NC · state guide

North Carolina background screening law

How the courts here are organized

North Carolina has a unified General Court of Justice and no county trial courts, and the second half of that sentence is the one that changes how a search here is scoped. The Judicial Branch describes the structure across three divisions: an Appellate Division of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, a Superior Court division, and a District Court division that also contains the magistrates. There is no county-level trial court in the state, and no North Carolina county holds its own criminal files as an institution. What each county does have is an elected clerk of superior court, and that office is the record keeper.

The Superior Court is the felony court and it is organized by district rather than by county. It was "Established in 1777" and the Judicial Branch states that "superior court is divided into five divisions and 48 districts across the state", that "superior court judges rotate among the districts within their divisions" every six months under a rotation designed to minimize conflicts of interest, and that its criminal jurisdiction is "All felony criminal cases", with misdemeanor and infraction appeals from the District Court also heard there. A clerk of superior court "is elected in each county and is responsible for all clerical and record-keeping functions." That sentence is the entire routing answer for a North Carolina court search, because there is no other county-level office that holds the file.

The District Court is where misdemeanors are decided and where every criminal case begins. "District courts are divided into 41 districts across the state and sit in the county seat of each county", they may also sit "in certain other cities and towns specifically authorized by the General Assembly", and unlike the Superior Court their districts "are not grouped into larger judicial divisions". Its criminal business is stated as "criminal cases involving misdemeanors and infractions (non-jury)". The 41 district court districts and the 48 superior court districts are therefore two different maps laid over the same 100 counties, and neither of them is the county map.

Magistrates sit inside the District Court division and they dispose of a real share of the state's criminal volume. The Judicial Branch lists their criminal authority as issuing warrants for arrest, setting bail, and accepting "guilty pleas for minor misdemeanors and infractions". A disposition by a magistrate is a court disposition and it is recorded in the same case file the clerk maintains, which matters because a search product that only looks for judges' orders will not see it.

The Appellate Division sits above both. The Supreme Court is the state's highest court and the Court of Appeals is the intermediate court: "Currently 15 judges hear cases in panels of three", the judges "are elected and serve eight-year terms", and the court decides questions of law rather than questions of fact. Appeals are therefore a separate record system from the trial courts, and a North Carolina criminal history is a trial-court history.

The consequence for screening is that North Carolina is a hundred-clerk state wearing a unified-court label. The court system is unified for administration, which is what makes a single statewide data feed possible at all, but the records themselves belong to the clerks, and § 7A-109(d) states the separation in terms: "Neither the Director nor the Administrative Office of the Courts is the custodian of the records of the clerks of superior court or of the electronic data processing records or any compilation of electronic court records or data of the clerks of superior court." A provider that describes a North Carolina search as a statewide court check is describing a license it holds, not a courthouse it visited.

The repository does not serve the general market and the statute that creates it says so twice. Section 143B-906 sets the Bureau's duty to "receive and collect criminal information, to assist in locating, identifying, and keeping records of criminals in this State, and from other states, and to compare, classify, compile, publish, make available and disseminate any and all such information to the sheriffs, constables, police authorities, courts or any other officials of the State requiring such criminal identification, crime statistics and other information respecting crimes local and national", which is a list of officials. Section 143B-1209.10 then governs the charge for a release to anyone else and closes with (d): "Nothing in this section shall be construed as enlarging any right to receive any record of the Bureau. Such rights are and shall be controlled by G.S.143B-906, 143B-1208.5, 120-19.4A, and other applicable statutes." A fee schedule is not an access right, and the Bureau says as much on its own pages.

The Bureau states the access rule in three sentences, and the third one is the operational one. "Criminal history record information (CHRI) maintained by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations (NCSBI) may only be released to entities having statutory authority to access that information or pursuant to a judicial order or subpoena." Then: "North Carolina General Assembly (NCGA) defines the 'qualified agencies' that are eligible to access criminal history record information (CHRI). Access to CHRI for employment or licensing is permitted only if there is a state statute, federal mandate, or local ordinance of a NC State town, city or county that specifically authorizes a fingerprint-based criminal history record background check." And then the filing requirement: "Agencies or organizations seeking access to CHRI must provide the statutory authority authorizing record checks on applicants/employees." The application for a check therefore has to name its own legal basis, and a local ordinance counts as one.

