For consumers
Your rights when an employer checks your background
If your current or prospective employer has asked us to run a background check on you, federal law gives you rights over what we may report, who sees it, and what happens when something in it is wrong. Most of the work of protecting yourself is knowing the sequence and the deadlines, because the point at which you can change an outcome is earlier than most people expect.
These rights apply whether you are applying for a job, already employed, contracting, or volunteering. They cannot be waived by an employer, and they cannot be waived by you.
First, who we are in this
TrueFingerprints LLC, trading as Personnelgraph, is a consumer reporting agency. The employer is our client. You are not. That matters, because it means the duties in this page run to you from us whether or not the employer asked for them, and it means we cannot decide what goes in your file on the basis of what would suit the employer.
It also means the employer carries duties of its own, which are separate from ours and are set out on the employer responsibilities section of the FCRA article. If an employer skipped a step they owed you, that is a claim against them and not against us, and it is worth knowing which is which.
What you are entitled to
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To be told first, and to say yes in writing
An employer cannot run a background check on you without telling you. They have to give you a clear written disclosure in a document that contains nothing else, and they have to get your written permission before the check is requested. A disclosure buried inside an application form does not satisfy this.
§1681b(b)(2)Disclosure and authorization
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To know what is in your file
You can ask us for everything we hold about you. You are entitled to the information itself, not a summary of it, and to the sources it came from.
§1681g(a)The summary of your rights
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To a copy of it free, at least once a year
Asking for your file costs nothing once every twelve months, and it is free again if an employer has taken adverse action against you. It is also free where a security freeze or an identity theft block is in place. The routes have different triggers, and people routinely pay for a report they were entitled to for nothing.
§1681j(a), (b)The summary of your rights
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To be told before an employer acts against you
If an employer is thinking about denying you a job, withdrawing an offer, or terminating you because of something in the report, they have to give you a copy of the report and the summary of your rights before they decide. That is your chance to correct anything wrong while it still matters.
§1681b(b)(3)Adverse action
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To be told afterwards as well
If the employer does act against you, they have to tell you so, tell you that we supplied the report, and give you our contact details along with notice that you can get a free copy from us and dispute what is in it.
§1681m(a)Adverse action
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To dispute anything wrong, at no cost
You can dispute anything inaccurate, incomplete or unverifiable, and we must reinvestigate free of charge. The reinvestigation has a statutory deadline of 30 days, not a target. If the information turns out to be wrong, or simply cannot be verified, it has to be deleted or corrected, and you have to be told the result.
§1681i(a)Disputes and reinvestigation
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To be told when a public record is being reported
Where we report public record information for employment purposes and it is likely to affect your chances, we have to either tell you at the same time as the employer or maintain strict procedures to make sure the record is complete and up to date. This right is specific to public records and it is one of the least known in the statute.
§1681k(a)Public record notice
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To a report that is accurate, not merely sourced
The standard is not that we passed on what a court sent us. It is that we use reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy of what we report about you. A record that is somebody else’s, or that has been dismissed, is not accurate because a source supplied it.
§1681e(b)Disputes and reinvestigation
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To block identity theft information, and to freeze your file
If you are a victim of identity theft, you can ask us to block information in your file that resulted from it, and we must do so once you give us the required proof. You can also place a fraud alert or a security freeze, which restricts who can access your file at all.
What can and cannot be in your report
The seven-year limits are the most misunderstood part of the statute, including by companies that are supposed to be applying it. They are in §1681c(a), and here is what they actually cover.
| Item | Limit | Measured from |
|---|---|---|
| Bankruptcies | 10 years | Older than ten years and it may not be reported at all. |
| Suits and judgments | 7 years | Either seven years or the governing statute of limitations, whichever is longer. |
| Paid tax liens | 7 years | From the date of payment. |
| Unpaid tax liens | 7 years | From the date of filing. |
| Accounts placed for collection | 7 years | From the date the account was placed. |
| Arrest records | 7 years | From the date of the arrest, entry, or release. Some states bar them entirely, and New York is one. |
| Other adverse items | 7 years | The catch-all in §1681c(a)(5), and the one that carries the conviction carve-out. |
Convictions are not on that list, and that is the point. The seven-year limit sits in a subsection that ends with the words “other than records of convictions of crimes.” A conviction has no federal time limit at all. It may be reported however old it is, and any summary that tells you otherwise, including one that says the limit lifts above a certain salary, has the exemption backwards. The salary threshold in §1681c(b)(3) lifts the limits on the items in the table above. It has never lifted anything for convictions, because there was nothing to lift.
The threshold is $75,000 and it is not indexed. There is no annual adjustment anywhere in the statute. A number of published summaries describe the figure as rising each year, which is a conflation with a different FCRA number: the cap on what a consumer reporting agency may charge for a file disclosure, which is adjusted annually and stands at $16.00 for 2026.
Your state may go further
Federal law is the floor. A number of states restrict what may be reported, shorten the time limits, require a separate state-specific disclosure, or require that you be given a copy of the report whether or not you ask. Where a state rule and the federal rule differ, the state rule governs in that state.
This is not a fifty-state summary, and anything that claims to be one should be read with suspicion. These are the states where the research is done, each written against primary sources and carrying its own citations:
- CaliforniaCalifornia bars non-conviction records categorically and sets no salary threshold at all, while its state criminal history repository is statutorily closed to consumer reporting agencies. Every search runs on county superior courts, all 58 of them.
- New YorkNew 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.
