Virginia has already counted the records. The Virginia State Police put the number at 112,231 conviction offenses eligible for automatic sealing under the state's Clean Slate law, and the agency has until October 1, 2026 to transmit its first list of them to the courts that will enter the orders.
That October date has been described across practitioner blogs and advocacy updates as the day automatic sealing begins in Virginia. It is not. Sealing became law on July 1, 2026. October 1 is a backstop, the outer bound for the first conviction batch to move. And one widely repeated claim about marijuana records is simply wrong: old possession cases do not ride the October list. They seal on a separate track, with no list, no waiting period, and no judge.
Here is what the statutes actually say, what the state has admitted about its own readiness, and how to find out whether the machine is going to skip you.
What Changed, and When It Changed
Virginia's sealing scheme lives at Va. Code Chapter 23.2, §§ 19.2-392.5 through 19.2-392.17. The General Assembly created it in 2021 (Sp. Sess. I, chs. 524 and 542), then rewrote and delayed it in 2025 through SB 1466 and HB 2723, enacted as chapters 634 and 671. The net effect was a one-year push. The chapter took effect July 1, 2026.
The Virginia State Crime Commission's January 2026 update states the October date plainly in note 2: "VSP has until October 1, 2026, to transmit the first list of convictions eligible for automatic sealing," citing enactment clauses 8 and 13 of the 2025 acts. That is a ceiling on agency performance, not a switch-on date for the public.
The deadline has a direct ancestor. The fifth enactment clause of the 2021 act required State Police to first transmit the § 19.2-392.7 list "not later than the earlier of (i) the first day of the third month following the effective date ... or (ii) October 1, 2025." The 2025 amendments moved both dates forward by a year.
Two separate obligations land that day. HB 2723's official summary also requires State Police to build "a secure portal for the purpose of allowing government agencies to determine whether a record has been sealed prior to responding to a request pursuant to current law by October 1, 2026." A list of convictions and a verification portal, due together.
The Seven Offenses That Seal Themselves
Under § 19.2-392.6, convictions for a short, specific list of offenses seal automatically:
- Misdemeanor petit larceny, § 18.2-96
- Misdemeanor concealment or shoplifting, § 18.2-103
- Trespass after being forbidden, § 18.2-119
- Instigating trespass, § 18.2-120
- Trespass on posted property, § 18.2-134
- Misdemeanor marijuana distribution, § 18.2-248.1
- Disorderly conduct, § 18.2-415
Two conditions gate all seven. The offense date must fall on or after January 1, 1986. Seven years must have passed since the conviction with no intervening reportable convictions, and traffic infractions do not count against you.
There is a third trap worth reading twice. If you were convicted on the same date of any other offense that is not itself eligible for automatic sealing, nothing from that date seals. One ineligible co-conviction sinks the whole day.
A scheduling note for anyone reading the statute after next summer: effective July 1, 2027, § 19.2-392.6 is amended to say "former § 18.2-248.1," tracking the repeal of the marijuana distribution statute.
Marijuana Possession Is Its Own Animal
This is the correction that matters most to the largest number of people.
Records for former § 18.2-250.1, simple marijuana possession, are not on the October conviction list and were never going to be. Section 19.2-392.6:1 provides that "any criminal or civil offense that concluded with any final disposition as a charge or conviction of former § 18.2-250.1 shall be sealed without the entry of a court order."
Read the reach of that sentence. It covers criminal and civil dispositions. It covers convictions and deferred dismissals. There is no seven-year wait, no State Police transmission list, and no judge preparing an order. The provision took effect July 1, 2026, along with the rest of the chapter, and it binds the Central Criminal Records Exchange, Virginia courts, Virginia law enforcement agencies, and the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The marijuana offense that is in the October batch is misdemeanor distribution under § 18.2-248.1, a different charge with the full seven-year clock attached.
One important limit. Section 19.2-392.6:1 lets DMV decline to seal a record where sealing would violate federal retention or federal program requirements. If an old possession conviction carried a driving-privilege suspension, a sealed court record does not automatically produce a clean driving record. Check the two separately.
Three Ways the Automated Sweep Skips You
The mechanics in § 19.2-392.7 give State Police explicit authority to leave an otherwise eligible offense off the list. The statute permits omission where:
- "It cannot be determined by an electronic review whether the offense is eligible" for automatic sealing; or
- Electronic review "indicates that the person was charged with violating the law of any other state, the District of Columbia, the United States or any territory thereof, excluding traffic infractions."
Add the same-day ineligible co-conviction rule from § 19.2-392.6 and you have three distinct exits from the automated path.