Where that route is unavailable, the Bureau sends the requester to the courts, and the courts send them to the clerk. The Bureau's own answer is that "A name-based record check may be obtained by contacting the Clerk of Court in each county of North Carolina. The fee of $25 is required", and it adds the disclaimer that "Name-based background checks are NOT as accurate as fingerprint-based background checks". The Administrative Office of the Courts describes the same product and states its limit in the page text: "Note: This search only checks the court records in that one county. It is not a statewide record search." The statewide product is a license instead, and the AOC is explicit that its own public portal is not the tool for the job: "Individuals performing background checks should use the county clerk's office for doing so, not Portal."

The licensed route is metered and it is priced per keystroke, which is worth knowing before quoting a turnaround. The AOC "offers access to criminal and civil court data in all 100 North Carolina counties through its Remote Public Access Program (RPA)", with the online fee schedule stated as "$495.00 - One-time connection fee (non-refundable); includes two user IDs and two admin IDs" and "$0.39 - The access fee per transaction", where a transaction is defined as "Each new task, indicated by the pressing of the 'Enter' key, the 'PA1,' 'PA2,' or 'PA3' keys, the function keys 'F1' through 'F12,' or the 'Clear' key". The same page gives the compliance reason the license exists: it "Ensures that data obtained accurately reflects that of the N.C. clerks' offices, thus reducing the likelihood of violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act".

The bulk extracts carry a delete list, and it is the same mechanism the expunction statutes depend on. The AOC offers "four criminal extracts and two civil extracts", and the Demographic Extract is deliberately thin: "The Demographic Extract contains data about the defendant only; it contains no data about substantive offenses charged, the nature of the criminal process, court appearance dates, or any other case data", and it is "designed to be used in a combination with online access", so a licensee builds an index and then pulls each case number in real time. The Daily Demographic Extract is the one that matters for compliance: "In addition, the daily extract includes case numbers that must be deleted from the licensee's database, since the cases no longer exist. A daily download of this extract is necessary to keep the licensee's demographic database current." A provider that skips a daily download is holding records § 15A-152(a) obliges it to destroy.

The last piece of the routing picture is that the expunction file itself is closed to a search. Section 15A-151(a) has the Administrative Office of the Courts "maintain a confidential file for expungements containing the petitions granted under this Article and the names of those people for whom it received a notice under G.S.15A-150", and lists ten disclosure routes: judges, the person themselves, a court under a § 15A-152 civil action, State or local law enforcement for records expunged for employment purposes only, three named standards commissions, the district attorney under § 15A-151.5, a joint request in a conditional discharge proceeding, and the Private Protective Services and Security Systems Licensing Boards for records expunged for licensure or registration purposes only. A commercial background check is not among them. Subsection (a2) then confines a clerk: "A clerk shall not disclose to any person or for any reason the existence or content of any expunged record from a county other than the clerk's own county." A hundred-county product and a one-county clerk therefore know different things, and the provider's answer can be right in one county and unavailable in 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 North Carolina adds on top of that floor, and where it departs from it.

What North Carolina law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against North Carolina 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.

North Carolina adds no notice duty of its own to that sequence for a criminal-history report. Chapter 95 contains no pre-adverse or adverse-action provision, Chapter 75 Article 2A regulates the credit file rather than the hiring decision, and § 15A-153 regulates the question rather than the letter. For a conviction report the federal sequence is the whole of the procedural requirement, which is worth saying plainly because the state does have an expunction rule and it is easy to assume a matching notice provision sits beside it.