- WashingtonWashington cut its salary threshold to $20,000, which reaches effectively every job in the state, and bars juvenile records outright for anyone 21 or older, while still allowing arrest records on the same clock as convictions.
- MinnesotaMinnesota requires a report to reach the consumer within 24 hours of going to the employer, and its ban-the-box law binds private employers with no size threshold.
- OklahomaOklahoma centralizes where almost everyone else fragments. Its court system publishes a county-indexed docket search across all 77 counties from one place, which is the inverse of the county-by-county problem in California and New York.
- MichiganMichigan lets an applicant withhold a misdemeanor arrest that led to no conviction even when answering under oath, and its state criminal history product deletes each result after seven days while warning it may not be accepted. Its limited-jurisdiction courts sit on city and township lines rather than county lines, so the county is not the unit of search.
- TexasTexas 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.
- MassachusettsMassachusetts 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.
- NebraskaNebraska releases its state criminal history to anyone who pays the fee, with interest in the subject demonstrated by paying it, so a name-based Nebraska check needs no authorization. Its twelve judicial districts are composed differently for district courts and for county courts, which makes the district number an unstable identifier, and its employer-screening provision governs reference disclosures on written consent rather than reports.
- MontanaMontana caps criminal record reporting at seven years and the cap reaches convictions, with no salary exemption anywhere in the statute and no exceptions subsection at all, so an old conviction is not reportable here at any salary. It also names marijuana in its off-duty lawful-product protection, and it splits the state’s criminal record into a restricted stream and an unrestricted one in which the courts sit.
- KansasKansas gives its municipal courts concurrent jurisdiction over ordinance violations matching five named state felony statutes, so a felony-equivalent conviction can sit in a city court record that a district-court search will not reach. Its seven-year reporting cap has been a dead letter since 1973, because a $20,000 salary exemption no amendment has ever touched removes the cap from nearly every job in the state.
- New HampshireNew 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.
- LouisianaLouisiana bars a private employer from requesting or considering an arrest or charge that did not result in a conviction, with no age limit on the bar and no salary exemption attached to it, and it gives the applicant a right on written request to the background check information that was used. Its felony line turns on whether an offense carries death or imprisonment at hard labor rather than on a maximum sentence, and the section creating its judicial districts states that there are forty-one and then creates a forty-second in the same text.
- VirginiaVirginia 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.
- ColoradoColorado’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.
- ArizonaArizona 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.
- OregonOregon releases criminal history to employers and screening firms only through a name-based search that the state police must label as unconfirmed, so the match rests on similarity of names and description rather than on fingerprints, the answer covers Oregon alone, and it returns every conviction with no time limit plus arrests less than a year old that ended in no acquittal or dismissal. Every request is disclosed to the person it is about before anything is released, and the department delivers fourteen days after sending that notice.
- GeorgiaGeorgia’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.
- WisconsinWisconsin forbids every employer in the state, from one employee up, to ask an applicant, an employee or any other individual, on an application form or otherwise, to supply information about any arrest record, and its definition of arrest record runs from a police questioning and being held for investigation through charge, indictment and trial, so the ban is not an application-stage rule and does not lift at an interview. The state’s circuit court docket is published at no charge to anyone, without asking who is requesting it or why.
- PennsylvaniaPennsylvania limits how a conviction may be used rather than whether it may be asked about: 18 Pa.C.S. § 9125 lets an employer consider a felony or a misdemeanor conviction only to the extent it relates to the applicant’s suitability for the position applied for, and requires a written notice when a decision not to hire rests in whole or in part on criminal history record information, which the Third Circuit read in January 2026 to reach a conviction the applicant volunteered. The State Police repository answers against Pennsylvania law enforcement records only and never federal ones, a Pennsylvania court docket sits outside the state criminal history statute altogether, and the docket number that identifies a case carries a county code where a judicial district number would be expected. Philadelphia then bans the inquiry, reaching research conducted for an employer by a third party, and sets a seven-year felony and four-year misdemeanor window measured from the underlying arrest or release from incarceration, whichever is later, with ten business days to answer a provisional decision.
- Rhode IslandRhode Island bans the criminal history question on an application form and then lets it back in at the interview: § 28-5-7(7) makes it unlawful to include the question on a form or otherwise inquire before the interview, and paragraph (iii) provides that any employer may ask about convictions at the first interview or thereafter, with the rule starting at four employees and covering the state and every municipality. The state criminal history sits in the Attorney General’s bureau of criminal identification, which § 12-1-4 opens beyond law enforcement only to officials of businesses required by federal or state law to run a check, confines to the individual’s own application for employment, and releases to a third party only on a signed notarized release. The courts are a single unified system of six courts with no county trial courts, so a felony is arraigned in the District Court where bail is set and decided in the Superior Court, and no county file holds either part of it.
- ConnecticutConnecticut has an employment AI statute and the act usually cited as its AI law is not it: P.A. 26-15, sections 7 to 12, requires a developer to supply information and a deployer to give a plain-language interaction disclosure and a written pre-decision notice for automated employment-related decision technology, applies to technology deployed on or after 1 October 2027, and is enforced solely by the Attorney General with no private right of action, while P.A. 23-16 regulates state agencies and contains no occurrence of the word employer. From 1 October 2026 the use of such technology is not a defense to a discrimination complaint. A consumer reporting agency issuing an employment report containing criminal matters of public record must notify the consumer when the report issues and name the recipient, and that definition reaches arrests and indictments rather than convictions alone. Ban-the-box is an application-stage bar reaching an employer with one employee, the conviction-denial rule is written as three factors and binds the state and its agencies rather than private employers, and 46a-80 is not the source of the five-factor test attributed to it. One Superior Court hears every criminal case across thirteen judicial districts and nineteen Geographical Area courts, there are no county courts, and the free case look-up stops showing a conviction ten years after sentencing while removing it a month early.
