MO · state guide

Missouri background screening law

How the courts here are organized

The organizing unit is the judicial circuit and not the county, and the count is fixed by statute. RSMo § 478.011 reads in full: "This state is divided into forty-six judicial circuits, numbered consecutively from one to forty-six." The Constitution sets the frame: "The judicial power of the state shall be vested in a supreme court, a court of appeals consisting of districts as prescribed by law, and circuit courts" (Mo. Const. art. V, § 1), and "The state shall be divided into convenient circuits of contiguous counties. In each circuit there shall be at least one circuit judge" (art. V, § 15.1). There is no separate municipal court system and no county trial court at the trial level: the circuit court is the trial court of general jurisdiction.

That jurisdiction is stated twice, in the Constitution and again in the statutes. Article V, § 14(a) provides that "The circuit courts shall have original jurisdiction over all cases and matters, civil and criminal", and § 478.070 repeats it almost word for word and adds that the courts "may issue and determine original remedial writs". Municipal ordinance violations are circuit business: § 479.010 provides that "Violations of municipal ordinances shall be heard and determined only before divisions of the circuit court as hereinafter provided in this chapter", and § 478.230 lets a municipal judge "hear and determine municipal ordinance violation cases of the municipality or municipalities making provision for the particular municipal judge". Where no municipal judge is provided, article V, § 23 assigns the work to the associate circuit judges for any municipality under four hundred thousand in population.

The map that tells you which counties sit in which circuit is no longer in the revised statutes, and that is the single most counter-intuitive thing about searching Missouri. The old enumeration series, §§ 478.075 to 478.188, was repealed effective 31 December 2020 by § 478.191. What replaced it is a circuit realignment plan prepared by the judicial conference under § 478.073, which under subsection 3 "shall be considered for all purposes as the equivalent in force, effect, and intent of a public act of the state upon its taking effect, and it shall be published by the revisor of statutes together with the laws adopted by the general assembly during the session in which the plan is submitted". The plan is therefore law with the force of a public act, and it is not in the section text. Subsection 2 limits what it may do: "A circuit realignment plan shall not alter the total number of judicial circuits in existence on December 31, 2019, and any circuit realignment plan creating or reducing the number of judicial circuits shall be null and void." The count is safe; the boundaries move by a document you have to go and fetch.

The two large circuits are the ones a screening file will meet most often. The courts' own news page names the 16th circuit commission for a vacancy in Jackson County and the 22nd circuit commission for a vacancy in St. Louis, which fixes those two numbers for those two places. The City of St. Louis also sits apart from county government in the statutes rather than in a footnote: § 43.504, which governs access to repository information for probation and drug treatment services, names "the sheriff of any county, the sheriff of the City of St. Louis, and the judges of the circuit courts of this state" as the officials who may make information available. A search scoped on county lines and a search scoped on circuit lines are the same search in most of the state and are not the same search where the two biggest populations are.

Two mechanisms decide how records are produced. The first is rulemaking: § 477.010 gives the supreme court "the power to direct the form of writs and process; and to promulgate general rules for all courts of the state", subject only to the limit that no rule may "abridge, enlarge or modify the substantive rights of any litigant". Both expungement regimes lean on that power, § 610.140.8 making closed case records "confidential and only available to the parties or by order of the court for good cause shown" and § 610.141.4 making case records for automatically expunged offenses "confidential and available to the parties or as otherwise provided by supreme court rules". The second is the automation: the office of state courts administrator runs the statewide court automation system that § 610.141.4 and § 43.500.1(7) both work through, and the repository itself is defined at § 43.500.2 as "the division within the Missouri state highway patrol responsible for compiling and disseminating complete and accurate criminal history records and statistics".

