The order is signed. The clerk stamps it. Someone tells you the case is closed and the record is gone. Then a rejection letter arrives from an employer or a property manager, and it cites a charge that is not supposed to be public anymore.
That is two different failures, and they need two different fixes. The first is legal: in most states, expungement never meant deletion, and the law itself still lets a defined list of agencies read the file. The second is commercial: a private screening company may hold a copy of your case that it bought from the court before your order issued, and nothing in the court's process automatically tells that company to update it.
So the honest answer to the question in the headline is: usually no, but not never, and the exceptions are the ones that cost people jobs.
What relief actually does
States use different words for overlapping things. Expungement, sealing, set-aside, and dismissal after a diversion program are not interchangeable terms with one national meaning. Michigan calls it setting aside a conviction. Other states seal. A few destroy records in narrow categories. The Collateral Consequences Resource Center's 50-state comparison is the reference point for how far each state's version goes.
The common structure is this: the record is made nonpublic rather than destroyed. It stops appearing in the public court index. It does not stop existing. That distinction is the whole subject of this article, and it is why the single most useful thing you can do this week is read your own order and your own state's statute instead of relying on what the word "expunged" sounds like.
Who still gets to see it
Michigan's statute is a clean worked example because it lists the holders by name. Under MCL 780.623, the nonpublic record of a set-aside conviction remains available to courts and the judicial branch, the Department of Corrections, law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, the attorney general, and the governor. The permitted uses are specific: pardon decisions, plea bargaining, licensing conducted through the judicial branch, law enforcement employment, and sentencing for a felony or for a misdemeanor punishable by more than one year. The CCRC state profile for Michigan lays out the same list.
Sex offender registration obligations survive a Michigan set-aside. Relief on the record does not lift the registration duty.
Your state's list will differ in the details. The pattern rarely does. Law enforcement and licensing bodies almost always keep access.
The sentencing trap
If you are facing a new charge, this is the paragraph that matters most.
In many states a sealed or expunged conviction can still function as a predicate offense or a sentence enhancer. CCRC flags Arkansas and Massachusetts as examples where sealed convictions can be used this way, while noting that in Arkansas a pardon may not carry the same effect. This varies state by state, and it is not something you can reason out from first principles.
Practical instruction: tell your defense lawyer about the sealed case. Do not assume it is invisible to the prosecutor, because in a large number of jurisdictions it is not. A defendant who withholds a sealed prior from their own attorney and then hears the prosecutor raise it at a plea negotiation has surrendered the one advantage they had, which was time to prepare for it.
Immigration and the federal definition of a conviction
Federal immigration law does not follow state relief. Under 8 U.S.C. §1101(a)(48)(A), the Board of Immigration Appeals held in Matter of Roldan, 22 I&N Dec. 512 (BIA 1999) (en banc), that a person remains convicted for immigration purposes even after a state expunges the conviction for rehabilitative reasons. The Ninth Circuit carved out a narrow exception for certain first-offender drug dispositions in Lujan-Armendariz v. INS, 222 F.3d 728 (9th Cir. 2000), and the continuing scope of that exception is contested and circuit-specific. The Immigrant Defense Project's practitioner guide, Beyond Roldan and Pickering, walks through where the line falls.
The blunt version for a non-citizen: never treat a state expungement as immigration relief. If immigration consequences are in play, that is a question for an immigration lawyer before you rely on the order for anything.
How the record gets back out
Courts sell bulk case data. Commercial screening companies buy it, load it into their own databases, and refresh on their own schedule rather than the court's. When a judge seals your case on a Tuesday, the vendor's copy does not change on Tuesday. It changes whenever that vendor next pulls and reconciles, if it reconciles.
The scale of the leakage is now measured rather than guessed. Colleen V. Chien's Clean Slate, Dirty Data: An Audit of Algorithmic Automated Criminal Record Relief, 103 N.C. L. Rev. 1481 (2025), audited thousands of commercial background checks against automatic-restriction laws and found roughly 2% on average still contained legally restricted records. Clearance rates improved in step with rule changes, implying two-thirds or better of eligible records do get cleared.
Two percent is the right number to hold in your head, and the right framing is uncommon but not rare, and catastrophic when it lands on you. It is not a reason for panic. It is a reason to verify rather than assume.
The National Consumer Law Center's Broken Records Redux catalogs the recurring error types: sealed or expunged records included, records attached to the wrong person on a common name, missing dispositions, one charge listed multiple times, and misdemeanors reported as felonies. The industry has no registration requirement. Roughly 94% of employers and 90% of landlords rely on these reports.