- New JerseyNew Jersey bans the criminal record question only until the first interview and then permits both the question and the hiring decision, with no job-relatedness test and no private cause of action, and it preempts every municipal fair-chance ordinance except one governing a municipality’s own operations, so no city here adds a rule to check. Its consumer reporting statute is named for credit but reaches employment expressly, and it requires a disclosure of the precise nature and scope of the investigation plus separate written permission before an investigative report is ordered. Its two free Judiciary portals cover the indictable tier and neither reaches the municipal courts, where disorderly persons offenses are heard, while the one court channel licensed for commercial use meters at $4 per minute with downloads and screen-scraping expressly not supported, and the State Police repository is fingerprint based with a consumer reporting agency absent from its requester list.
- HawaiiHawaii holds the criminal record question and its consideration until a conditional offer, with no size threshold: §378-2.5(b) permits inquiry only after the offer, the employer definition reaches anyone with one or more employees, and the seven-year felony and five-year misdemeanor lookback runs excluding periods of incarceration, with a right to document a shorter period from a date of release. The exception list opens with "including:", so its nineteen categories are illustrative rather than exhaustive. Its four judicial circuits are numbered one, two, three and five because the fourth was eliminated in 1943, and its state repository sells name-based adult conviction checks to anyone who pays while non-conviction data stays confidential.
- VermontVermont bars the criminal history question on the initial application form from one employee up, and the bar reaches arrests and citations while the exception that lets a regulated employer ask early reaches only convictions. Its repository releases convictions without docket numbers, by name and date of birth, and the state is barred by statute from publishing criminal case records on the internet at all. The state has no seven-year rule and no salary threshold, so what limits a Vermont report is the sealing regime, which carries a civil penalty of up to $1,000.00 for each unauthorised disclosure.
- MaineMaine bans the criminal record question under 26 M.R.S. § 600-A with no size threshold and reaches summonses and arrests in the records it covers, while the exceptions that let a regulated employer ask early speak only of convictions. The rule sits in the WAGES AND MEDIUM OF PAYMENT subchapter rather than the Human Rights Act, so the interview trigger carries an affirmative duty to let the applicant explain rather than a bare permission, and enforcement is a Department of Labor fine of $100 to $500 for each violation instead of a commission complaint. Its sharpest exposure for a screening company is that the sealed-record offense at 15 M.R.S. § 2269 is a Class E crime addressed to "A person" rather than to an agency, so it reaches a private reporting product in a way that the criminal justice agency release bar of 16 M.R.S. chapter 7 does not.
- DelawareDelaware bars the criminal record and credit question for public employers only, on an interview trigger rather than a conditional offer: 19 Del. C. § 711(h) makes it unlawful to inquire into or consider the criminal record, criminal history, credit history, or credit score of an applicant for employment during the initial application process, up to and including the first interview, and permits it after the first interview. There is no headcount threshold, because the covered entity is a public employer, and no state private-sector ban-the-box, no mini-FCRA and no state seven-year reporting limit. The criminal history itself sits in the State Bureau of Identification, which furnishes conviction data on a discretionary, fee-funded basis and prohibits onward dissemination.
- District of ColumbiaCannabis 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.
- IllinoisIllinois splits the hiring record across two statutes with different thresholds, and the stricter one has the lower threshold. The conviction-use rule at 775 ILCS 5/2-103.1 reaches any employer with one or more employees, because the Human Rights Act definition at 775 ILCS 5/2-101(B) includes "Any person employing one or more employees within Illinois during 20 or more calendar weeks" and reaches the State, every political subdivision and every party to a public contract "without regard to the number of employees", while the ban-the-box inquiry rule at 820 ILCS 75/15 reaches only an employer or employment agency with fifteen or more employees and defines its covered employer as "any person or private entity", which leaves the public sector outside it. The use rule is a duty rather than a prohibition: a conviction record may not be a basis for an employment action unless a substantial relationship or an unreasonable risk is shown, and the state adds a notice sequence the federal one does not have, with a written preliminary notice carrying the employer reasoning and a copy of the report, at least five business days to respond, and a second written notice carrying the reasoning and the right to file a charge with the Department. Employment credit checks are restricted separately by the Employee Credit Privacy Act, 820 ILCS 70/10, which allows them only where a satisfactory credit history is an established bona fide occupational requirement.
- OhioOhio renumbered its sealing chapter, so the test most screening policies quote now has a different address: the "unless the question bears a direct and substantial relationship to the position for which the person is being considered" language sits at R.C. 2953.34(N)(2)(a), and R.C. 2953.33 is now the non-conviction provision covering a not-guilty finding, a dismissal, a no bill or a pardon, which the chapter heading records as "[Former R.C. 2953.52, amended and renumbered by S.B. 288, 134th General Assembly, effective 4/4/2023]". The state repository is narrower than the courts: R.C. 109.57(A)(1) has the superintendent hold felonies and a named set of misdemeanors, so an ordinary misdemeanor reaches a search only through the county courts. For cannabis, R.C. 3796.28(A)(5) gives an employer a defense rather than a duty.
- North CarolinaNorth 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.
