TN · state guide

Tennessee background screening law

How the courts here are organized

Tennessee is a two-axis state: the trial courts are organized on judicial districts that do not match county lines, and the limited-jurisdiction court that decides most misdemeanors sits in every county under a jurisdiction that varies from county to county. The Administrative Office of the Courts states the first axis in one sentence: "Tennessee's 95 counties are divided into 32 judicial districts. Within each district are Circuit Courts and Chancery Courts, as provided by the state constitution. Some districts also have legislatively established Criminal Courts and Probate Courts. Judges of these courts are elected to 8-year terms."

The district is the unit for the higher trial courts and it does not track the county. The AOC publishes a district map with the county composition of each of the 32 districts, and the composition is uneven: District 30 is Shelby County alone, District 11 is Hamilton County alone, District 20 is Davidson County alone, District 6 is Knox County alone, and District 13 covers Clay, Cumberland, DeKalb, Overton, Pickett, Putnam and White counties together. A single county can therefore appear in one district while its courthouse holds courts for that district, and the district number is not a county identifier.

Circuit Court is the general-jurisdiction court and it is where felony trials happen outside the districts that have their own criminal courts. The AOC describes Circuit Courts as "courts of general jurisdiction in Tennessee" that "hear civil and criminal cases and appeals of decisions from Juvenile, Municipal, and General Sessions Courts", and adds that "Criminal cases are tried in circuit court except in districts with separate criminal courts established by the General Assembly." Criminal Courts were "established by the legislature to relieve circuit courts in areas with heavy caseloads", and in addition to criminal jurisdiction "criminal court judges hear misdemeanor appeals from lower courts".

General Sessions is the court that matters most to a screening file and it is easy to miss. Every county has one, its jurisdiction comes partly from private acts and therefore differs by county, and the AOC states its criminal reach precisely: "Criminal jurisdiction is limited to preliminary hearings in felony cases and misdemeanor trials in which a defendant waives the right to a grand jury investigation and trial by jury in Circuit or Criminal Court." A felony therefore begins with a General Sessions record, and a misdemeanor may end with one and never reach circuit at all. The same judges "also serve as juvenile judges except in counties in which the legislature has established separate Juvenile Courts."

Juvenile business is mostly General Sessions business and it is a court of record by statute. The AOC states that "Tennessee is home to 98 juvenile courts with 109 juvenile court judges and 45 Magistrates. Of these 98 courts, 17 are designated 'Private Act' juvenile courts while the remaining 81 are general sessions courts with juvenile jurisdiction", that "Each court, with the exception of Bristol and Johnson City, is county-based and administered with at least one juvenile court located in each of the state's 95 counties", and that "Pursuant to Tennessee Code Annotated § 37-1-159, the juvenile court is a court of record." Municipal courts sit below all of this, hearing ordinance violations, and the AOC caps the ordinary penalty at "a fine of up to $50 (Fifty Dollars) plus court costs", with a civil penalty of up to $500 in some instances.

The organizing fact for a Tennessee search is that the county is not the unit and the district is not the county. A Circuit or Criminal Court file sits in a district that may hold one county or seven, and a General Sessions file sits in the county. A search scoped to a county name will reach the General Sessions and juvenile business and may not reach the circuit business, and a search scoped to a district number will reach the circuit business and not the county court. Both units have to be named.

The tier that most often goes missing is General Sessions. Because its criminal jurisdiction reaches felony preliminary hearings and misdemeanor trials only where the defendant waives the grand jury and the jury, a General Sessions disposition carries a waiver on its face, and where a misdemeanor is tried there the file never reaches circuit court. For a screening product that treats "no circuit court record" as "no record", that is the failure mode this state produces.

The repository route and the court route answer different questions. The TBI product is a Tennessee adult criminal history keyed on a name and sold at $29 to anyone, and the bureau describes what it holds rather than what any individual court holds. A court search is a district and county exercise that has to name the tier. Neither is a Tennessee statewide criminal history on its own, and the page states both rather than treating the bureau product as a substitute for a court check or the reverse.

The expunction order is served on Tennessee custodians and not on the market. Section 40-32-110(a) entitles the petitioner to have "all public records of the expunged conviction destroyed in the manner set forth in this chapter", and § 40-32-102(d) requires the court to send the order to the bureau within thirty days from the date of the order for entry into its expunged offender and pretrial diversion database. Nothing in the chapter reaches a private database that was populated before the order, which is why a report can carry a conviction the state no longer holds.

