NM · state guide

New Mexico background screening law

How the courts here are organized

The organizing unit for a New Mexico search is the judicial district, not the county, and the district lines do not follow county lines one to one. N.M. Const., art. VI, § 13 gives the district court "original jurisdiction in all matters and causes not excepted in this constitution", appellate jurisdiction over inferior courts "in their respective districts", supervisory control over those courts, and the writ power, and it requires at least two district court terms a year in each county at the county seat. Section 34-6-1 enumerates the districts: the first covers Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Los Alamos; the second is Bernalillo alone; the third is Dona Ana; the fourth covers Guadalupe, San Miguel and Mora; the fifth covers Eddy, Chaves and Lea; the sixth covers Grant, Luna and Hidalgo; the seventh covers Socorro, Torrance, Sierra and Catron; the eighth covers Taos, Colfax and Union; the ninth covers Curry and Roosevelt; the tenth covers Quay, DeBaca and Harding; the eleventh covers McKinley and San Juan; the twelfth covers Otero and Lincoln; and the thirteenth covers Cibola, Sandoval and Valencia. Those county lists sum to thirty-three, which is the check that the district map and the county map cover the same ground.

The district court is the trial court of general jurisdiction, and it is never closed. Section 34-6-2 provides that "The district court shall always be in session." Felonies, civil matters above the magistrate limits and the state's family and children's business are heard there. The Judiciary's own published description puts the bench at one hundred and two judges across the thirteen districts. Only one of the thirteen, the second district, sits in a single county, which is why a district rather than a county is the right unit for scoping a search.

Below the district court sit the courts of limited jurisdiction, and the one that matters most for screening is the one that keeps no record. Section 35-1-1 establishes the magistrate court "as a court of limited original jurisdiction within the judicial department of the state government" and then states plainly that "The magistrate court is not a court of record." Section 35-1-2 provides that "The magistrate court consists of one magistrate district in each county excepting a class A county with a population of more than two hundred thousand persons in the last federal decennial census", which is Bernalillo County, where the metropolitan court sits instead; and "The name of the magistrate district is the same as the name of the county in which it is located". Section 35-3-3(A) caps magistrate civil jurisdiction at "ten thousand dollars ($10,000), exclusive of interest and costs". Section 35-3-4(A) gives magistrates "jurisdiction in all cases of misdemeanors and petty misdemeanors, including offenses and complaints under ordinances of a county" and the power to "hold preliminary examinations in any criminal action where authorized by law", and subsection (C) requires a transcript to the district court when a case is bound over. Section 35-14-1 establishes a municipal court in each incorporated municipality.

The appellate tier is small and centralized. The Court of Appeals has ten judges sitting in panels of three, and the Supreme Court has five justices and, in the Judiciary's own description, "has superintending control over all inferior courts and attorneys licensed in the state". Both sit in Santa Fe. Because the district court is the court of record for the limited-jurisdiction tier, a misdemeanor that is appealed is re-heard on the district court's file rather than on a transcript from the court below, and a misdemeanor that is not appealed exists only in the limited court's own case management system.

One caution about the counts on this page. The bench and court figures come from the Judiciary's own published descriptions of its courts, read through an archived capture, and the lower-court figures do not agree across the Judiciary's pages: magistrate-court counts of fifty-four, forty-six and forty-three and municipal-court counts of eighty-one and seventy-eight were observed on different pages during this pass. The live site stopped answering partway through, so the disagreement could not be settled. The page states the district structure, which is statutory and therefore fixed, and states the lower-tier figures with that qualification rather than choosing one silently.

The public channel is a docket channel and the gap between it and a document is the whole difference. Case Lookup is open to anyone without registration and covers the appellate courts, the district courts, the magistrate courts, the metropolitan court and the municipal courts, which sounds like a statewide criminal history until the coverage statement is read. The Judiciary states that "Documents are not available through Case Lookup"; that "For security purposes, Personal Identifying Information (PII), such as social security numbers and address information is not available"; that "Municipal court data is limited to criminal Domestic Violence and DWI historic convictions beginning September 1, 1991"; that since July 1, 2007 the Judiciary "no longer displays juvenile criminal cases"; and that since July 1, 2008 it "no longer displays Family Violence Protection Act Order of Protection cases". A municipal ordinance conviction other than a DWI or a domestic violence matter is therefore not in the statewide channel, and a magistrate disposition is there as a docket entry with no document behind it.