- IndianaIndiana prohibits its political subdivisions from barring an employer from making a criminal history inquiry, or requiring disclosure, at the initial application stage: IC 22-2-17-3 provides that unless federal or state law provides otherwise, a political subdivision may not prohibit an employer from obtaining or using criminal history information during the hiring process or from making the inquiry at the time of an initial application, and the definition it borrows at IC 22-2-17-1 covers arrests and detentions as well as convictions, so the preemption protects the right to ask about an arrest. The state then splits expungement into two tracks and seals only one: IC 35-38-9-6(b) makes misdemeanor and Level 6 felony records "permanently sealed", while IC 35-38-9-7(b) leaves more serious felony records as records that "remain public records", ordered only to be "clearly and visibly marked or identified as being expunged". A provider is nonetheless barred from reporting the marked record by IC 24-4-18-6(a)(1), and an expungement order reaches the State Police only because the local court forwards it, in a state with ninety-two county court chapters across ninety-one circuits.
- MissouriMissouri made it unlawful to keep reporting an arrest, a pending indictment or a conviction once a pardon, an expungement or a no-conviction outcome is learned, and then required its Highway Patrol to give consumer reporting agencies the data to delete the drug-offense expungements its central repository performs automatically. Section 610.143.1 provides that records "shall no longer be reported if at any time after a conviction it is learned that a full pardon or expungement has been granted for that conviction, or at any time after an arrest or indictment it is learned that a conviction did not result", and the Attorney General enforces it with damages of not more than one thousand dollars per violation and an injunction available to any aggrieved consumer. The automatic side runs without a petition: § 610.141.3 requires the central repository to screen its database "on a rolling basis, but not less than once per week" and to expunge qualifying drug offenses as a matter of law, and § 610.141.11 feeds those deletions to consumer reporting agencies under a signed agreement. There is no separate state consumer-reporting act, so the overlay on a screening file runs through chapter 610 and chapter 43.
- MarylandMaryland starts its ban-the-box clock at the first in-person interview rather than at a conditional offer, and the prohibition covers the record check as well as the record question while it runs. Lab. & Empl. § 3-1503(a) provides that "an employer may not, at any time before the first in–person interview, require an applicant to disclose whether the applicant has a criminal record or has had criminal accusations brought against the applicant", and subsection (b) then permits the requirement "during the first in–person interview", so a process deferred to the post-offer stage is applying a stricter rule than the statute requires, and an arrest that never became a charge is inside the ban because criminal accusations are named beside the record. The definition reaches past a conviction: § 3-1501(b) makes a criminal record out of an arrest, a plea or verdict of guilty, a plea of nolo contendere, a stet marked on the docket, a disposition of probation before judgment, and a disposition of not criminally responsible, so three things a conviction-only report would carry as non-convictions are inside it. The threshold is fifteen full-time employees under § 3-1501(c)(1). The state consumer reporting act then adds a rule about what a report may contain: Com. Law § 14-1203(a)(5) bars "Records of arrest, indictment, or conviction of crime which, from date of disposition, release, or parole, antedate the report by more than seven years", and where the federal analog was amended in 1998 to exempt convictions from that window, this text was not, so the ordinary reading is that a Maryland report may not carry a conviction older than seven years. Court records are the other half of the work, because the District Court is a single statewide court divided into twelve districts by CJP § 1-602 and six of those districts cover more than one county, so a search keyed to counties cannot express the geography its records are filed in.
- TennesseeTennessee sells its own criminal history to anyone: the Bureau of Investigation offers a "Tennessee Only" check at "$29" with "FINGERPRINTS NOT REQUIRED", while the nationwide product is $50 and does require them, so the state report on a named person is the cheaper and more open of the two and no employment purpose has to be established to buy it. The expunction paragraph every summary quotes is gone: Public Chapter 268 of 2025, Senate Bill 1055, rewrote § 40-32-101 as a definitions section and re-enacted the "never occurred" rule and the bar on collateral consequences at § 40-32-110(b) and (c), so a page citing § 40-32-101(g) for the effect of an expunction is citing a paragraph that no longer exists. The mechanism is deletion rather than sealing, which is what separates a Tennessee expunction from a screening file built before the order: § 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 the bureau describes its own practice as "At TBI, the charges are actually deleted from the defendant’s record" and "we do not ’seal’ records". The courts are 95 counties run through 32 judicial districts, and General Sessions, which sits in every county, is where a misdemeanor is decided whenever the defendant waives the grand jury and the jury, so the tier that holds most misdemeanor dispositions is not the circuit file.
- FloridaWhere Florida law requires a criminal history check or makes one a condition of a privilege or benefit, the check has to include a Florida criminal history provided by the Department of Law Enforcement, and a private vendor may supply it only if that information is obtained directly from the department for each request. The state regulates categories of employment rather than employers: Chapter 435, "Employment Screening", opens at § 435.01(1)(a) with "Unless otherwise provided by law, whenever a background screening for employment or a background security check is required by law to be conducted pursuant to this chapter, the provisions of this chapter apply", and everything the chapter does is downstream of that condition, so a private employer outside a covered category is outside the chapter and no Florida statute bans the criminal history question in the private sector. Where the chapter applies it fixes the standard, with a Level 1 check under § 435.03(1) running "statewide criminal correspondence checks through the Department of Law Enforcement, and a check of the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website" and a Level 2 check under § 435.04(1)(a) adding "fingerprinting for statewide criminal history records checks through the Department of Law Enforcement, national criminal history records checks through the Federal Bureau of Investigation", which puts local records checks below the state level and decides how a search here has to be scoped. The disqualifying list at § 435.04(2) runs from (a) to (zz) and reaches a person who has "been arrested for and are awaiting final disposition of" a listed offense, so a pending case disqualifies before any conviction, and § 435.06(1) leaves one ground on which to contest it: "The only basis for contesting the disqualification is proof of mistaken identity." For public employment the restraint sits on the decision rather than the inquiry, at § 112.011.