What North Carolina adds is a rule about the content of the letter rather than the timing of it. Section 15A-153(c) makes it unlawful for an employer, "in any application, interview, or otherwise", to require an applicant to disclose an expunged arrest, charge or conviction, and the "or otherwise" reaches a question put in a follow-up rather than on a form. A letter or a screening questionnaire that asks the person to account for a conviction the person was entitled to omit is the conduct the subsection prohibits, and the person is protected on the other side too, because § 15A-153(b) provides that a person who receives an expunction is not "guilty of perjury or otherwise giving a false statement by reason of that person's failure following expunction to recite or acknowledge the expunged arrest, apprehension, charge, indictment, information, trial, or conviction in response to any inquiry made of the person for any purpose other than as provided in subsection (e) of this section."

The provider-side duty changes the analysis of a report that was accurate when it was collected. Section 15A-152(a) is triggered by the receipt of a notice to delete, and it requires the provider to "destroy and shall not disseminate" the record, within the license time or within ten business days where no license specifies one. A report assembled from a database that has not applied its daily delete list is therefore not saved by the fact that the underlying court record was correct on the day it was pulled. Subsection (b) is the related trap for a licensed entity that is not FCRA-regulated, because it permits dissemination only if the information was obtained or updated within the preceding ninety days.

The public-sector overlay adds two steps that private employers do not have and that are worth knowing when a client is a State agency or a state contractor. Executive Order No. 158 § 3(e) requires that, unless state or federal law including the Fair Credit Reporting Act prohibits it, the agency provide the applicant with a copy of the criminal record and a copy of the federal Summary of Rights where the agency obtains the record during the decision process, and that it "allow an applicant with a criminal record a reasonable opportunity to explain the circumstances surrounding their relevant conviction(s) and provide any proof of rehabilitation, including a certificate of relief." That is an explanation right rather than a dispute right, and it sits after the interview stage that § 3(c) sets.

A consumer's security freeze is not a dispute and does not stop an employment report, so a file that arrives with a freeze noted is not a file that is missing. Section 75-63(a) lets a consumer reporting agency advise a third party that a freeze is in effect while prohibiting it from releasing the frozen report without the consumer's express authorization, and § 75-63(l)(12) and (13) except employment-purpose credit reports and criminal background record information from the freeze altogether. The practical consequence is that a freeze cannot be treated as a consumer election against screening, and it cannot be used to explain an absent credit file in an employment context, because the employment purpose is authorized notwithstanding the freeze.