The document layer exists on paper and not in practice, which is the access finding that matters most for a product that needs documents. The Case Access Policy for Online Court Records, issued under Supreme Court Order No. 23-8500-007 dated March 10, 2023, defines the access group "Public" as "Any person not defined above" and gives it "Redacted public records.*", with the asterisk carrying the operative limitation: "Online document access requires redaction to remove protected personal identifier information, which is NOT currently available and is contingent upon the Judiciary obtaining an appropriation to implement the necessary redaction technology. View or print access is case-by-case. Bulk record download is prohibited by New Mexico Supreme Court Order No. 10-8500 dated September 15, 2010 and No. 13-8500 dated August 28, 2013." A second footnote adds that the public set does not include cases or records that are sealed or otherwise confidential under statute, court rule or court order, and that content "varies by court depending on court case files currently digitized". The statutory hook is § 14-2-1.1, which provides that "Unredacted records that contain protected personal identifier information shall not be made available on publicly accessible websites operated by or managed on behalf of a public body", with "protected personal identifier information" defined at § 14-2-6(F).

Registered access is tiered by case type rather than priced. re:SearchNM covers "civil, criminal, family, and probate cases from appellate, district, magistrate and metropolitan courts by user profile", and registration is by category: Attorneys of Record and Pro Hac Vice, Attorney Staff, Justice Partners, FBI Justice Partners, Press, Self-Represented Litigants, and Public. Tier 1 covers "most civil, probate, domestic relations, domestic violence, parentage proceedings, and criminal case types"; Tier 2.1 covers delinquency proceedings in Children's Court; and Tier 2.5 covers abuse and neglect, families in need of court-ordered services, adoption and mental health proceedings, of which the Judiciary says only law enforcement officers may view them. The Secured Odyssey Public Access accounts were migrated to re:SearchNM on April 7, 2023. No fee is published anywhere on the Judiciary's access pages or in the Case Access Policy, so the page does not state one and does not describe the lookup as free.

The repository is a separate system with a separate and narrower access rule. The state criminal history sits in the Department of Public Safety's central repository, and the access statute is the Arrest Record Information Act. Section 29-10-5, headed "Exchange of information", authorizes a law enforcement agency to disseminate arrest record information to a federal, state or local government law enforcement agency, and preserves direct access for the attorney general, the district attorney, the crime victims reparation commission and the courts; the section names no employer or commercial route. The individual route is § 29-10-6(A): "Upon satisfactory verification of his identity, any individual may inspect, in person, through counsel or through his authorized agent, arrest record information maintained by a law enforcement agency concerning him." Section 29-10-7(A) lists what is publicly inspectable without going through that route: fugitive lists, "original records of entry such as police blotters", "court records of public judicial proceedings", published opinions, traffic and accident records, clemency announcements and de-identified statistical reports. The department's own operator terms set out the mechanics: the release "must be notarized and the fee is $15.00 per record check", the department "must receive the authorization form with the 'original' signature", turnaround "is 7-15 working days from the date of receipt ... and should only be requested by mail", and "With the required release and proper payment, all adult arrest records are released." The same page states that the repository holds "arrest record information on persons arrested in New Mexico for felony, misdemeanor (offenses punishable by six months or more imprisonment) and DWI offenses" and adds the completeness caveat in the department's own words: "The completeness and accuracy of this information is dependent on the contributing agencies."

Routing a New Mexico search therefore means answering three separate questions. Which court: a district court matter, or a limited-jurisdiction matter that may sit in a magistrate court that is not a court of record, in a municipal court whose data reaches the statewide channel only for domestic violence and DWI convictions from September 1991, or in the Bernalillo County metropolitan court. Which channel: the free docket lookup, which carries no documents and no personal identifiers, or the registered tiered service, which is the only public route to a document and which will not be complete until the redaction technology is funded. And which source: a court record or a repository record, because the repository route runs through the subject's own notarized release by mail and is not a commercial ordering channel. An answer that does not say which of the three it came from is not a comparable answer from one candidate to the next.

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

What New Mexico law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against New Mexico 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.

New Mexico adds no state adverse-action notice duty for a criminal-history report, and the state overlay that does exist is an access limit rather than a notice rule. The Case Access Policy for Online Court Records gives the public tier "Redacted public records" and footnotes online document access as requiring redaction "which is NOT currently available and is contingent upon the Judiciary obtaining an appropriation to implement the necessary redaction technology", so a letter that relies on a court document obtained from the free public channel is relying on something the policy does not currently provide. Bulk record download is separately prohibited by New Mexico Supreme Court Order No. 10-8500 dated September 15, 2010 and No. 13-8500 dated August 28, 2013.