- KentuckyKentucky’s consumer reporting statute is one sentence long and it is a maintenance bar rather than a hiring rule: KRS 367.310 provides that "No consumer reporting agency shall maintain any information in its files relating to any charge in a criminal case, in any court of this Commonwealth, unless the charge has resulted in a conviction." It was created by 1980 Ky. Acts ch. 49, sec. 1, effective 15 July 1980, and has not been amended since, so an acquittal, a dismissal, a nolle prosequi or a pending Kentucky charge has no lawful place in a file. The state repository is closed by KRS 17.150(4), which states that "[c]entralized criminal history records are not subject to public inspection", and the only employer gateway out of it is KRS 17.160, which reaches a position with supervisory or disciplinary power over a minor and an organization chartered by Congress or specified by the Attorney General. The route a screening program actually uses carries its own notice duty: the Administrative Office of the Courts sells a statewide criminal record report for $25 on form AOC-RU-004, and its own page states under the heading "Third-Party Notification" that if a record is found it "will notify that person that you requested his or her criminal record report" and "will also send that person a copy of his or her report results". The courts are unified by Constitution section 109 into four tiers over 120 counties, grouped into 57 judicial circuits under KRS 23A.020 and 59 judicial districts under KRS 24A.030 that become 58 on 1 January 2031, and a circuit and a district of the same number need not cover the same counties.
- NevadaNevada opens its own repository to this industry by name: NRS 179A.103 requires the Central Repository to maintain "a service to conduct a name-based search", lists "A screening service" among the persons eligible to participate, ties the consent form to one complying with 15 U.S.C. § 1681b(b)2, and fixes the contents at subsection 5, which provides that the Central Repository "shall disseminate to an authorized participant of the service information which reflects convictions only". The reporting lookback runs the opposite way to the usual reading, because NRS 598C.150(2) imposes seven years on "any other civil judgment, a report of criminal proceedings, or other adverse information, excluding a record of a conviction of a crime", so the limit catches arrest and charge material and never a conviction. The ban-the-box rule is public-sector only, at NRS 613.330(8), and the cannabis provisions are not where a summary puts them: the off-duty protection for lawful products is NRS 613.333, enacted in 1991, while NRS 613.132 is a separate bar on refusing to hire on a positive marijuana screening test, and the medical and adult-use programs sit in Title 56 at NRS 678A to 678D rather than in Title 453A or 453D. The 15-employee threshold in NRS 613.310(2) governs only the sections from NRS 613.310 to 613.4383 and does not travel to the rest of the title.
- AlabamaAlabama’s expungement statute reaches the applicant’s answer rather than the state’s files: § 15-27-6(b) provides that a petitioner whose record was expunged "shall not have to disclose the fact of the record or any matter relating thereto on an application for employment, credit, or other type of application", while § 15-27-8 provides that "[t]he records shall be retained by the Alabama State Law Enforcement Agency indefinitely", so the effect is non-disclosure with a custodian use bar rather than destruction, and a form answer denying the record and a vendor report showing it can both be correct. No Alabama section read restricts an employer’s criminal-record inquiry at either the private or the public level, a finding drawn from the full Code of Alabama 1975 table of contents, 59,044 records, in which no section title joins an employment concept to a criminal-record concept; the caution on that method is that the table of contents is not self-verifying, because Title 26, chapter 20 is still headed "Sex Crime Records of Employees Supervising Children" although every section of it was repealed effective 1 November 2000. Two provisions run in the employer’s favor instead: § 12-26-9(k) gives an employer an affirmative defense to a negligent-hiring claim where the employer "knew of the order of limited relief at the time of the alleged negligent hiring", and § 20-2A-6(a)(3) provides that the medical cannabis chapter does not "[p]rohibit any employer from refusing to hire, discharging, disciplining, or otherwise taking an adverse employment action against an individual" for use of medical cannabis "regardless of the individual’s impairment or lack of impairment". Court records sit in 41 judicial circuits enumerated in § 12-11-2, with a circuit court in every county under § 12-11-1, and the state repository is ALEA’s, where the Alabama Background Check system is open to qualifying employers and the subject-initiated fingerprint-based check costs $25.
- New MexicoNew Mexico bars the criminal history question and then permits the answer: § 28-2-3.1(A) provides that a private employer using a written or electronic application "shall not make an inquiry regarding an applicant’s history of arrest or conviction on the employment application but may take into consideration an applicant’s conviction after review of the applicant’s application and upon discussion of employment with the applicant". The conditions on that permission are procedural and there are only two of them, with no conditional-offer trigger, no individualized assessment and no adverse-action duty in the sentence, and the object shifts from "history of arrest or conviction" in the bar to "an applicant’s conviction" alone in the permission. Cannabis runs in two directions and the two sections do not interact: § 26-2B-9 in the Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act protects the applicant, while § 26-2C-34(A)(3) in the Cannabis Regulation Act separately provides that nothing in that Act shall "prevent or infringe upon the rights of an employer to adopt and implement a written zero-tolerance policy regarding the use of cannabis products", permitting discipline "on the basis of a positive drug test that indicates any amount of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol metabolite". The binding constraint is the courts rather than the statute book: § 35-1-1 provides in a standalone sentence that "The magistrate court is not a court of record", and the Case Access Policy under Supreme Court Order 23-8500-007 promises the public "Redacted public records" while stating in its own chart that the redaction technology is "NOT currently available" and contingent on an appropriation.