Screening in North Carolina: what your process needs

• Do not describe North Carolina as a ban-the-box state. Chapter 95 and Chapter 126 were read in full and contain no application-stage inquiry ban, and § 15A-153(a) provides in terms that nothing in the section prohibits an employer from asking about charges or convictions that have not been expunged and are part of the public record.
• Build the process around the expunged record instead, because that is where the state rule is. Section 15A-153(c) bars an employer from requiring an applicant to disclose an expunged arrest, charge or conviction and from knowingly and willingly inquiring about one, "in any application, interview, or otherwise", and there is no employer-size threshold.
• Do not ask an applicant to account for a gap in a record. Section 15A-153(b) protects the person from a perjury or false-statement claim for failing to acknowledge an expunged matter, and a question that invites the person to explain an omission is the conduct § 15A-153(c) reaches.
• Check the employer's exposure on the enforcement route. The Commissioner of Labor issues a written warning for a first violation and can impose up to $500 for each additional violation after the warning, the determination is reviewable under Chapter 150B, and § 15A-153(f) expressly creates no private cause of action. A demand letter that threatens a state-law claim under this section is threatening something the section does not give.
• Know that a dismissal may already be gone before the report is ordered. Section 15A-146(a4) expunges by operation of law 180 to 210 days after final disposition for cases disposed on or after 1 December 2021 where all charges were dismissed or ended in a not-guilty or not-responsible finding, and no petition or fee is involved. A felony charge dismissed under a plea agreement is excluded, so the exception is where a reportable disposition is most likely to survive.
• Read § 15A-152(a) as the obligation with no federal carve-out. The duty to destroy and not to disseminate on receipt of a notice to delete binds a private entity in the business of compiling and disseminating criminal history record information for compensation, and the default deadline is ten business days. A screening firm that assumes its FCRA status answers the whole section has read the carve-outs one subsection too far.
• Do not skip the daily feed. The Administrative Office of the Courts states that the Daily Demographic Extract "includes case numbers that must be deleted from the licensee's database, since the cases no longer exist", and that "A daily download of this extract is necessary to keep the licensee's demographic database current." A weekly or monthly refresh is a documented gap against § 15A-152(a).
• Check the ninety-day rule if the entity is a licensed non-FCRA user. Section 15A-152(b) permits dissemination by a licensed entity only if the information was obtained or updated within the preceding ninety days, and that rule does not apply to an entity regulated by the federal Act.
• Expect the notice to come from the state rather than from the court. Section 15A-150(d) requires a State agency holding a bulk-extract license to notify the licensee to delete, and requires the licensee to pass the notice down to any entity it supplies in a bulk extract. A provider further down the chain that has received nothing from its supplier has still received nothing, and § 15A-152(a) turns on notice rather than on its source.
• Do not treat a Bureau check as available on request. The State Bureau of Investigation releases criminal history record information only to entities with statutory authority or under a judicial order or subpoena, and employment access requires a state statute, a federal mandate or a local ordinance authorizing a fingerprint-based check, with the requester required to provide the authority it relies on.
• Scope a court search to the clerk, and be explicit about the county count. There are no county trial courts, but a clerk of superior court is elected in each of the 100 counties and § 7A-109(d) provides that the Administrative Office of the Courts is not the custodian of their records. The $25 certified search covers one county, and the Administrative Office of the Courts states that it "is not a statewide record search."
• Budget for the licensed route by transaction rather than by report. Remote Public Access carries a $495 connection fee and a $0.39 access fee per transaction, and a transaction is each new task indicated by Enter, PA1 to PA3, F1 to F12 or Clear. A product that quotes a per-report cost without metering keystrokes is quoting a number it cannot hold.
• Do not describe the public portal as a screening tool. The Administrative Office of the Courts states that "Individuals performing background checks should use the county clerk's office for doing so, not Portal."
• Do not promise a consumer that a security freeze will stop a background check. Section 75-63(l)(12) and (13) except employment-purpose credit reports and criminal background record information from the freeze.
• Check whether the role carries a statutory disqualification before designing the check. The Bureau's employment route requires an authorizing instrument, and the same enquiry identifies whether the position is one for which state or federal law prohibits hiring a person with particular convictions, which is the second limb of the EO 158 job-relatedness test for public-sector roles.
• Ask before you assume on salary history, and on cannabis. No North Carolina salary-history prohibition was located and it was not verified as absent. No cannabis employment protection was located in the instruments read in full, and the finding is about those instruments rather than about the whole code.

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.
• Georgia. Georgia’s First Offender Act says a discharge is not a conviction and "shall not be used to disqualify an individual in any application for employment or appointment to office in either the public or private sector", and the section opens by excepting Code Section 42-8-63.1: a discharge can still disqualify applicants to schools, child welfare agencies, child and after-school care, long-term care, day care for elderly persons and facilities for people who are mentally ill or developmentally disabled, on one offense list for discharges before 1 July 2016 and a different one after, and any discharge involving a felony or a crime involving moral turpitude can bar a peace officer certification. The superior court is the felony tier in circuits carrying all 159 counties, and a magistrate court sits in every one of them.
• District of Columbia. Cannabis employment protections are enacted but unfunded: every operative section of Chapter 9B is marked "[Not Funded]" and the Code states the amendment "has not been implemented", leaving the 2015 rule that testing waits for a conditional offer as the only live cannabis provision. The criminal-record rule triggers on that same offer, bars arrest and non-conviction inquiries at every stage, and gives the applicant a post-adverse-action right to the records the employer procured. Credit information is banned by the Human Rights Act rather than a consumer-reporting statute, there is no employment lookback, and every conviction, felony and misdemeanor alike, is adjudicated in the one Superior Court, whose clerk is a record route alongside the FBI and the Metropolitan Police Department.