The second one is the widest. A single out-of-state, federal, or D.C. charge anywhere in your history, at any point, for anything, removes you from the batch. Not a conviction. A charge.
And nothing in the statute requires anyone to tell you. There is no notice, no rejection letter, no queue position to check. People who assume the sweep caught them will wait indefinitely for a record that was silently passed over.
"Automatic" Does Not Mean "Immediate"
Section 19.2-392.7 describes a loop, not a single event. State Police review the Central Criminal Records Exchange on at least a monthly basis, transmit lists to the Executive Secretary of the Supreme Court and to circuit court clerks whose case management systems interface with VSP, those clerks prepare orders, judges enter them, and clerks notify VSP electronically once entry is complete.
Two consequences follow. First, missing the first list is not permanent, because the review repeats monthly. Second, only clerks with interfacing systems receive lists directly, which means the pace of sealing will not be uniform across Virginia's circuit courts.
Charlottesville Circuit Court Clerk Llezelle Dugger, speaking to WVIR NBC29 before the July 1 launch, framed the law's value and its uncertainty in the same breath: "It's giving folks a chance at a clean slate, if enough years have passed." On how many petitions to expect on day one, she said, "It could be five, it could be 50."
Can the State Actually Hit October 1?
The honest answer is that Virginia State Police say yes, after a rough year they have documented themselves.
In Capt. Julia Gunderson's December 2, 2025 presentation to the Crime Commission, VSP laid out the collapse of its cloud criminal history record vendor arrangement: a Notice of Breach issued to Voyatek on August 5, 2025, a contract termination notice on October 7, 2025, and a negotiated termination worked out with outside counsel and the Office of the Attorney General through October and November. The agency then "quickly executed a strategic pivot to an Internal Solution to deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) solution to meet ALL mandated deadlines."
Its budget slide states that "CCH Sealing is on track to deliver legislative mandates by July and October 2026." The same material puts completion of "critical system updates" at October 2027. The mandates get met on a minimum viable build; the full system arrives a year later.
The Crime Commission's January 2026 report supports the optimistic read. Every implementing agency, including VSP, the Office of the Executive Secretary, DMV, the Virginia Court Clerks Association, VACA, and the Virginia Indigent Defense Commission, advised that implementation was proceeding on schedule, and the Fairfax County Circuit Court clerk expected to be ready. The Commission identified no legislative changes needed for the 2026 session and no resources required beyond the 2025 budget allocation.
If You Have to File, There Are Two Different Petitions
Most coverage describes one petition process. There are two, and the difference matters enormously for anyone the sweep passes over.
The backstop: § 19.2-392.12:1
This provision creates what the chapter calls automatic petition sealing. It covers misdemeanor convictions and deferred dismissals that were eligible for automatic sealing but "were unable to be sealed through the automatic process," plus certain other misdemeanor convictions and deferred dismissals not eligible for automatic sealing. If you have an out-of-state charge in your history, or your eligibility could not be resolved electronically, this is your route. It is a lighter lift than the general petition and carries none of the felony history bars below.
The general petition: § 19.2-392.12
Section 19.2-392.12 has been available since July 1, 2026, and it is considerably more demanding. Seven years for a misdemeanor, ten years for a felony, measured from conviction or release. The petitioner must never have been convicted of a Class 1 or Class 2 felony or any felony punishable by life, must have no Class 3 or Class 4 felony within 20 years, and no other felony within the past 10 years.
The exclusion list runs long: violent felonies, sex crimes, sex trafficking, felonies involving a firearm, protective order violations, hate crimes, animal cruelty, election law offenses, date rape drug offenses, not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity dispositions, dangerous or vicious dog offenses, and any offense where the victim was a family or household member. The statute also caps use: "A petitioner may only have two petitions granted pursuant to this section within his lifetime." File in the circuit court of the county or city where the case was disposed of.
For scale on who is looking at this route, VSP's December 2025 estimates counted 32,643 individuals with a Class 5 felony conviction, 34,004 with a Class 6 felony, 53,758 with a conviction under §§ 18.2-95, 18.2-98, 18.2-108, 18.2-111, 18.2-117 or 18.2-178, and 612,998 with a single misdemeanor conviction.
Separately, § 19.2-392.11 sweeps previously concluded misdemeanor non-convictions, meaning acquittals, nolle prosequi dispositions, and dismissals, through an at-least-annual VSP review for people with no convictions and no arrests in the prior three years.