- MississippiMississippi keeps the expunged record and lets the employer ask about it. Section 99-19-71(3), as amended by House Bill 1546 of 2026, provides that "The existence of an order of expunction shall not preclude an employer from asking a prospective employee if the employee has had an order of expunction entered on his behalf", while the Mississippi Criminal Information Center retains "a nonpublic record thereof" solely to decide in later proceedings whether the person is a first offender, and a district attorney’s office may separately retain one "for law enforcement purposes only". The same subsection carries the sharpest protection in the section, and it is narrow: no person may be "held thereafter under any provision of law to be guilty of perjury or to have otherwise given a false statement by reason of his failure to recite or acknowledge such arrest, indictment or conviction in response to any inquiry made of him", except in the first-offender proceeding itself. The eligibility rules moved in 2026: House Bill 1546 was approved by the Governor on 30 March 2026 and took effect 1 July 2026, cutting the felony waiting period in subsection (2)(a) from five years to three and adding felony procuring prostitution and promoting prostitution to a list of twelve categories that cannot be expunged. The medical cannabis chapter helps an applicant nowhere: it provides that it shall not be construed to require any employer to accommodate medical use, nor to prohibit any employer from taking an adverse employment action for it "regardless of the individual’s impairment or lack of impairment", nor to create any right of action against an employer. The courts run 23 Circuit Court districts and 20 Chancery Court districts over the same counties, with 24 County Courts, 82 Justice Courts and 239 Municipal Courts below them, while the repository is the Criminal Information Center inside the Department of Public Safety.
- IowaIowa protects no criminal-record class: § 216.6(1)(a) reaches age, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion and disability, and the exceptions at § 216.6(6) turn on employer size, domestic service and religious qualification rather than on convictions, so there is no criminal-record class to except from. What Iowa has instead is a repository rule: the Division of Criminal Investigation releases criminal history data under § 692.2(1)(b) to "A person or public or private agency, upon written application", an open door whose restrictions then close two categories behind a signed release from the subject, being criminal history data carrying no disposition after eighteen months from the date of arrest and a deferred judgment discharged after successful probation. The request "must identify a specific person by name and date of birth", fingerprints "may be required", and every release must "prominently display the statement: An arrest without disposition is not an indication of guilt". Under § 692.2(6)(b) the fee for a subject’s own certified copy released to a potential employer "shall not be paid by the person but shall be paid by the employer" when the employer requests the release in writing. On cannabis the chapter runs the other way: § 124E.24, titled "Limitation of liability", provides that nothing in it "shall create any claim, cause of action, sanction, or penalty, for discrimination or under any other theory of liability", expressly including "refusing to hire, discharging, disciplining, discriminating, retaliating, or otherwise taking any adverse employment action", while § 124E.21 preserves a zero-tolerance drug-testing policy. A discharged deferred judgment is expunged without a petition once the restitution, court costs and fees in the case are paid, and § 602.6101 establishes "A unified trial court" called the Iowa District Court, divided for administration into eight judicial districts.
- South CarolinaSouth Carolina’s repository is open rather than closed, and it will disseminate arrest history whether or not a disposition is attached. S.C. Code Regs. 73-23(E) provides that the SLED/CJIS "may disseminate criminal history record information, unless sealed, to private persons, governmental entities, businesses, commercial establishments, professional organizations, charitable organizations and others", and the content reaches "all unsealed conviction data, non-conviction data and non-disposition data as well as findings of not guilty, nolle prosequi, dismissals, and similar dispositions", while § 23-3-115(A) provides that criminal history record information "including arrest history, may be disseminated in accordance with regulations regardless of whether a corresponding judicial finding or disposition is part of the record". Identification "will be based upon name, race, sex, date of birth, and, if available, a social security number", with a notation required on any record identified "solely by these characteristics and not by fingerprint comparison". The applicant’s own review is where the door closes: Regs. 73-24(A)(6) provides that if the individual "is accompanied by another person, including a potential employer, the accompanying person must not be allowed to see the record", and 73-24(A)(7) states that "Waivers have no authority. The record does not belong to the reviewing person, but to the agency which holds it." The one provision that runs the applicant’s way is § 17-22-960, "Expungement; employer immunity", which provides that "[e]xcept for criminal justice agencies, employers shall not use expunged information adversely against an employee", while shielding the employer from any claim "related to the worker’s expunged offense" and barring expungement information as evidence in a negligent hiring or retention proceeding. The State is divided by § 14-5-610(A) into sixteen judicial circuits served by forty-nine circuit judges on rotation.