The reporting article carries a deletion duty that belongs in the file before a decision is made. Section 56-3-6(A)(5) requires that an arrest or indictment record "no longer be reported if at any time it is learned that after a conviction a full pardon has been granted, or after an arrest or indictment a conviction did not result", and subsection B requires a bureau to "delete as soon as practical any item of derogatory information whenever it is ascertained that the source of information can no longer verify the item in question from its records of original entry". A report that still carries a pardoned conviction or an arrest with no conviction behind it is the fact pattern those two provisions are aimed at.

Enforcement on the reporting side is heavier than the federal scheme in one respect, and lighter in none. Section 56-3-7(A) gives a private right of action against "Any credit bureau or user of information that willfully fails to comply with any requirement of Sections 56-3-1 through 56-3-6 NMSA 1978 with respect to any consumer", with actual damages, "punitive damages as the court may allow", costs and reasonable attorney's fees, and the compiler's annotation treats the Act as "a state consumer-protection statute analogous to the Fair Credit Reporting Act". Section 56-3-8 makes it a fourth-degree felony to obtain consumer information from a credit bureau under false pretenses, or for a bureau officer or employee to provide it to a person not authorized to receive it. The qualification travels with the citation: § 56-3-1 defines "consumer" as a person who "seeks or is seeking credit for personal, family or household purposes", and no decision reconciling that with the employment-facing duties in §§ 56-3-4 and 56-3-5 was found.

Article 3A adds a notice that rides with the federal one. Section 56-3A-4 provides that "At any time that a consumer reporting agency is required to provide the consumer with a summary of rights pursuant to Section 609 of the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, the following notice shall be included", and sets out a New Mexico notice headed "New Mexico Consumers Have the Right to Obtain a Security Freeze or Submit a Declaration of Removal". Because a Section 609 summary accompanies an employment report, the state notice accompanies it too, and § 56-3A-5 lets the affected consumer or the attorney general bring a civil action for injunctive relief, actual damages, a civil penalty "not to exceed two thousand dollars ($2,000) for each violation of the security freeze", and the costs of the action and reasonable attorney fees.

An expunged conviction has an answer that the statute supplies. Section 29-3A-7 provides that "the proceedings shall be treated as if they never occurred, and officials and the person who received the order to expunge may reply to an inquiry that no record exists with respect to the person", subject to a proviso that arrest or conviction records "shall be disclosed by the person and officials in connection with any application for or query regarding qualification for employment or association with any financial institution regulated by the financial industry regulatory authority or the securities and exchange commission". A person whose record has been expunged can therefore answer that no record exists, and section 29-3A-2(C)(4) excludes a record obtained through a background check authorized by law from the article's definition of "public records", which is the provision to check before deciding what an employer may do with a record it already holds.