The gap between the open and the closed side of the repository is where a Missouri screening file is won or lost, and both sides are statutory. On the open side, the Highway Patrol publishes the answer: "Any person may request a criminal background check on any individual for a fee. The Central Repository may release any open records that have been reported to them. Closed records may be released to those agencies designated by statute as authorized to receive them." Open records are defined on the same page as "convictions, pending charges within 30 days of the arrest, and suspended imposition of sentences during probation", and closed records as "those records when the accused is found not guilty, charges were nolle prossed or dismissed, suspended imposition of sentence after probation is completed, and arrests after 30 days where no charges have yet been filed or reported by the prosecuting attorney".

Each of those closure rules has a statutory source. Section 610.100.2(3) covers the no-charge case: "If any person is arrested and not charged with an offense against the law within thirty days of the person's arrest, the arrest report shall thereafter be a closed record except that the disposition portion of the record may be accessed and except as provided in section 610.120." Section 610.105.1 covers the disposition case: "If the person arrested is charged but the case is subsequently nolle prossed, dismissed, or the accused is found not guilty or imposition of sentence is suspended in the court in which the action is prosecuted, official records pertaining to the case shall thereafter be closed records when such case is finally terminated". A suspended imposition of sentence therefore closes on completion of probation and stays open while probation runs, which is why the Patrol's own open-record list carries SIS "during probation" as an open item.

On the closed side the statute is a list and it is not a long one. Section 610.120.1 provides that closed records "shall not be destroyed; they shall be inaccessible to the general public and to all persons other than the defendant except as provided in this section and chapter 43", and then names the recipients: criminal justice agencies, law enforcement agencies for licensing and registration purposes, agencies authorized by chapter 43 that submit fingerprints, the sentencing advisory commission, "qualified entities for the purpose of screening providers defined in chapter 43", the Department of Revenue, the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Health and Senior Services, and federal agencies. No private employer appears and no consumer reporting agency appears. Subsection 2 closes the door again: "These records shall be made available only for the purposes and to the entities listed in this section."

The qualified-entity route is the only commercial-adjacent channel and its outer edge was not resolved by this pass. Section 43.540.1(6) defines a qualified entity as a government office issuing or renewing a license, permit, certification or registration; a government office "to make fitness determinations on applications for state, county, or municipal government employment"; or "Any entity that is authorized to obtain criminal history record information under 28 CFR 20.33." That third limb is federal and was not read for this page, so the page states the limb and does not describe its reach. What the route does deliver is stated plainly in § 43.540.3: the review "shall include the submission of fingerprints to the Missouri state highway patrol, who shall conduct a Missouri criminal record review, including closed record information under section 610.120", with the prints forwarded to the FBI for a national review.

The use restriction on repository data is enforced criminally and it is drafted to reach the party doing the collecting. Section 43.532.1 requires that records "be used solely for the purpose for which they were obtained" and gives the subject "the opportunity to challenge the correctness, accuracy, or completeness of a criminal history record". Subsection 2 then provides that any person obtaining repository information "under false pretense, or who advertises or engages in the practice of collecting, assembling, and disseminating as a business enterprise, other than for the purpose of furnishing criminal history information to the authorized requester for its intended purpose, is guilty of a class A misdemeanor". The carve-out is what saves a legitimate screening business and it is also what describes it: furnishing to the authorized requester, for the requester's intended purpose. Section 43.540.5 adds a confidentiality duty on the qualified-entity side, with the same class A misdemeanor for disclosing "beyond the scope allowed", and § 43.509 requires that all collection and dissemination "be in compliance with chapter 610 and applicable federal laws or regulations".

Two smaller provisions shape what a Missouri search can be built on. Section 43.535.1 lets a law enforcement agency run a repository review "for only open records" for the purpose of hiring municipal or county government employees, which is the local-government channel and is open-records only like the commercial one. Section 43.535.2 then supplies the mechanism by which a city could go further than the state: "Municipalities and counties may, by local or county ordinance, require the fingerprinting of applicants or licensees in specified occupations for the purpose of receiving criminal history record information by local or county officials. A copy of the ordinance must be forwarded for approval to the Missouri state highway patrol prior to the submission of fingerprints to the central repository." Any local overlay therefore exists as an ordinance on file with the Patrol, and no such ordinance was read for this page.