- AlaskaAlaska’s central repository releases to "a person for any purpose" and takes two categories back in the same sentence: AS 12.62.160(b)(8) provides that information may be provided to a person for any purpose, "except that information may not be released if the information is nonconviction information or correctional treatment information", so an arrest that ended in a dismissal sits outside the report a general employer buys, while (b)(10) separately opens the file to the subject of the information. The route is not open on request either, because (c) opens "Unless otherwise provided for in regulations adopted by the commissioner" and withholds release "until the person requesting the information establishes the identity of the subject of the information by fingerprint comparison or another reliable means of identification approved by the department". The counterintuitive arm gives more to a narrower class: (b)(9) lets an interested person receive information "including information relating to a serious offense" where it is requested "for the purpose of determining whether to grant a person supervisory or disciplinary power over a minor or dependent adult", which is the one route past the nonconviction bar. The statute slot is an immunity rather than a protection, and it is opt-in: AS 23.10.600 is titled "Employer protection from litigation" and AS 23.10.615 reads in full that "Compliance with AS 23.10.600 - 23.10.699 by employers is voluntary". Alaska has no counties, because article X, section 2 of its constitution vests "All local government powers" in "boroughs and cities" and section 3 requires that "The entire State shall be divided into boroughs, organized or unorganized", so a search routes by court location rather than by county across four judicial districts.
- ArkansasArkansas seals a record rather than destroying it, and the statute names who may be told. Section 16-90-1416(a) provides that the custodian "shall not disclose the existence of the sealed record or release the sealed record except when requested by" seven classes of requester: the person or their attorney, a criminal justice agency for its own hiring, a court, a prosecuting attorney, a healthcare licensing board, the Arkansas Crime Information Center, and the Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training. Four acts have amended that list since 2013, each adding a regulator or an agency, and no employer or screening firm has ever been on it. The person gets the mirror of that right: § 16-90-1417(b)(1) provides that the conduct is "deemed as a matter of law never to have occurred", so the person may say it did not occur. The repository is then carved out of that duty by name, because § 16-90-1416(b)(1) provides that "[a]s used in this section, ‘custodian’ does not mean the Arkansas Crime Information Center", and two channels beyond it conflict: § 12-12-1506(d) permits the state police to release criminal history to "any person upon proper request and payment of the requisite fee and without requiring written consent of the subject", while § 12-12-1010(c) requires a noncriminal justice agency request to pass "a review and express approval of dissemination by the director". Eligibility moved the applicant’s way: Act 680 of 2019 struck both the sixty-day wait and the fifty-dollar filing fee, and Act 341 of 2021 struck the exclusion of anyone who had "served any portion of his or her sentence as an inmate in the Division of Correction", leaving five ineligibility items. Felonies sit in twenty-eight circuit designations and misdemeanors in forty-one district court judicial districts that are not coterminous with counties, and a preliminary felony matter sits in the district court, so one felony can leave a record in two tiers.
- North DakotaNorth Dakota’s only criminal-record inquiry restriction is public-sector and it fires at the interview: § 12.1-33-02.2 provides that "A public employer may not inquire into or consider the criminal record or criminal history of an applicant for public employment until the applicant has been selected for an interview by the employer", and it took effect on 1 August 2019 as 2019 Session Laws chapter 121 (House Bill No. 1282), which no emergency clause accelerated. The state criminal history sits behind a single gate: § 12-60-16.6 provides that "Only the bureau may disseminate a criminal history record to parties not described in section 12-60-16.5", and the rule underneath it directs that agencies receiving a request from a noncriminal justice source "shall refer those requests to the bureau", so a screening firm reaches the record through the bureau or not at all. Nonconvictions now close automatically: § 12-60.1-05 requires a court to close the record sixty-one days after an order of nonconviction entered on or after 1 August 2025, with no filing fee for the pre-2025 backlog, and § 12-60.1-04(8) requires the sealing order itself to release the record where an entity has a statutory obligation to run a background check. The courts are one unified system of eight judicial districts designated by supreme court rule rather than by statute, county courts were abolished on 1 January 1995, and municipal courts become courts of record on 1 July 2026.
- South DakotaSouth Dakota gives a registered medical cannabis patient "the same rights under state and local law, as the person would be afforded if the person were solely prescribed a pharmaceutical medication" as to employer interaction and drug testing, then excepts an employer acting on a positive cannabis metabolite test in a safety-sensitive job, defined by whatever the employer "reasonably believes could" cause illness, injury or death or result in serious property damage. The 2024 Act added that "No cause of action is created for employment discrimination or wrongful termination arising from an employer’s enforcement of a drug-free workplace policy in compliance with this chapter." There is no ban-the-box rule in either sector: SDCL 20-13-10 bars refusing to hire or to discharge a person "because of race, color, creed, religion, sex, ancestry, disability, or national origin", and criminal record is not among the enumerated grounds. The state criminal history is the Attorney General’s chapter 23-5 file, exempt from the public records law by § 23-5-11, and § 23-5-12 opens it only to the person it refers to, on a written request with fingerprints, releasing it to anyone else only on that person’s authorization and a possible liability waiver. Public criminal case access runs through Public Access Record Search from 1989 forward at twenty dollars a search, charged whether or not records are returned; anything earlier requires the clerk of courts in the county of filing.
- WyomingWyoming regulates neither the criminal history question nor the report that answers it. A read of the whole statute book returns no ban-the-box in either sector, no salary history restriction, no automated hiring statute and no lookback requirement, and the state’s only consumer reporting statute defines a credit report around credit for personal, family or household purposes, so a screening report sits outside it. What shapes the work is the court structure and the repository: nine judicial districts across twenty-three counties, with circuit court boundaries drawn on the judicial districts rather than the counties and district judges assignable statewide, so a county-by-county search is the wrong instrument. The Division of Criminal Investigation holds the criminal history, and it may release it only to the forty-two recipients enumerated in W.S. 7-19-106(a), which names no private employer and no consumer reporting agency; a third party reaches it only through a consent-based voluntary check that a criminal justice agency must forward, with the subject’s fingerprints attached. Expungement is a reclassification of the repository record rather than destruction, with investigatory files expressly outside the definition, and the arrest and no-conviction route is the one place the state lets a person answer an inquiry as though the event had not occurred.