Screening in New Mexico: what your process needs

• Read § 28-2-3.1 before drafting the application form, and read it as an inquiry rule rather than as a hiring rule. The prohibition attaches to the form, and the section permits consideration of a conviction once employment has been discussed.
• Do not treat New Mexico as a conditional-offer state. Nothing in § 28-2-3.1 requires an offer, an individualized assessment, a notice to the applicant or a chance to respond. A process built around a conditional offer is applying a policy choice and not a statutory sequence.
• Do not cite a "Fair Chance Hiring Act" and do not cite §§ 28-2-11 to -13. Neither exists. The private-sector provision is § 28-2-3.1, enacted by Laws 2019, ch. 176, § 2, and it sits in the Criminal Offender Employment Act.
• Do not state a four-employee threshold for § 28-2-3.1 as settled. The section has no size qualifier; the four-or-more definition is § 28-1-2(B) of the Human Rights Act, and the section reaches it only through the remedy route at § 28-2-3.1(B). State the text and the open question.
• Keep the public-sector process separate. A state agency, a political subdivision or a licensing board is under § 28-2-3, which bars the question on an initial application, waits for the finalist stage before consideration, and prohibits any use, distribution or dissemination of four categories of record.
• Build the four-category check into a public-sector file. Arrests without a valid conviction, convictions that have been sealed, dismissed, expunged or pardoned, juvenile adjudications, and convictions that are not job-related for the position and consistent with business necessity may not be used, distributed or disseminated at all under § 28-2-3(B).
• Do not describe a three-year rehabilitation presumption in New Mexico. Section 28-2-4 once created one, and Laws 2021 (1st S.S.), ch. 3, § 2 deleted it. Misdemeanors involving moral turpitude were removed from the permissible grounds in the same Act.
• Check § 28-2-5 before relying on the Act for a covered sector. Law enforcement, early childhood education and care, caregiver screening, the children, youth and families department and public education licensure are outside the Act, and each exempt agency is required to promulgate its own screening rules.
• Scope a court search by judicial district, not by county. The thirteen districts in § 34-6-1 cover thirty-three counties and only the second district sits in a single county.
• Expect a magistrate disposition to exist without a transcript. Section 35-1-1 states that the magistrate court "is not a court of record", so the case management record is the record, and the position changes only if the matter was bound over, where § 35-3-4(C) requires a transcript to the district court.
• Do not promise a document from the public channel. Case Lookup carries no documents and no personal identifying information, and the public document tier under Supreme Court Order No. 23-8500-007 depends on redaction technology that the policy states is not currently available and is contingent on an appropriation.
• Take bulk download off the table. It is prohibited by New Mexico Supreme Court Order No. 10-8500 dated September 15, 2010 and No. 13-8500 dated August 28, 2013, and the prohibition is quoted in the current Case Access Policy.
• Do not describe the state repository as an ordering channel. Section 29-10-5 provides for dissemination between government law enforcement agencies and names no employer or commercial route, and the individual route at § 29-10-6(A) runs on the subject's own notarized release, by mail, at fifteen dollars per record check.
• Apply the reporting article's seven-year rule at the point of report. Section 56-3-6(A)(5) measures criminal-record reporting from release or parole and requires deletion once a full pardon is learned of or an arrest produced no conviction, and § 56-3-7(A) exposes a user of information as well as a bureau.
• Separate the two cannabis regimes in policy and in training. Section 26-2B-9 protects an applicant or employee against action based on conduct allowed under the medical Act, with a federal-benefit defense and an employer-deemed safety-sensitive carve-out. Section 26-2C-34 protects the employer and authorizes a written zero-tolerance policy keyed to any detectable amount.
• Do not build an off-duty cannabis protection into a New Mexico policy. Section 26-2C-34 protects the employer rather than the employee, its first paragraph reaches only impairment, possession or use "at work or during work hours", and its third authorizes a written zero-tolerance policy keyed to any detectable amount.
• Check the expungement route before treating an old record as clean or as present. Conviction expungement is by petition with waiting periods from two to ten years, non-conviction expungement is by petition after one year, and automatic expungement exists only for cannabis under § 29-3A-8.
• Do not rely on § 14-3-15.1 for state data without checking the conditions. A copy of a state database may be authorized only on an agreement not to use it for a political or commercial purpose without written approval, and unauthorised use or disclosure is a misdemeanor carrying up to a year in jail and a five thousand dollar fine.

Related states

• Arizona. Arizona does not release its criminal history to private employers or to consumer reporting agencies: the exchange list it keeps omits both, and releasing or procuring the release of the information outside that list is a class 6 felony, so an Arizona screening product runs on court records rather than on a repository check. Its statewide case search publishes 177 of 184 courts from one place and carries its own gap list, naming Maricopa Superior as displaying criminal cases only and Pima Superior as unavailable through the site.
• Colorado. Colorado’s bar on reporting sealed, expunged and non-conviction records sits in its consumer credit reporting act, where a sealing bill put it in 2022, and the employment salary exception that could have switched the act off for senior roles was deleted the same year and the exceptions subsection replaced in 2023 with a single mortgage-sized credit exception, so the bar and the seven-year cap reach every Colorado employment report at any pay. Its automated decision-making law names employment among the domains it covers and sets the trigger at technology used to materially influence a hiring decision, with duties from 1 January 2027.
• 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.

What we do

New Mexico has a narrow private-sector rule and a strong public-sector one, and the difference decides how a process here should be built. Section 28-2-3.1 bars the criminal history question on a written or electronic application and then expressly permits an employer to consider a conviction once employment has been discussed, with no conditional-offer stage and no size threshold in the section. Section 28-2-3 keeps public employers and licensing boards on a finalist trigger and prohibits any use, distribution or dissemination of four categories of record, and it was extended in 2021 while the rehabilitation presumption was repealed. The courts settle matters in thirteen judicial districts over thirty-three counties, the magistrate court is not a court of record, and the public document tier is written into the Case Access Policy but gated on a redaction appropriation, which means a New Mexico document routinely has to come from the registered channel rather than the free one. The state repository is a subject-access system: a notarized release, by mail, fifteen dollars per check, and no commercial route under the Arrest Record Information Act. Our New Mexico work keeps the application form, the discussion and the decision separate for private employers, holds public-sector clients to the four-category use bar, checks every report against the seven-year criminal-record rule in the Credit Bureaus Act, and states which court and which channel produced each record. If your current vendor cites a Fair Chance Hiring Act, applies a four-employee threshold it cannot source, or promises a document from the free public lookup, this is where that shows.