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

What Missouri law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Missouri 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.

Missouri adds a duty that operates before the letter is written, because it attaches to the record rather than to the decision. Section 610.143.1 provides that arrests, pending indictments and convictions "shall no longer be reported if at any time after a conviction it is learned that a full pardon or expungement has been granted for that conviction, or at any time after an arrest or indictment it is learned that a conviction did not result." Where a report carries a record that should have stopped being reported, the exposure is created by the report and not by the decision taken on it, and § 610.143.3 lets the consumer sue for an injunction without pleading any other remedy.

The expungement route carries its own notice duty at the front of the process. Section 610.140.10 requires that "An employer shall notify an applicant of the requirements under subdivisions (4) to (6) of this subsection", which are the positions at a federally insured bank, savings institution or credit union, or an affiliate; an insurance entity or insurer; and any employer required by federal or state law to exclude applicants with certain convictions. Those are the only categories in which an expunged crime "may be grounds for automatic disqualification"; everywhere else it "shall not be grounds for automatic disqualification of an applicant, but may be a factor for denying employment". A Missouri adverse-action file therefore needs to record which category the position fell into, because the answer to whether the expunged record could disqualify turns on it.

The immunity provision in the same 2026 section points the other way and belongs in the file. Section 610.143.4 gives an employer, volunteer organization or landlord immunity from claims arising out of the misconduct of a person whose record has been expunged, where the misconduct relates to the expunged portion, "unless such employer, volunteer organization, or landlord failed to exercise reasonable care in determining that the employee does not pose a danger or risk to others." The condition is a reasonable-care inquiry, so the record of that inquiry is what preserves the immunity, and it is a state-law question separate from the federal sequence.

Missouri gives the subject an accuracy challenge on repository data independently of the federal dispute route. Section 43.532.1 provides that records obtained from the central repository "shall be used solely for the purpose for which they were obtained" and that "The subject of the record shall be afforded the opportunity to challenge the correctness, accuracy, or completeness of a criminal history record." On the qualified-entity side, § 43.540.2(10) requires the entity to notify the applicant in writing of the right to obtain a copy of the review and of the right to challenge accuracy and completeness and "to obtain a determination as to the validity of such challenge before a final determination regarding the applicant is made". A dispute that arrives through the state route has its own timing rule, and it resolves before the entity's decision rather than after a notice letter.

There is no Missouri state adverse-action notice duty for criminal-history reports, no state lookback rule and no state pre-request notice for a criminal-history search. The procedural requirement for a conviction report is the federal sequence, plus the state notice at § 610.140.10 where the position falls in one of the three named categories, plus the reporting bar at § 610.143 and the deletion feed at § 610.141.11, which are obligations about what the report contains rather than about what the letter says.