What the bureau itself keeps is written into the chapter rather than left to policy. Section 40-32-101(4) provides that "Public records," for purposes of expunction only, does not include arrest histories, investigative reports, appellate court records or appellate court opinions, signed orders of expunction that are maintained as confidential records and are not open for inspection by members of the public, intelligence information of law enforcement agencies, files of district attorneys general that are maintained as confidential records for law enforcement purposes and are not open for inspection by members of the public, and records of the department of children's services or department of human services that are confidential under state or federal law and that are required to be maintained by state or federal law for audit or other purposes. Section 40-32-102(e)(2) then makes release of confidential records outside law enforcement a Class A misdemeanor, and (e)(5) permits the court to release a copy of the order to the petitioner.

A portal exists and its coverage was not verified. The AOC publishes a "Search Public Case History" facility from tncourts.gov and the site describes a Tennessee Statewide Court Information Systems program, but what that search covers, whether it reaches trial court criminal dispositions in all 95 counties, and what it costs were not verified for this page, so the page records that the facility exists and does not describe its contents. The AOC's own news feed separately confirms that appellate case data from Tennessee was included in a cybersecurity incident reported by West Publishing Corporation, which is a reminder that Tennessee court data also sits with a commercial publisher outside the state's control.

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

What Tennessee law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Tennessee 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.

Tennessee adds no state adverse-action notice duty for criminal-history reports, and no state pre-request notice for a criminal-history search. The federal sequence is the whole of the procedural requirement for a conviction report, and there is no state credit-report notice pair to satisfy alongside it.

The state rule that belongs in the file is the expunction, and the order decides it. Section 40-32-108(e) provides that a petitioner is entitled to a copy of the order and that "such copy is sufficient proof that the person named in the order is no longer under any disability, disqualification, or other adverse consequence resulting from the expunged conviction", and § 40-32-110(c) provides that the person "is not guilty of perjury or otherwise giving a false statement by reason of the person's failure to recite or acknowledge" the record "in response to any inquiry made of the person for any purpose". Where a report carries a conviction the person has produced an order for, the order is the document that answers it.

The recipient of the record is on notice. Section 40-32-102(e)(2) makes release of confidential records or information outside law enforcement for law enforcement purposes a Class A misdemeanor, and § 40-32-102(e)(1) requires the clerk maintaining expunged records to keep them confidential. A process that obtains the record from somewhere other than a Tennessee custodian is not reached by those provisions, which is the divergence to check before the letter is written.

What a destruction order does not reach has to be checked in the same pass. Section 40-32-101(4) excludes a defined list from the meaning of "public records" for the purposes of expunction, and § 38-6-118 keeps the expunged offender and pretrial diversion database confidential rather than destroyed while requiring it to be shared with the coordinator of elections on request. Section 7-51-1701(b) separately takes records related to an administrative action against a local government employee out of the destruction regime entirely. A letter that assumes an expunction emptied every Tennessee system is assuming something the chapter does not say.