Sources

• NMSA 1978, ch. 28, art. 2, the Criminal Offender Employment Act, including §§ 28-2-3, 28-2-3.1, 28-2-4, 28-2-5 and 28-2-6
• NMSA 1978, § 28-1-2, Human Rights Act definitions, including the four-employee employer definition at (B) and the applicant-inclusive employee definition at (E)
• NMSA 1978, ch. 56, art. 3, the Credit Bureaus Act, §§ 56-3-1 to -8, including the seven-year criminal-record rule at § 56-3-6(A)(5) and the private right of action at § 56-3-7
• NMSA 1978, ch. 56, art. 3A, the Fair Credit Reporting and Identity Security Act, §§ 56-3A-1 to -6, including the employment-screening carve-out at § 56-3A-3(L)(9) and the notice duty at § 56-3A-4
• NMSA 1978, ch. 29, art. 3A, the Criminal Record Expungement Act, §§ 29-3A-1 to -9
• NMSA 1978, ch. 29, art. 10, the Arrest Record Information Act, §§ 29-10-3 to -7, and the Caregivers Criminal History Screening Act at §§ 29-17-2 to -5
• NMSA 1978, ch. 26, the Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act employment provision at § 26-2B-9 and the Cannabis Regulation Act employer protections at § 26-2C-34
• NMSA 1978, ch. 35, Magistrate and Municipal Courts, including § 35-1-1 and the civil and criminal jurisdiction limits at §§ 35-3-3 and 35-3-4
• NMSA 1978, § 34-6-1, the thirteen judicial districts, and § 34-6-2, the district court always in session
• NMSA 1978, ch. 14, the Inspection of Public Records Act at §§ 14-2-1 to -6, including the website redaction rule at § 14-2-1.1, and the state database conditions at § 14-3-15.1
• Constitution of the State of New Mexico, art. VI, § 13 on the district courts and art. X, § 6 on municipal home rule
• New Mexico Judiciary, Case Access Policy for Online Court Records under Supreme Court Order No. 23-8500-007 dated March 10, 2023, read through Internet Archive raw replay
• New Mexico Judiciary, Public Access and re:SearchNM, including the Case Lookup coverage statement and the tier structure, read through Internet Archive raw replay
• New Mexico Department of Public Safety, fingerprinting and background checks, the repository operator terms, read through an archived capture because dps.nm.gov does not resolve from this environment
• Route note: NMOneSource (nmonesource.com), the New Mexico Compilation Commission's host, was reachable directly and is the source for every statute and constitutional quotation on this page; chapter downloads use the form https://nmonesource.com/nmos/nmsa/en/<itemId>/1/document.do and the item identifiers were verified by reading each downloaded PDF's own first page. nmlegis.gov returns HTTP 403, so no bill history was read. codelibrary.amlegal.com returns 403 to this environment, which is why the Albuquerque code was read through Internet Archive raw replay of the archived code library pages. dps.nm.gov does not resolve (curl exit 6), so the repository operator terms were read through an archived capture dated 2022-06-19. nmcourts.gov answered through its WordPress REST interface early in the pass and then returned a persistent HTTP 302 with a zero-byte body on every path including /wp-json/, so the Judiciary's Case Access Policy, its public-access page and its court descriptions were read through Internet Archive raw replays; the live pages could not be re-read, which is why a disagreement between the Judiciary's own lower-court counts is recorded rather than resolved. caselookup.nmcourts.gov served its disclaimer but the emergency-notice submission did not advance, so the search form's fields are unverified. library.municode.com serves an application shell whose code content routes require a job identifier that could not be derived, so the Santa Fe, Las Cruces, Bernalillo County, Los Alamos County and Sandoval County codes were not read, and las-cruces.org returns 403 independently. r.jina.ai now returns a Cloudflare interstitial for hosts in this project. No New Mexico case law was read: the case-law mirrors are blocked, so the only judicial statements on this page are the annotations printed in the official compilation, which are attributed as such.

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.