Screening in Missouri: what your process needs

• Ask whether the vendor holds the § 610.141.11 agreement with the Highway Patrol. The state is required to supply consumer reporting agencies with the data needed to identify and delete records being automatically expunged, and the agency must sign an agreement certifying use limited to compliance with the chapter and destruction of the data when it is no longer needed. A Missouri file that cannot be refreshed against that feed cannot stay accurate.
• Build a route for a pardon, an expungement or a no-conviction outcome to reach the report after delivery. Section 610.143.1 makes continued reporting unlawful once the outcome is learned, and "learned" is the operative word, so the process needs somewhere for the information to land rather than only a dispute channel for inaccuracy.
• Do not run a Missouri search on county lines alone. The organizing unit is the judicial circuit, there are forty-six of them under § 478.011, and the county-to-circuit map is in the judicial conference realignment plan rather than in the revised statutes. Municipal ordinance violations are heard by divisions of the circuit court under § 479.010, so they are part of the same search and not a separate one.
• Read § 478.073 before assuming any circuit boundaries from memory. The plan altering boundaries and territorial jurisdiction has the force of a public act and is published by the revisor with the session laws, and § 478.073.2 freezes the total number at what existed on 31 December 2019 and voids any plan that creates or reduces circuits.
• Treat the name search as an open-records product and nothing more. The Patrol sells a name, date of birth and Social Security number search at $15 with "Only open records will be released with a name search". A name search that returns a closed record is not a name search within the agency's own description.
• Do not treat the fingerprint channel as commercially open. Closed records go out on fingerprints only where the requestor is authorized by statute, and the statutory route runs through the qualified-entity definition at § 43.540.1(6), which is confined to government licensing and government employment fitness determinations plus entities authorized under 28 CFR 20.33.
• Know where the repository's criminal exposure sits. Section 43.532.2 makes it a class A misdemeanor to obtain repository information under false pretense or to advertise or engage in collecting, assembling and disseminating as a business enterprise "other than for the purpose of furnishing criminal history information to the authorized requester for its intended purpose". The purpose limitation is the defense and it is also the description of the licensed activity.
• Check the fee against the cap rather than the invoice. Section 43.530.1 caps a non-fingerprint request at nine dollars, adjustable by up to a dollar a year to a ceiling of twenty; § 43.530.2 caps a fingerprint request at twenty, or fourteen for the requests it names. The Patrol's published prices sit under those caps.
• Do not refuse to hire a registered medical cannabis patient on status or on a positive test. Article XIV, § 1(15) protects a qualifying patient or primary caregiver with a valid identification card, and it expressly reaches off-premises use during non-working hours and a positive test for components or metabolites.
• Check the three limits on that protection before relying on it in either direction. The protection is displaced where accommodating would cause the employer to lose a federal monetary or licensing-related benefit, where the person was under the influence on the premises or during working hours, or where the position is one in which legal use affects the person's ability to perform job responsibilities or the safety of others, or conflicts with a bona fide occupational qualification.
• Do not extend that protection to adult-use conduct. Article XIV, § 2(3)(3) requires no accommodation in the workplace, permits discipline for working while under the influence, and permits adverse action on that basis, and article XIV, § 1.7(1)(d) bars a claim against an employer for prohibiting it.
• Apply the right expungement conditions. Section 610.140.11 permits a no answer only where there is no public record of a crime after the expungement, and requires an affirmative answer where the employer is legally barred from employing the person; article XIV, § 2(10)(8)(c) states the same right for marijuana expungements with no such conditions. Ask which instrument applies before treating a no answer as either reliable or unreliable.
• Notify the applicant where the position is one of the three categories at § 610.140.10. The employer must tell the applicant about the requirements under subdivisions (4) to (6), and those are the only categories in which an expunged crime may be an automatic disqualification.
• Check the licensing rule before a licensing client relies on a conviction. Section 314.200 bars a board from denying a license primarily on the basis that a conviction precludes a showing of good moral character where the applicant has been released from incarceration or completed probation without violation, and requires the board to weigh the nature of the crime against the license sought, the date of the conviction and the applicant's conduct since.
• Keep a reference script inside § 290.152.2. The protected answer is a written response to a written request from a person the employer reasonably believes to be a prospective employer, covering the nature and character of service, its duration and the true cause of discharge or voluntary quit, with a copy to the employee and consistency with any § 290.140 service letter.
• Do not charge a subject to remove or correct a published record. Section 407.1150.2 makes soliciting or accepting that payment unlawful, each payment is a separate violation, and the statutory damages floor is ten thousand dollars with humiliation or embarrassment sufficient to prove harm.

Related states

• Kansas. Kansas gives its municipal courts concurrent jurisdiction over ordinance violations matching five named state felony statutes, so a felony-equivalent conviction can sit in a city court record that a district-court search will not reach. Its seven-year reporting cap has been a dead letter since 1973, because a $20,000 salary exemption no amendment has ever touched removes the cap from nearly every job in 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.
• Nebraska. Nebraska releases its state criminal history to anyone who pays the fee, with interest in the subject demonstrated by paying it, so a name-based Nebraska check needs no authorization. Its twelve judicial districts are composed differently for district courts and for county courts, which makes the district number an unstable identifier, and its employer-screening provision governs reference disclosures on written consent rather than reports.

