VA · state guide

Virginia background screening law

How the courts here are organized

Virginia has 31 circuit courts. § 17.1-506 enumerates them and closes at the thirty-first, which is the Cities of Manassas and Manassas Park with the County of Prince William. It has 32 district-court districts, because § 16.1-69.6 enumerates them as 1 through 31 and then adds district 2-A, composed of Accomack and Northampton. The two numbers count different things and neither is wrong, which matters because a provider that carries one count across from the other will have a coverage map with a district missing.

The jurisdiction split is the part with a reporting consequence. The circuit court is described by the judiciary as the trial court with the broadest powers, and it has the authority to hear serious criminal cases called felonies. The general district court handles traffic violations, hears misdemeanors, and conducts preliminary hearings for felonies. A felony therefore ends up as a circuit court disposition, and a data source built on general district court records will not contain it.

That is not a hypothetical gap, because the judiciary describes its own statewide search as covering criminal and traffic case information in general district courts and select circuit courts. The full product list makes the pattern clearer: online access to civil and criminal cases in select circuit courts, land records for select courts, and a statewide search whose circuit court coverage is qualified. The consequence is that whether a Virginia felony disposition is reachable depends on which circuit court it sits in rather than on the offense, so the coverage question is answered court by court.

Above the trial courts, the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court sit, and the statutory sections creating them were not read in this pass. The page states the trial tiers and their jurisdiction and does not summarize the appellate structure, so the top of this hierarchy is described only where it was verified.

One further jurisdiction, not a court but run by the judiciary, is worth knowing because it is the only statewide product here built for screening. The Date of Birth Confirmation service gives subscription access to adult criminal cases in the juvenile and domestic relations district courts, criminal and traffic case information in the general district courts and participating circuit courts, for confirming an individual’s date of birth. Subscribers must be registered with the State Corporation Commission to do business in Virginia, and must have the individual’s express consent to run the search on their personally identifiable information. It is a confirmation service with a consent condition, not an open record search.

Two related record rules sit in the same part. § 19.2-392.17 deems a record of a traffic infraction under Title 46.2 with an offense date on or after 1 January 1986 and not punishable as a criminal offense to be sealed after 11 years from final disposition, and bars dissemination outside the permitted purposes. § 19.2-389(A)(2) bars dissemination of arrest information to a non-criminal-justice agency or individual once a year has elapsed from the arrest with no recorded disposition and no pending prosecution.

The repository is the Central Criminal Records Exchange, which § 19.2-387 places as a division of the Department of State Police under the authority of the Superintendent. Access is a closed list at § 19.2-389(A), and an ordinary private employer is not on it. The employment-related recipients are specific: criminal justice agencies screening their own applicants, agencies of political subdivisions and public transit operators and public service corporations acting under a duly enacted ordinance, Transportation District Act commissions and their contractors, public service companies hiring for positions involving personal contact with the public, school boards, the Virginia Lottery, licensed nursing homes, hospitals, home care organizations, assisted living facilities and adult day care centers, and the Department of Social Services.

An individual may obtain his own record at cost under § 19.2-389(A)(11). A provider serving private employers does not obtain Exchange data as an employer. It reaches Virginia criminal and traffic history through the court system, and it reaches the sealing notifications through the registration channel in § 19.2-392.16(C). Those are two different routes and only one of them requires the registration.

The registration channel is the operational center of this page. Subsection (C) requires a business screening service to register with the Department of State Police to receive electronic notifications of sealing orders, permits the Department to charge an annual licensing fee, requires the Department to maintain and publicly post a list identifying the business screening services licensed to receive such records, and bars resale of those notifications. Being absent from that list is therefore visible to anyone who looks.

One gap in this spine should be stated. The Virginia State Police website was unreachable from this environment, so the published list itself and the State Police’s own description of the Exchange were not read. The statutory duty to publish the list is verified; whether the list is current, and what the Department’s own guidance says about it, is not.

A second gap is the source of any older Virginia citations. The sealing regime was recodified: Chapter 23.1 is now only the expungement sections, §§ 19.2-392.1 to 19.2-392.4, and a new Chapter 23.2 holds §§ 19.2-392.5 to 19.2-392.17, every one tagged effective 1 July 2026. A guide written before that date will cite the right rule under a section number that no longer holds it.

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

What Virginia law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Virginia 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: pre-adverse action notice with the report and the summary of rights, a reasonable opportunity to respond, then the adverse action notice with the agency’s details and a dispute route. The FCRA article sets it out in full.

Virginia adds a duty that runs on the provider’s side of the sequence and can be breached without any adverse action occurring. § 19.2-392.16(B) requires prompt deletion of a sealed record regardless of source, and § 19.2-392.13 closes the obvious defense by providing that a sealed record’s continued existence in an intermediate compilation does not authorize its dissemination. A report furnished before the sealing notification arrives is not a breach, but a report furnished after it is, and the registration in subsection (C) exists precisely so the notification arrives.

The second Virginia-specific item is the collection date. § 19.2-392.16(D) requires the date the record was collected by the service to travel with the record, together with a notice that records may have been sealed since. That puts the age of a compiled record on the face of the disclosure rather than in internal metadata, so the reader can see how long the service has been holding it.