How to Check Whether You Are in the Batch
Five steps, in order:
- Pull your own criminal history record from State Police using form SP-167. VSP's December 2025 slides confirm that "the process for an individual to obtain a copy of their own criminal history record will remain the same (SP-167)."
- Pull your case dispositions from the Virginia Judicial System's Online Case Information System and write down every jurisdiction that appears.
- Flag any out-of-state, federal, D.C., or territorial charge. That is your automated-sweep disqualifier under § 19.2-392.7, and it is the single most common reason an eligible record will not seal on its own.
- If you are filing, use VSP's step-by-step guides for requesting criminal history record information and routing results to the correct circuit court. VSP has posted two versions, one for Fairfax County Circuit Court and one for all other Virginia circuit courts. Confirm current petition form numbers with the clerk of the circuit court where your case was disposed of, or at vacourts.gov, rather than relying on form numbers circulating on practitioner sites.
- Check the Crime Commission's sealing resource page and printable brochure for the eligibility lists and FAQs.
The Legal Aid Justice Center's public guidance makes the point most people need to hear: no action is required if your record is genuinely automatically sealable, but the eligibility rules are intricate enough that confirming your own status beats assuming it.
What Sealing Actually Buys You
Sealing reaches records held by the Central Criminal Records Exchange, any Virginia court, any Virginia police department, sheriff's office or campus police department, and DMV. Section 19.2-392.16 bars background check companies from disseminating sealed records.
The employment protection is in § 19.2-392.15, which prohibits employers, educational institutions, and state and local governments from requiring an applicant to disclose a sealed arrest, charge, or conviction. A willful violation is a Class 1 misdemeanor, per violation.
Be clear-eyed about enforcement. Morgan Lewis, writing for employers in June 2026, notes that the statute creates no private right of action. If an employer demands disclosure of a sealed record, the remedy runs through criminal process, not a civil suit you file yourself.
What Got Cut Along the Way
The 2025 rewrite narrowed the 2021 law. The Collateral Consequences Resource Center documents the removal of court-appointed counsel provisions as unworkable and the curtailment of broader felony sealing, while estimating that roughly 90% of misdemeanors and nearly two-thirds of Class 5 and Class 6 felonies remain eligible.
On overall scale, the Clean Slate Initiative, an advocacy organization, estimates that roughly 1.4 million Virginians have an arrest or conviction record and about 415,000 stand to benefit from full or partial sealing. That figure counts people. VSP's 112,231 counts conviction offenses in the automated batch. They are not the same measurement and should not be added together.
The Throughput Problem
Set the numbers side by side. VSP estimates 942,143 misdemeanor non-conviction offenses queued for review under § 19.2-392.11, on top of the 112,231 conviction offenses due to move by October 1.
Now look at the operation absorbing that volume. VSP told the Crime Commission that expungements already carry "a backlog of petitions and orders awaiting processing," that they rose 10.5% from 2023 to 2024, and that they were on track for a further 19% increase from 2024 to 2025. They are still processed manually, by mail.
The law is automatic. The throughput is not. If your record matters to a job application, a lease, or a professional license, the safest assumption is that you are responsible for confirming your own status, and the § 19.2-392.12:1 petition exists precisely because the machine will miss people.
Related reading
Sources
- Virginia State Crime Commission, Sealing of Criminal Records Update (January 2026)
- Virginia State Police, Progress on Automated Sealing (December 2, 2025 presentation)
- Va. Code § 19.2-392.6, Automatic sealing of offenses resulting in conviction
- Va. Code § 19.2-392.6:1, Sealing of former possession of marijuana offenses
- Va. Code § 19.2-392.7, Process for automatic sealing
- Va. Code § 19.2-392.12, Sealing of offenses by petition
- Va. Code Chapter 23.2, full chapter index
- Virginia LIS, HB 2723 (2025), enacted as chs. 634 and 671
- 2021 Va. Acts, Sp. Sess. I, ch. 524 (HB 2113)
- Collateral Consequences Resource Center, Virginia profile
- [Morgan Lewis, Virginia's Clean Slate Law Expands Requirements for Employers (June 2026)](https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/06/virginias-clean-slate-law-expands-requirements-for-employers-performing-criminal-background-checks)
- The Clean Slate Initiative, Virginia's Clean Slate Implementation Started This July
- Legal Aid Justice Center, Criminal Record Expungement and Sealing
- WVIR NBC29, Virginia's new Clean Slate law to take effect July 1 (June 29, 2026)
- Virginia State Crime Commission, Sealing of Criminal Records resource page
- Virginia Judicial System, Online Case Information System
Note: This article contains AI-assisted content and has been reviewed by our editorial team.
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