- UtahUtah expunges on the court’s own motion and the clock has started: § 77-40a-204(3) provides that "[o]n and after January 1, 2026, a court shall automatically expunge a case in accordance with this part if the court identifies the case as being eligible for automatic expungement", while § 77-40a-204(4) asks only for "reasonable efforts, within available funding" to meet the timing goals and § 77-40a-201(4) gives the individual "no cause of action for damages" when the court does not. The individual’s side of that is § 77-40a-401(5), which lets a person who received an expungement "respond to any inquiry as though the arrest, investigation, detention, prosecution, or conviction did not occur", so a record can be reportable and then cease to exist while the applicant is entitled to deny it, and § 77-40a-202 deletes traffic offense records with no order at all. The repository runs the other way: § 53-10-108(2) limits dissemination to an enumerated list whose only employment entries are a qualifying entity’s own hiring, applicants included, and a purpose authorized by a statute, executive order, court rule, court order or local ordinance, neither of which is a channel a consumer reporting agency can use. On cannabis the section that circulates as a cardholder protection is the one that protects the employer: § 26B-4-207(3) provides that "[n]othing in this section requires a private employer to accommodate the use of medical cannabis or affects the ability of a private employer to have policies restricting the use of medical cannabis by applicants or employees", and the public-sector duty it replaced was removed by the 2024 amendment rather than by the 2023 renumbering.
- IdahoIdaho releases its state criminal history to "a person or public agency or private entity" on written application to the Idaho State Police Bureau of Criminal Identification, which is the opposite of the closed-repository reading a reader would bring to it. What closes is the onward step: Idaho Code § 67-3008(6) bars a person or private entity from passing a record obtained from the department to anyone who is not a criminal justice agency or a court "without a signed release of the subject of record or unless otherwise provided by law." A record of an arrest with no disposition twelve months on may only be released to criminal justice agencies, to the subject, or to a requester holding that signed release, and every release of criminal history data has to prominently display the statement "AN ARREST WITHOUT DISPOSITION IS NOT AN INDICATION OF GUILT." The courts are one unified system of four courts organized into seven judicial districts that group all 44 counties, with no county trial courts, so a felony normally leaves a magistrate division record for the preliminary hearing and a district court record for the disposition. Idaho has no ban-the-box rule at any stage and no medical or adult-use cannabis program, which makes the compliance question here documentary rather than procedural, and the statewide fingerprint check fee rose to $25 on 1 January 2026 while the name-based fee stayed at $20.
- West VirginiaWest Virginia does not limit when an employer may ask about a criminal record, in the private sector or the public one: there is no ban-the-box statute, and the Human Rights Act enumerates race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, age, blindness and disability without naming criminal record. What the state regulates is the release of the record itself. The Criminal Identification Bureau may furnish fingerprints, photographs, records or other information to any private organization with the superintendent’s approval, but every request must carry a written authorization signed and acknowledged by the person whose record is sought, a condition repeated for license check results at § 30-1D-1(c)(4). Expungement is narrower than it looks: the non-disclosure rule in § 61-11-26(l)(1) is overridden by (l)(3), which entitles any person required by state or federal law to obtain a criminal history record check on a prospective employee to have knowledge of any convictions expunged under that section, so a mandated check may surface what the chapter says never occurred. The courts decide how a search is scoped, and a circuit is not a county: from 1 January 2025 the state’s 55 counties are divided into 30 judicial circuits with 80 circuit judges, and the circuit clerk holds the trial record.
If your state is not listed, that means nobody has finished the research, not that the state has no rules. Ask, and we will tell you what applies to your report.
How to use them
Get a copy of your file
Ask us. Write to [email protected] with your full name and enough detail to identify you, and say that you are requesting a copy of your file. There is no charge where an employer has taken adverse action against you, and none where a security freeze or an identity theft block is in place.
Dispute something that is wrong
Do this in writing and do it early, because the clock that matters is the employer’s, not ours. Filing a dispute with us does not by itself pause anything an employer is doing, so if you have a pre-adverse action notice in hand, tell the employer directly that you are disputing, as well as telling us. The dispute form is the fastest route and it takes a few minutes.
We have 30 days to reinvestigate, and the outcome has to be put in writing to you. If we change anything, we have to tell the employer that received the report as well.
Complain about how it was handled
If you think your rights under the statute have been violated, you can complain to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at consumerfinance.gov/complaint, to the Federal Trade Commission, or to your state attorney general’s office. A complaint to us is not a prerequisite, and you do not need to have disputed anything first.
Tell us if we got it wrong
If the problem is not the information but how we handled it, we would rather hear it directly. The responsible disclosure policy covers security issues, and the same address above reaches a person for anything else.
Sources
- 15 U.S.C. § 1681 et seq. The Fair Credit Reporting Act.
- 12 C.F.R. Part 1022. Regulation V, which implements the FCRA.
- Regulation V, Appendix K. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s prescribed Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the form §1681g(c) requires to be given to consumers.
- Regulation V, Appendix O. The annual adjustment to the maximum file disclosure charge, $16.00 for 2026.
Last reviewed 23 September 2026. This page is checked on a quarterly cycle against primary sources. It describes your rights under federal law and is not legal advice; if you need advice about your own situation, consult a lawyer. See the terms of use.