints, which is a different proposition from a name-based check and carries the subject’s involvement in it.

The second limit is what the repository file is built from. Rule 140-2-.04(2) requires each agency arresting or taking a person into custody to capture fingerprints, descriptions, photographs and other identifying data on a person charged with an offense described in O.C.G.A. § 35-3-33, and Rule 140-2-.04(5) requires agencies making a disposition decision to transmit disposition information in the manner and format GCIC requires and within the timeframe required by state law. Both subsections make the transmitting agency "responsible for the completeness and accuracy of transmitted data", which is the rules’ own way of saying that the state does not guarantee either.

The third limit is that nothing in Chapter 140-2 gives a private party a claim against a reporting agency. The chapter is a reporting regime: it tells agencies what to send to the state, it tells GCIC how to hold it, and it puts its penalties in Rule 140-2-.10 as administrative sanctions with criminal exposure only where the conduct separately breaks a criminal statute. An adverse-action notice that cites a GCIC rule as the source of a disclosure duty is citing the wrong body of law, because the disclosure duty is federal and sits in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

The fourth limit is the court side, and it is the one that decides coverage. A superior court clerk’s file is the authoritative record for a felony in that county, and a state court clerk’s file is the authoritative record for a misdemeanor where the county has a state court. Nothing aggregates them. The Georgia courts’ own website is not a substitute: georgiacourts.gov returns a hard 403 to every user agent tried, including a Googlebot user agent and its own REST API, and the snapshots the Internet Archive holds of it are navigation pages covering the appellate courts only. On the trial-court side the state website publishes nothing, which is why the structure above was taken from the Code and counted.

The routing consequence is that a Georgia product is honest when it says which of the two it did. A repository response is a fingerprint-based state request whose completeness depends on what each arresting agency submitted. A county search is a clerk-level record and is authoritative for that county. Neither is a Georgia statewide criminal history, and the difference between them is the one an employer needs to know before writing an adverse-action letter.

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

What Georgia law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Georgia 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.

Georgia adds a step before the letter, and it is about the record rather than the procedure. A First Offender discharge is not a conviction under § 42-8-63, so a report that carries one as a conviction has mis-stated what the record is and not merely how much weight it deserves. That is a dispute about the content of the file and it belongs in the pre-adverse action window, where the record can still be corrected or excluded before a decision is communicated.

The § 42-8-63.1 exceptions are the place where an adverse-action letter is most likely to overreach. They are limited to named sectors and to named offenses, they differ between discharges before and after 1 July 2016, and the offense lists in the two subsections are drafted differently, one by offense name and one by Code reference. An employer that reads the exception as a general permission for schools and care work will disqualify people the statute protects, and the letter is where that shows.

A citation error worth avoiding in the letter itself. Chapter 140-2 governs what agencies report to GCIC and what GCIC may release. It imposes no duty on an employer to tell an applicant anything, and it creates no offense: Rule 140-2-.10 makes its sanctions administrative. An adverse-action notice that cites a GCIC rule for the disclosure duty is citing the wrong body of law.

Georgia has no state pre-request notice duty, no state adverse-action notice duty and no state lookback rule. The federal sequence is the whole of the procedural requirement, which means a Georgia process is judged against the federal standard and against the First Offender Act, and there is no state overlay that changes the timing.

A repository response and a county search support different letters. A GCIC response is a fingerprint-based state record whose completeness depends on what each arresting agency submitted under Rule 140-2-.04, and a county search is a clerk-level record that is authoritative for its own county and silent about the other 158. An adverse-action letter that describes either one as a Georgia statewide criminal history is describing something neither of them is.