The third is the 30-day dispute clock at § 19.2-392.16(E). It runs from receipt of notice of the dispute from the subject, not from a decision, and it obliges the service to notify the subject of the correction, deletion, or the completion of the investigation. A provider that runs the federal dispute process without a Virginia notification step will miss this.

For employers rather than providers, the Virginia step that is easy to miss is the notice at § 19.2-392.15(F). Any application that asks about prior arrests, charges or convictions must carry a statement that sealed information need not be disclosed, and the penalty provision at (G) makes a willful failure a Class 1 misdemeanor for each violation.

Screening in Virginia: what your process needs

• Confirm the business screening service registration under § 19.2-392.16(C) is current and that the entity appears on the Department of State Police published list, since the list is public.
• Confirm sealing notifications from the State Police are being received and actioned, because subsection (B) turns on knowing that a record is sealed.
• Confirm the deletion duty is applied regardless of source, including records that arrived from an intermediate compilation or a third-party supplier.
• Confirm every disseminated Virginia criminal history and traffic history record carries the collection date and the notice that records may have been sealed since that date.
• Confirm the dispute process includes the Virginia 30-day notification to the subject, separately from the federal dispute handling.
• Confirm a Virginia traffic infraction with an offense date on or after 1 January 1986 and no criminal punishment is suppressed 11 years after final disposition.
• Confirm an arrest with no disposition and no pending prosecution is suppressed after one year for non-criminal-justice recipients.
• Confirm no Virginia cannabis-disclosure claim is made on the strength of § 19.2-389.3, which is repealed effective 1 July 2026.
• Confirm any Virginia sealing citation uses the Chapter 23.2 section numbers, since the sealing sections moved there effective 1 July 2026.
• Confirm a Virginia coverage statement says that felony dispositions sit in the circuit court and that the statewide search reaches select circuit courts rather than all of them.
• Confirm the Virginia coverage map accounts for 32 district-court districts including 2-A, separately from the 31 circuits.
• Confirm no Virginia city ordinance claim is made without a city-code source, since Virginia is a Dillon Rule state and no locality was researched.

Related states

• New Hampshire. New Hampshire authorizes consumer reporting agencies by name to obtain state criminal conviction records for employment screening and designates the state police record the official certified source for employment and licensing purposes, while forbidding the division from requiring notarization. Its seven-year cap on convictions is switched off by a $20,000 salary figure carried from 1971.
• Massachusetts. Massachusetts holds its criminal disposition file with the Commissioner of Probation rather than with the courts that produced it, and releases it only through a registration that expires every two calendar years and requires retraining. Its regulation also writes the federal $75,000 employment figure into state law, so how much record a provider may pass to an employer turns on the salary of the job.
• New York. New York sets its salary threshold at $25,000, so the seven-year limit reaches jobs federal law exempts, and its bar on reporting arrests has no time limit attached to it.

What we do

Virginia is the state that regulates the screening provider directly. A business screening service must register with the State Police to receive sealing notifications, the Department publishes the list of who is registered, and a sealed record must be deleted regardless of where it was found. The private right of action is $1,000 or actual damages plus fees, the Attorney General can add up to $2,500 per violation, and the federal safe harbor at subsection (J) expressly does not cover conduct that violates the section as well as federal law. On the employer side there is no statewide private-sector ban-the-box, because the 1985 repeal was never replaced, and the only duty reaching private employers turns on sealed records. The coverage trap is structural: 31 circuits against 32 district-court districts, felony dispositions in the circuit court, and a statewide search that reaches select circuit courts rather than all of them.

Sources

• Va. Code § 19.2-392.16, dissemination of criminal history and traffic history records by business screening services
• Va. Code § 19.2-392.15, prohibited practices by employers and educational institutions as to sealed records
• Va. Code § 19.2-392.13, disposition and permitted uses of sealed records
• Va. Code § 19.2-392.11, automatic sealing of misdemeanor non-convictions
• Va. Code § 19.2-392.2, expungement petition
• Va. Code § 19.2-392.4, prohibited practices as to expunged records
• Va. Code § 19.2-392.17, traffic infractions deemed sealed
• Va. Code § 19.2-389, dissemination of criminal history record information
• Va. Code § 19.2-389.3, marijuana possession dissemination limits, repealed effective 1 July 2026
• Va. Code § 19.2-11.14, use of artificial intelligence-based tools
• Va. Code § 40.1-28.7, repealed by Acts 1985, c. 421
• Va. Code § 2.2-2812.1, state agencies prohibited from inquiring about arrests, charges or convictions on applications
• Va. Code § 15.2-1505.3, localities prohibited from inquiring about arrests, charges or convictions on applications
• Va. Code § 2.2-2815, increase in salaries
• Va. Code § 59.1-444.1 to § 59.1-444.4, consumer reporting agencies, security freezes and medical debt
• Va. Code § 59.1-575 and § 59.1-576, Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act definitions and exemptions
• Va. Code § 17.1-506, circuit courts
• Va. Code § 16.1-69.6, general district court districts
• Virginia’s Judicial System, circuit court, general district court and online case information pages

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.