What we do

North Carolina regulates the expunged record rather than the criminal record. Section 15A-153(c) bars an employer from requiring an applicant to disclose an expunged arrest, charge or conviction, and from knowingly and willingly inquiring about one, with no employer-size threshold, and the Commissioner of Labor issues a warning and then up to $500 a violation, with no private right of action. Dismissals and not-guilty findings expunge themselves by operation of law 180 to 210 days after final disposition under § 15A-146(a4), so the record may be gone before anyone files anything. Section 15A-152(a) then puts a deletion duty on any private entity in the business of compiling and disseminating criminal history record information, with a ten business day default and no federal carve-out, while the ninety-day currency rule and the civil liability provision each have one. The State Bureau of Investigation releases criminal history only on statutory authority, a judicial order or a subpoena, and for employment only where a state statute, a federal mandate or a local ordinance authorizes a fingerprint-based check. The courts are unified with no county trial courts, but the elected clerk of superior court in each of the 100 counties holds the file, § 7A-109(d) puts the Administrative Office of the Courts outside the custodianship, a certified search covers one county at $25, and the statewide product is a metered license at $0.39 a transaction. Our North Carolina work checks the daily delete list, states the county count behind a search, and keeps the question an employer may ask apart from the one it may not. If your current vendor describes a North Carolina court search as statewide without a Remote Public Access license behind it, this is where that shows.

Sources

• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-153, Effect of expunction; prohibited practices by employers, educational institutions, agencies of State and local governments
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-152, Civil liability for dissemination of certain criminal history information, including the duty to delete at (a)
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-150, Notification requirements, including the private-entity notice at (d)
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-151, Confidential agency files; exceptions to expunction, including the clerk non-disclosure rule at (a2)
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-146, Expunction of records when charges are dismissed or there are findings of not guilty, including automatic expunction at (a4)
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-145.5, Expunction of certain misdemeanors and felonies, and the waiting periods at (c)
• N.C. Gen. Stat. ch. 75, art. 2A, the Identity Theft Protection Act, §§ 75-60 to 75-65
• N.C. Gen. Stat. ch. 95, Employment, read in full
• N.C. Gen. Stat. ch. 126, State Personnel System, read in full
• N.C. Gen. Stat. ch. 143B, including § 143B-906 and § 143B-1209.10 on the State Bureau of Investigation and access to its records
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 7A-109, the clerk of superior court as custodian of the records, including (d)
• N.C. Gen. Stat. ch. 64, art. 2, E-Verify, including the employer definition at § 64-25(4)
• N.C. Const. art. VII, § 1, General Assembly to provide for local government
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 160A-174, general ordinance-making power and the consistency test at (b), with § 160A-4 and § 153A-121
• S.L. 2017-4 (H.B. 142), the preemption of local regulation of private employment practices at § 3 and its expiry at § 4
• Executive Order No. 158, Furthering Fair Chance Policies in State Government Employment, read from the PDF linked from governor.nc.gov
• Executive Order No. 24, the state-government artificial intelligence order, read from the PDF linked from governor.nc.gov
• North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, Employers and Licensing Entities, and Background Checks on Others
• North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, background check services, read live
• North Carolina Judicial Branch, Criminal Background Check help topic, including the single-county clerk search and the Remote Public Access description
• North Carolina Judicial Branch, Remote Public Access Program, online access fee schedule and criminal extracts
• North Carolina Judicial Branch, Superior Court and District Court pages, and the Court of Appeals page, read live through the reader proxy
• Route note: every North Carolina statute and session law was read live from ncleg.gov on 23 September 2026 through the r.jina.ai reader proxy, by whole chapter where a chapter was the question and by section page where a section was; the section pages carry a publication stamp of 16 April 2026 and the section credits run to the 2025 session. nccourts.gov returns HTTP 403 to a direct request from this environment, so every Judicial Branch page was read through the same proxy. The State Bureau of Investigation pages at ncsbi.gov were reachable live. The two Executive Orders were read from the PDFs after the order pages on governor.nc.gov rendered only navigation through the proxy. No North Carolina case law was read, because the case-law mirrors are blocked from this environment, so nothing on this page turns on a holding. No municipal code was readable, which is why slot 4 is unset.

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.