Screening in Georgia: what your process needs

• Establish whether the record is a First Offender discharge before anything else. O.C.G.A. § 42-8-63 says a discharge is not a conviction and may not be used to disqualify, and everything else on this page assumes that question has been answered.
• If it is a discharge, find the date. § 42-8-63.1(a) governs discharges between 1 July 2004 and 30 June 2016 and § 42-8-63.1(b) governs discharges from 1 July 2016, and the two use different offense lists for the same three sectors.
• Then find the sector. The exceptions reach public and private schools, child welfare agencies, child and after-school care providers, long-term care facilities, day care for elderly persons, and facilities defined in Code Section 37-3-1 or 37-4-2 serving people who are mentally ill or developmentally disabled. Each paragraph is limited to its own sector and its own offense list.
• Screen law-enforcement roles separately. § 42-8-63.1(c) is not sector-based: any discharge involving a felony or a crime involving moral turpitude may bar a peace officer certification, employment in a certified position with a law enforcement unit, and employment with the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council.
• Do not cite the GCIC Council Rules for a disclosure duty. Chapter 140-2 is a reporting regime for agencies and for GCIC. Its sanction provision at Rule 140-2-.10 is administrative, and it creates no misdemeanor.
• Do not cite Rule 140-2-.04(1)(b), 140-2-.04(1)(b)3 or 140-2-.04(2)(a)3. Rule 140-2-.04 has five unlettered subsections and none of those paragraphs exists.
• Do not cite Rule 140-2-.03 for disposition reporting. Rule 140-2-.03 is "Security of Criminal Justice Information". The disposition duty is Rule 140-2-.04(5), and its timeframe is the one state law requires rather than a fixed thirty days.
• Scope a county search to the counties that matter and say which ones you ran. There are 159 clerks of court and no statewide index, so the coverage statement is the list of counties and not the name of the state.
• Know which side of the repository you are using. A GCIC response is a fingerprint-based state record, and a county search is a clerk-level record. They are not interchangeable and they do not answer the same question.
• Carry the state’s own qualification on completeness. Rules 140-2-.04(2) and (5) place responsibility for the completeness and accuracy of transmitted data on the agency that submits it, so the repository’s coverage is a function of what each agency sent.
• Run the federal sequence in full. Pre-adverse action notice with the report and the summary of rights, a real opportunity to dispute, then the adverse action notice. Georgia adds no state notice duty and removes none.
• Keep the record dispute and the decision dispute separate. A First Offender discharge reported as a conviction is a content error in the file, and it is worth resolving before the decision is communicated rather than after.
• Do not treat a Georgia medical cannabis registration as an employment protection. None was located, and none is asserted here.
• Ask before you assume on salary history, credit checks and employer size. No Georgia rule was located in any of the three, and none of the three was verified as absent.

Related states

• Virginia. Virginia repealed its private-sector ban-the-box in 1985 and never replaced it, and it regulates the screening provider instead: a business screening service must register with the State Police to receive sealing notifications, must delete a sealed record regardless of the source it came from, must carry the record’s collection date on every dissemination, and is liable for $1,000 or actual damages. Its sealing sections moved to a new chapter on 1 July 2026 and its cannabis employer-disclosure ban was repealed the same day.
• 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.
• 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.

What we do

Georgia is the state where the question is not how old the record is but what the record is. A First Offender discharge is not a conviction under O.C.G.A. § 42-8-63, and it may not be used to disqualify an applicant in either the public or the private sector, with exceptions that are limited to named sectors, named offenses and two discharge-date bands under § 42-8-63.1. Underneath that, Georgia has no free statewide case search and 159 clerks of court, and its state repository moves criminal history to private parties through a fingerprint-based channel rather than an open index. Our Georgia work distinguishes a discharge from a conviction, states which counties were searched, and says which side of the repository the answer came from. If your current vendor calls a name-based response a Georgia statewide criminal history, this is the state where that costs you.

Sources

• O.C.G.A. § 42-8-63, First Offender Act discharge, read through an Internet Archive capture of the 2024 Georgia Code
• O.C.G.A. § 42-8-63.1, exceptions to the discharge bar, read through an Internet Archive capture of the 2023 Georgia Code
• Georgia Rules and Regulations, Department 140, Chapter 140-2, Practice and Procedure, read live
• O.C.G.A. § 15-6-1, Composition of Judicial Circuits, the enumeration the county count was made from
• O.C.G.A. § 15-6-2, Number of Judges
• O.C.G.A. § 15-7-1, state courts
• O.C.G.A. § 15-9-1, probate courts
• O.C.G.A. § 15-10-1, magistrate courts
• Route note: law.onecle.com stamps every page "Last modified: October 14, 2016", and law.justia.com is blocked directly from this environment so its Code pages were read through Internet Archive captures with the raw modifier. georgiacourts.gov returns HTTP 403 to a Chrome user agent, to a Googlebot user agent and to its wp-json API, and the snapshots the Internet Archive holds of its classes-of-court pages are navigation hubs covering the appellate courts only. No current official source was reached for Georgia trial-court structure, which is why that section rests on the Code.

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.