What federal law still requires of screeners
The Fair Credit Reporting Act does not have a clean rule that says "do not report expunged cases." It has three obligations that get you most of the way there.
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15 U.S.C. §1681e(b) requires reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy.
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15 U.S.C. §1681k requires that public record information reported for employment purposes be complete and up to date, or that the consumer be notified.
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15 U.S.C. §1681i requires reinvestigation when you dispute.
Then there are the time limits in 15 U.S.C. §1681c, which most people misremember. Arrest records and civil judgments generally cannot be reported after seven years, or until the governing statute of limitations expires, whichever is longer. But §1681c(a)(5) expressly preserves "records of convictions of crimes" with no time limit at all. A conviction can be reported forever. And §1681c(b) lifts the time limits entirely when the job carries an expected annual salary of $75,000 or more. If you are applying for a position above that threshold, the seven-year rule you were counting on does not apply.
Case law on expunged records is thin but reads in the consumer's favor. In McNamara v. HireRight Solutions, Inc. (2014), the court described screeners as free to report dispositions "until, of course, they are sealed or expunged." At least five FCRA class actions over reporting expunged or sealed cases have settled. Screeners typically defend on two grounds: technical accuracy, meaning the record was genuinely public at the time it was collected, and lack of knowledge that the case was later sealed. CCRC's analysis of whether screeners may lawfully report expunged records works through why those defenses sit poorly against a maximum-possible-accuracy standard.
What changed in Washington, and why it matters to you
On Jan. 23, 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued an advisory opinion, Fair Credit Reporting; Background Screening, 89 Fed. Reg. 4171. It said in plain terms that background reports must exclude records that were expunged, sealed, or otherwise legally restricted, must include disposition information, and must not list one case multiple times.
That advisory opinion was withdrawn on May 12, 2025, as part of a rollback of 67 guidance documents under Acting Director Russell Vought. Morgan Lewis's summary of the withdrawal counts 8 policy statements, 7 interpretive rules, 13 advisory opinions, and 39 other documents.
Read the consequence carefully, because it is narrower than the headlines suggested. The National Consumer Law Center's position, set out in Continued Vitality of 67 Withdrawn CFPB Guidance Documents, is that "There is no change to the underlying statutes, regulations, or even official interpretations of regulations," and the analysis in the withdrawn opinion remains usable in private litigation. Sections 1681e(b), 1681i, 1681k, and 1681c are untouched.
What changed is the enforcement posture. Do not plan around a federal agency policing this on your behalf. The realistic remedy is a private FCRA claim brought by your own lawyer.
For contrast, here is what agency enforcement looked like when it happened. On Oct. 29, 2015, the CFPB ordered General Information Services and e-Backgroundchecks.com to pay $10.5 million in consumer relief, at $1,000 per affected consumer, plus a $2.5 million civil penalty. The conduct included attaching records to the wrong consumers, including dismissed and expunged records, and reporting misdemeanors as felonies.
The fix-it sequence
If a sealed or expunged case surfaced on a report, work these in order. Skipping steps is what makes disputes fail.
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Get certified copies of your order. Multiple copies, from the clerk of the court that entered it. Every step below requires you to attach one.
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Confirm the order was actually executed. Check with the clerk that the case was removed from the public index, and check that the state criminal history repository processed it. A court order sitting unexecuted in a file is a common and fixable cause.
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Request your own file from the screener that flagged you, then dispute in writing. You are entitled to the report. Dispute in writing, attach the certified order, and keep proof of what you sent and when. Once you dispute, the agency must notify the original furnisher of the information within five business days.
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Challenge the FBI file if it is stale. The FBI will not expunge anything for you. Its Identity History Summary challenge process is free through CJIS, but it only forwards your claim to the agency that controls the record, and the FBI updates its file after official communication from that agency. Most states require the correction to route through the State Identification Bureau, which then pushes the update federally.
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Re-pull your reports periodically. Vendors reload from bulk court data. A record that was corrected once can reappear on a later refresh. Checking a few times over the following year is not paranoia, it is how you catch a reload.
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File a CFPB complaint only after disputing directly. The Bureau's own notice requires you to dispute with the reporting agency first. A complaint filed out of order is a complaint that goes nowhere.
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Call an FCRA lawyer if the record reappears after a completed dispute. A reappearance after a documented dispute is a stronger posture than the first appearance, because the screener's knowledge is no longer in question. That is the fact pattern that has been settling.