Screening in Tennessee: what your process needs

• Do not cite § 40-32-101(g) for the effect of a Tennessee expunction. Public Chapter 268 of 2025 deleted § 40-32-101 and substituted definitions, and the effect of an order is now at § 40-32-110. Cite § 40-32-110(b), (c) and (e) for an order granted after April 2025 and note the old cite only if the order predates the change.
• Do not describe a Tennessee expunction as sealing. Section 40-32-110(a) entitles the petitioner "to have all public records of the expunged conviction destroyed in the manner set forth in this chapter". A process whose state taxonomy has one setting for sealed and expunged will describe Tennessee wrongly, and the difference decides what a later search may return.
• Check whether the order is attached to the petition in any matter you are advising on. Section 40-32-102(c)(3) provides that "An order of expunction must not be entered by the court unless a certificate, as required by this subsection (c), is attached to the order of expunction", and § 40-32-102(c)(1) requires the certificate to carry the name, date of birth, social security number, offense, date of arrest and the § 8-4-115 state control number.
• Do not read the bureau certificate as a person-level clearance. Section 40-32-102(c)(4) provides that it "is only a certification as to whether the submitted offense is eligible for expunction", that it "is not a certification that the defendant is eligible for expunction", and that the bureau "is not required to search any other source or database". Section 38-6-118(b)(2) puts the same limit on the diversion certificate.
• Check the definition before assuming an expunction emptied everything. Section 40-32-101(4) lists what "Public records" does not include for the purposes of expunction: arrest histories, investigative reports, appellate court records or opinions, signed orders of expunction, law enforcement intelligence information, district attorneys general files, and confidential children's services and human services records.
• Expect the person to have the document. Section 40-32-108(e) provides that a petitioner is entitled to a copy of the order of expunction and that "such copy is sufficient proof that the person named in the order is no longer under any disability, disqualification, or other adverse consequence resulting from the expunged conviction", and § 40-32-110(c) protects the person from a perjury or false-statement claim for not reciting the record "in response to any inquiry made of the person for any purpose".
• Do not treat a $29 Tennessee check as equivalent to a fingerprint check. The bureau sells a name-based Tennessee adult criminal history on any individual for $29 with no fingerprints, and it sells the fingerprint-based products at $50 nationwide and at $37.15, $33.15 and $23.90 for qualified organizations through a contractor. Which product was ordered changes what the report is worth and what it can be defended with.
• Route a search by district and by county, and name the tier. Tennessee has 95 counties in 32 judicial districts, Circuit and Chancery Courts sit in each district, and General Sessions sits in every county. A district search reaches circuit business; a county search reaches General Sessions, juvenile and municipal business. A felony may have records in both tiers.
• Do not stop at Circuit Court for a misdemeanor. General Sessions criminal jurisdiction covers "misdemeanor trials in which a defendant waives the right to a grand jury investigation and trial by jury in Circuit or Criminal Court", so a misdemeanor disposition may exist only in General Sessions and never reach the circuit file.
• Check the juvenile route before assuming it is separate. Of Tennessee's 98 juvenile courts, 81 are general sessions courts sitting with juvenile jurisdiction, and § 37-1-159 makes the juvenile court a court of record. The court that holds the record is often the same court that holds the adult misdemeanor business.
• Do not plan around a municipal ban-the-box ordinance without checking § 7-51-1802 first. Subsection (d) bars a local government from prohibiting an employer from requesting information on an application or during hiring, and (g) occupies the entire field of regulating terms and conditions of employment. Subsection (e) leaves a local government free to set the rules for its own employees.
• Read § 38-6-106 and § 71-3-507 before advising a public-sector or child care client. Section 38-6-106(h) names four categories of position that must be fingerprinted, and § 71-3-507 requires a disclosure form and a fingerprint-based review before a person assumes a role with a licensed child care agency, with a five-year repeat cycle and a same-business-day notification duty on the agency.
• Do not advise a child care client that an expunged offense is out of scope. Section 71-3-507(a)(3)(C) requires the disclosure form to cover "any violations of the law, including pending criminal or juvenile charges of any kind, and any conviction or juvenile adjudication involving a sentence or suspended or reduced sentence", and (a)(3)(E) requires five years of residence history so that equivalent out-of-state registries can be checked.
• Do not look for a Tennessee salary threshold or a Tennessee salary history rule. Neither was located in the instruments read, and no state counterpart to the federal high-salary exemption was found. Ask rather than assume, and treat both as unverified rather than as absent.
• Do not read the information privacy act as reaching the employment file. Section 47-18-3302(7)(B) defines "Consumer" to exclude "a natural person acting in a commercial or employment context" and § 47-18-3311(a)(16) exempts consumer reporting agency activity regulated under the federal Act, even though § 47-18-3302(10) names "employment opportunities" in its significant-effects definition.

Related states

• 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.
• 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.
• North Carolina. North Carolina has no general ban-the-box, and its own statute says the point out loud: § 15A-153(a) provides that nothing in the section "shall be construed to prohibit an employer from asking a job applicant about criminal charges or convictions that have not been expunged and are part of the public record." The employer-facing rule is § 15A-153(c), which bars requiring an applicant to disclose an expunged arrest, charge or conviction and bars knowingly inquiring about one, with no employer-size threshold, enforced by the Commissioner of Labor with a written warning for a first violation and up to five hundred dollars for each later one, and with no private cause of action. The rule that catches a screening provider is separate and sits in the liability section: § 15A-152(a) requires a private entity that holds itself out as compiling and disseminating criminal history record information for compensation to destroy, and not to disseminate, information it has received a notice to delete, within ten business days where no license sets a time. That subsection carries no federal carve-out, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act and Gramm-Leach-Bliley carve-outs in subsections (b) and (c) do not reach it, so a consumer reporting agency is outside the dissemination limit and inside the duty to destroy.