What we do

Missouri is two rules in one state. The repository side is open: the Highway Patrol states that "Any person may request a criminal background check on any individual for a fee", a $15 name search returns open records only, and the closed set is a statutory list at § 610.120 that names no private employer and no consumer reporting agency, with a class A misdemeanor at § 43.532.2 for anyone who obtains repository information under false pretense or who runs a collecting and disseminating business outside the purpose the authorized requester holds it for. The reporting side changed on 28 August 2026: § 610.143.1 now bars the reporting of an arrest, a pending indictment or a conviction once a pardon, an expungement or a no-conviction outcome is learned, with Attorney General enforcement, up to a thousand dollars per violation and an injunction any consumer may obtain. Beside it, § 610.141 runs automatic expungement of eligible drug offenses at least weekly and § 610.141.11 requires the Highway Patrol to hand consumer reporting agencies the deletion data on a signed agreement. On top of that, the courts are organized by judicial circuit and not by county, forty-six of them, with the county-to-circuit map sitting in a realignment plan that has the force of a public act rather than in the revised statutes, and cannabis protection running to cardholders on status and on a positive test while adult use has none. Our Missouri work holds the § 610.141.11 agreement, keeps a route open for a superseded record to leave the file, scopes a court search to the circuit and the municipal division rather than to a county, and separates a medical cardholder from an adult-use applicant before the decision is made. If your current vendor treats a Missouri name search as a full state criminal history, or has no way to stop reporting a record the state has expunged, this is where that shows.

Sources

• RSMo § 610.143, full pardon or expungement, certain records not to be reported, effective 28 August 2026 (L. 2026 S.B. 1421)
• RSMo § 610.141, automatic expungement of eligible offenses, including the consumer reporting agency deletion feed at subsection 11
• RSMo § 610.140, expungement of certain criminal records, including the application-stage rights at subsections 10 and 11
• RSMo § 610.100, arrest and incident records, including the thirty-day closure at subsection 2(3)
• RSMo § 610.105, effect of nolle pros, dismissal, suspended imposition of sentence and not guilty findings
• RSMo § 610.120, records to be confidential and the list of entities that may receive them
• RSMo § 610.110, failure to recite a closed record excused, and § 610.122, arrest record expunged
• RSMo § 43.500, chapter 43 definitions including the central repository and unique biometric identification, as amended in 2026
• RSMo § 43.530, fees and the criminal record system fund, and § 43.532, use of records and the class A misdemeanor
• RSMo § 43.540, criminal record review and qualified entities, including the closed-record review at subsection 3
• RSMo § 478.011, number of judicial circuits, and § 478.073, the circuit realignment plan
• Mo. Const. art. XIV, § 1, medical marijuana, including the employment provision at subdivision 15
• Mo. Const. art. XIV, § 2, marijuana legalization, regulation and taxation, including the employment paragraph at 2(3)(3) and the expungement paragraph at 2(10)(8)
• RSMo § 407.1150, publishing or disseminating criminal record information prohibited, chapter 407, effective 28 August 2014
• Missouri State Highway Patrol, Criminal Justice Information Services FAQs, the repository, the search types, the fees and the open and closed record definitions, read through the r.jina.ai reader proxy
• Route note: every Missouri statute and constitutional provision on this page was read live at revisor.mo.gov by direct request to the OneSection endpoint, so the quotations carry the revisor's own subdivision numbering. mshp.dps.mo.gov refuses direct TLS from this environment and courts.mo.gov returns HTTP 403, so the Highway Patrol CJIS pages and the courts' own circuit news were read through the r.jina.ai reader proxy. Municipal code hosts were unreadable: municode renders ordinance text by script, cityclerk.kcmo.org timed out, stlouis-mo.gov was unreachable and guessed kcmo.gov paths returned 404, which is why slot 4 is unset. No Missouri case law was read.

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.