State of play: automatic sealing, and what automatic does not mean
The map keeps moving. The Clean Slate Initiative counts 14 states plus Washington, D.C. with laws meeting its automated-sealing criteria: Pennsylvania (2018), Utah and New Jersey (2019), Michigan and Connecticut (2020), Delaware and Virginia (2021), California, Oklahoma, Colorado and D.C. (2022), Minnesota and New York (2023), Illinois (2025), and Missouri (2026).
Missouri is the newest. Gov. Mike Kehoe signed SB 1421 on July 8, 2026, making Missouri the 14th Clean Slate state. State agencies face a January 2027 deadline to begin screening and sealing, with misdemeanors automatically expunged after one year and nonviolent felonies after three. The Missouri State Highway Patrol runs the program. The Missouri Independent covered the scope of the measure as it moved through the legislature.
Illinois was 13th. The General Assembly approved HB 1836 on Oct. 30, 2025, creating the broadest automated sealing program to date. Agencies and circuit clerks must begin systematic sealing by 2029, and beginning Jan. 1, 2029, sealing of non-convictions becomes immediate and mandatory on a favorable disposition.
You will sometimes read that roughly half of states now have automatic relief. That framing only holds if you count marijuana-only and non-conviction-only regimes. CCRC's narrower cut is more useful if you are trying to figure out whether your own case qualifies: 9 states have automatic relief spanning non-convictions, misdemeanors and some felonies (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Indiana, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey); 3 more plus D.C. cover only non-convictions and misdemeanors (D.C., Delaware, Utah); and 11 states plus D.C. have marijuana-specific automatic relief.
Automatic also does not mean instant. Michigan shows both the scale automation reaches and the lag. Automatic set-asides began April 11, 2023, clearing records for 252,417 people on the first day, as Michigan Advance reported at the time. The first year produced 1,405,819 expunged records across 912,416 people, with 283,428 people fully cleared. As of 2026, Michigan State Police report roughly 1,578,501 people with automatic expungements and more than 5 million convictions sealed. That is enormous throughput, and it still took years to build.
The gap you have to close yourself
Relief is a court event. A clean background check is an administrative outcome, and it happens across the state repository, the FBI file, and however many private databases hold a copy of your case. The order starts that process. It does not finish it.
Treat the signed order as the beginning of a verification project: confirm the clerk executed it, confirm the state repository has it, pull your own reports, and dispute in writing with the certified order attached. Two percent is a small number until it is your application.
Related reading
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[A Colorado Judge Threw Out a Felony Case Without Finding the DNA Analyst Ever Touched It. The State Supreme Court Wants Him to Explain Why.](/news/colorado-judge-dismissal-cbi-dna-scandal-missy-woods-supreme-court)
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[The Supreme Court Said a Geofence Warrant Is a Search. It Did Not Say the Evidence Comes Out.](/news/supreme-court-geofence-warrant-search-chatrie-suppression)
Sources
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Clean Slate in States, The Clean Slate Initiative
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Governor Kehoe Signs Clean Slate Into Law as Part of Missouri Public Safety Bill
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Bill requiring automatic expungement of eligible drug offenses heads to Missouri governor, Missouri Independent
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50-State Comparison: Expungement, Sealing & Other Record Relief, Collateral Consequences Resource Center
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15 U.S.C. §1681c, Cornell Legal Information Institute
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May background screeners lawfully report expunged records?, CCRC
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Fair Credit Reporting; Background Screening, CFPB Advisory Opinion, 89 Fed. Reg. 4171 (Jan. 23, 2024), withdrawn May 12, 2025
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Continued Vitality of 67 Withdrawn CFPB Guidance Documents, National Consumer Law Center
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CFPB Revokes Guidance in Sweeping Rollback of Agency Policies and Priorities, Morgan Lewis
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CFPB Takes Action Against Two of the Largest Employment Background Screening Report Providers for Serious Inaccuracies (Oct. 29, 2015)
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Colleen V. Chien, Clean Slate, Dirty Data: An Audit of Algorithmic Automated Criminal Record Relief, 103 N.C. L. Rev. 1481 (2025)
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Broken Records Redux, National Consumer Law Center (Dec. 9, 2019)
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Beyond Roldan and Pickering, Immigrant Defense Project
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Convictions cleared for nearly 850K Michiganders as 'Clean Slate' program takes effect, Michigan Advance
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