What we do

Tennessee is the state where the record is cheap and the erasure is real. The bureau sells a name-based Tennessee adult criminal history on any individual for $29 with no fingerprints required, and the fingerprint product costs $50, so the state's own criminal history on a named person is the easier purchase. Against that, Tennessee does not seal: § 40-32-110(a) entitles the petitioner to have all public records of the expunged conviction destroyed, § 40-32-110(b) provides that "Expunction means, in contemplation of law, the conviction for the expunged offense never occurred", and § 40-32-110(c) protects the person from a perjury or false-statement claim for not reciting it "in response to any inquiry made of the person for any purpose". The provision that says so moved in 2025: Public Chapter 268 deleted § 40-32-101 and re-enacted its substance at §§ 40-32-106 to -110, so a process still citing § 40-32-101(g) is citing a paragraph that no longer exists. The courts run on 95 counties and 32 judicial districts, and General Sessions, which sits in every county, decides misdemeanors where the grand jury and the jury are waived, which is the tier most searches miss. Our Tennessee work keeps the bureau record and the court record apart, names the tier, checks whether the expunction order is on file, and does not describe a destruction as a seal. If your current vendor calls a Tennessee expunction a sealing, or reads a clean circuit court search as a clean Tennessee record, this is where that shows.

Sources

• 2025 Tenn. Pub. Acts ch. 268, Senate Bill 1055, the enrolled act read in full, passed 14 April 2025 and effective on becoming a law. It deletes § 40-32-101 and substitutes definitions, including "Public records" for the purposes of expunction at (4), re-enacts the effect of an expunction at § 40-32-110(b) and (c), amends the bureau certificate at § 40-32-102(c) and the confidentiality provision at (e), and adds §§ 40-32-106 to -110, including the petition procedure and its sixty-one day and two year periods at § 40-32-108. Indexed by the Secretary of State as public chapter 0268 of the 114th General Assembly
• Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Background Checks, the page stating the $29 Tennessee-only product, no fingerprint requirement and availability to the general public on any individual
• Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Diversions, Expungements, and Dispositions, the diversion eligibility process, the reasons for which expunction can be granted and the $100 certificate fee
• Tenn. Code Ann. § 38-6-109, the bureau's criminal history background check duty at (a), fingerprint requests at (b) and direct name-based T.C.I.C. access at (c), read through a commercial mirror
• Tenn. Code Ann. § 38-6-118, the expunged criminal offender and pretrial diversion database and its confidentiality, elections and district attorney carve-outs, read through a commercial mirror
• Tenn. Code Ann. § 38-6-106, bureau background investigations, including the four fingerprinted position categories added at (h) by 2023 Tenn. Pub. Acts ch. 433
• Tenn. Code Ann. § 71-3-507, child care agency criminal records disclosure and fingerprint-based background review, as amended by 2023 Tenn. Pub. Acts ch. 433 and read in full through a commercial mirror
• 2023 Tenn. Pub. Acts ch. 433, Senate Bill 1038, the enrolled act amending § 38-6-106 and § 71-3-507
• 2023 Tenn. Pub. Acts ch. 408, the Tennessee Information Protection Act, read in full. It is codified at Title 47, Chapter 18, Part 33: short title at § 47-18-3301, definitions including the consumer, commercial and employment context and significant-effects provisions at § 47-18-3302, applicability thresholds at § 47-18-3303, consumer rights at § 47-18-3304, the Fair Credit Reporting Act exemption at § 47-18-3311(a)(16), enforcement, cure and civil penalty at § 47-18-3313, and the local-ordinance pre-emption at § 4 of the act
• Tenn. Code Ann. § 7-51-1802, the pre-emption of local employment regulation, including the application-information provision at (d) and the field occupation at (g), read through a commercial mirror
• Tenn. Code Ann. § 7-51-1701, back pay after an arrest for local government employees and the exclusion of administrative-action records from destruction, read through a commercial mirror
• Tenn. Code Ann. § 16-2-506, judicial districts, opening "The state is divided into thirty-two (32) judicial districts composed as follows", read through a commercial mirror
• Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts, Circuit, Criminal, Chancery & Business Courts, General Sessions Courts, Juvenile & Family Courts, Municipal Courts and the Judicial District Map, read live
• Route note: Tennessee code text has no primary host reachable from this environment. lexisnexis.com/hottopics/tncode redirects into a JavaScript-only advance.lexis.com container, codes.findlaw.com is a commercial republication and was read through the r.jina.ai reader proxy, and law.justia.com returns HTTP 403 to direct requests and was read through Internet Archive raw replay. Every code quotation above is therefore a secondary read unless it was taken from an enrolled act. Enrolled public chapters were read from publications.tnsosfiles.com through the reader proxy, and the Secretary of State's public-acts index at tnsos.org was searched by chapter number, subject, abstract and bill number for the 111th through 114th General Assemblies. tncourts.gov and tn.gov were reachable live and were read directly. capitol.tn.gov is not reachable directly and its bill-status system is an ASP.NET POST form that cannot be driven by a plain request, so no bill that failed is on this page, and no Tennessee case law was read because the case-law mirrors are blocked.

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.