MI · state guide

Michigan background screening law

How the courts here are organized

Michigan has 83 counties and two overlapping court geometries, and neither of them is the county. That is the single most useful thing to understand before running a search here, because it changes what a coverage claim can honestly say.

Circuit courts hold felony jurisdiction, and there are 57 of them across 83 counties, so a circuit generally covers more than one county and does not follow county lines. Below them, roughly 100 district courts carry the misdemeanor volume and are organized on city and township lines. Probate courts add a third layer at 78, and four municipal courts remain. The practical consequence is that the county, which is the unit a screener naturally reaches for, does not correspond to either the court that holds felonies or the court that holds misdemeanors.

Compare that with California, where the superior court is one per county and the county is exactly the right unit, or Texas, where district courts hold felonies and famously do not map to county lines. Michigan is harder than either, because it has two mismatched geometries at once.

Michigan State Police run the state’s own name-based criminal history service, and their description of it is unusually candid. It is described as the only public resource for name-based Michigan criminal history background checks, and in the same breath the result is stated to be something that may not be accepted by all organizations. The service also deletes each result after seven days.

Read those together and they describe a product that is a starting point rather than an answer. A seven-day retention window means the record has to be re-pulled rather than held, and a self-declared acceptance limit means the state is telling you not to treat its own output as conclusive.

There is a completeness problem underneath that, and it is structural rather than a policy choice. If the courts that hold misdemeanors are organized on city and township lines rather than county lines, then a statewide name-based repository cannot be assembling its misdemeanor content on the same geometry as the courts that produce it. That is the gap a screening provider is actually working around here, and it is why a Michigan search is normally an assembly of targeted court pulls rather than a single state query.

The clean-slate position is the other moving part, and it is stated here now. MCL 780.621g, added by 2020 PA 193 and effective 11 April 2021, sets convictions aside without any application being filed: seven years from the imposition of sentence for a misdemeanor, and ten years from whichever is later of the imposition of sentence or the completion of any term of imprisonment for a felony. The lifetime limits are two felonies and four misdemeanors, with the misdemeanor cap not applying to the short-misdemeanor categories. Assaultive crimes, serious misdemeanors, crimes of dishonesty, offenses punishable by ten or more years, the chapter XVII offenses involving a minor, a vulnerable adult, injury or death, and human trafficking offenses are all excluded.

Two features of that provision matter more than its thresholds. The record is made nonpublic rather than destroyed, so the set-aside removes it from ordinary view without removing it from the state police database. And every operative subsection is conditioned on appropriation, with the governor able to delay implementation by up to 180 days for technological limitations. The statute therefore states a trigger and a funding condition rather than a calendar date, so this page states the thresholds and the exclusions and asserts no operational date at all.

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

What Michigan law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Michigan 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 the report and the summary of rights, a reasonable opportunity to respond, then the adverse action notice with the agency’s details and a dispute route. The FCRA article sets it out in full. Michigan adds nothing to that sequence.

What Michigan adds sits further upstream, and it is a request-side duty rather than a notice-side one. Because MCL 37.2205a(1) governs what may be asked for, the control is the question set and the search specification, not the report. A screening provider’s exposure here is a configuration that asks a court for misdemeanor dispositions the employer has no lawful basis to seek, which is a different failure from putting something inaccurate in a report.

There is a second consequence worth separating out. If the applicant may lawfully withhold a covered record even under oath, then a false or incomplete answer on an application is not evidence of dishonesty for that record. A process that treats an undisclosed misdemeanor as a candor problem would be misreading what the statute permits.

Screening in Michigan: what your process needs

• Confirm the search specification does not request misdemeanor dispositions for charges that did not result in conviction. This is the Michigan obligation and it is the easiest one to breach by configuration rather than by intent.
• Confirm no internal documentation treats the MCL 37.2205a(1) bar as a reporting restriction. It binds the employer and the employment agency, and the operative step is the request rather than the report.
• Confirm felony charges that are still pending are handled separately from disposed misdemeanors, because the statute excludes them from the protection.
• Confirm a Michigan coverage statement describes circuits for felonies and city or township courts for misdemeanors, and does not claim a county search. The county is not the unit here.
• Confirm the reliance on ICHAT reflects its limits: seven-day retention, and the state’s own statement that the result may not be accepted.
• Confirm no application form treats an undisclosed covered misdemeanor as a dishonesty finding. The statute permits the applicant to withhold it under oath.
• Confirm no lookback or salary restriction has been imported into a Michigan configuration. There is none, and applying one would suppress records that may lawfully be reported.
• Confirm the configuration accounts for the automatic set-aside at MCL 780.621g. A conviction set aside under it is made nonpublic rather than destroyed, which is not the same thing as an expunged or destroyed record and is not handled the same way by a search.

Related states

• Illinois. Illinois splits the hiring record across two statutes with different thresholds, and the stricter one has the lower threshold. The conviction-use rule at 775 ILCS 5/2-103.1 reaches any employer with one or more employees, because the Human Rights Act definition at 775 ILCS 5/2-101(B) includes "Any person employing one or more employees within Illinois during 20 or more calendar weeks" and reaches the State, every political subdivision and every party to a public contract "without regard to the number of employees", while the ban-the-box inquiry rule at 820 ILCS 75/15 reaches only an employer or employment agency with fifteen or more employees and defines its covered employer as "any person or private entity", which leaves the public sector outside it. The use rule is a duty rather than a prohibition: a conviction record may not be a basis for an employment action unless a substantial relationship or an unreasonable risk is shown, and the state adds a notice sequence the federal one does not have, with a written preliminary notice carrying the employer reasoning and a copy of the report, at least five business days to respond, and a second written notice carrying the reasoning and the right to file a charge with the Department. Employment credit checks are restricted separately by the Employee Credit Privacy Act, 820 ILCS 70/10, which allows them only where a satisfactory credit history is an established bona fide occupational requirement.
• Minnesota. Minnesota requires a report to reach the consumer within 24 hours of going to the employer, and its ban-the-box law binds private employers with no size threshold.
• 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

Michigan is the state where the law is on the applicant’s side and the records are the hard part. Answering it well means being able to say which courts were searched and why the county was not the right unit, rather than repeating a coverage sentence that would be true of any state.

Sources

• MCL 37.2205a(1), misdemeanor arrest and detention records
• MCL 780.621g, automatic set-aside of convictions, added by 2020 PA 193
• Michigan Regulation and Taxation of Marihuana Act §4(3), employment
• Michigan State Police, ICHAT internet criminal history access tool
• Michigan court structure, circuit, district, probate and municipal courts
• 15 U.S.C. §1681c(a), federal reporting limits

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.