Who this affects

Arrest records and background checks

Checked 2026-08-25

The federal seven-year shield on a non-conviction arrest disappears entirely at a $75,000 salary — a threshold unchanged since 1996 — and none of it applies to an employer who simply searches your name.

What the law limits, and what it does not

FCRA § 605(a)(2) keeps records of arrest that antedate the report by more than seven years out of a consumer report. Two details matter. The clock runs from date of entry — the arrest — not from the dismissal, so a 2020 arrest dismissed in 2025 falls off in 2027, not 2032. And convictions are expressly carved out of the time limits altogether.

Then § 605(b)(3) removes the limits entirely where the job pays, or may reasonably be expected to pay, $75,000 or more. That figure has not been indexed since 1996. The better the job, the less protection the arrest has.

The distinction almost nobody explains: the FCRA regulates communications by a consumer reporting agency. A hiring manager typing your name into Google is not a consumer reporting agency, so no seven-year limit applies, no adverse-action notice is owed, and no dispute right attaches. That is the gap this entire industry occupies.

The rules that do reach employers

The EEOC's 2012 enforcement guidance states that the fact of an arrest does not establish that criminal conduct occurred, and that exclusion based on an arrest in itself is not job related and consistent with business necessity — while allowing an employer to act on the conduct underlying the arrest where it makes the person unfit for the role.

Fair-chance laws cover 37 states and more than 150 localities, with 15 states extending to private employers. They govern when an employer may ask or run a check. None of them governs what an employer finds on the open web.

Two jurisdictions go further and are worth knowing. California's own statute runs its seven-year clock from disposition rather than arrest and contains no salary exception. Washington's Fair Chance Act as amended in 2025 bars adverse action based on an arrest record outright, phasing in from 1 July 2026 for employers with fifteen or more workers and 1 January 2027 for smaller ones.

Which is why the search result is the problem

Regulated background checks are auditable and correctable. The unregulated search is neither. Nobody sends you an adverse-action notice for the interview you did not get because your name returns a booking photograph.

That is the surface removal work addresses, and the honest sequence is: use the free routes first — Google's tool for contact details, the site's own opt-out, your state's statutory demand where one exists — then pay for what is left. If you also have a regulated report with an error on it, dispute it under the FCRA; that is free and it is a different remedy from anything we sell.

Two states that ban it outright, and the number behind all of this

Beyond the seven-year rule, a couple of states remove arrests from the reporting system entirely rather than ageing them out. New York prohibits a reporting agency from reporting or maintaining information relative to an arrest or a criminal charge unless it produced a conviction or the charge is still pending — a flat content ban with no clock attached. Massachusetts makes it unlawful for an employer to request an arrest, a detention, or a disposition where no conviction resulted, and extends that to sealed and expunged records.

One statistic explains why any of this matters, and it is the number nobody quotes. Across 49 states and the District of Columbia, only about 64 per cent of arrests from the past five years had a final disposition reported to the state repository. Roughly a third of recent arrests sit in the system with no outcome recorded at all.

That is what lands on a report and what a search returns: the arrest, without the ending. It is also why correcting the record often matters more than removing it.

Common questions

Will a dismissed arrest show on a background check?

On a regulated consumer report it should drop off seven years from the arrest date — unless the job pays $75,000 or more, where the federal limit does not apply at all. On an employer's own web search there is no time limit whatsoever.

Do ban-the-box laws protect me?

They control when an employer may ask about or run a criminal history check. They do not control what an employer finds by searching your name, which is usually how a mugshot surfaces.

What should I do first?

The free routes: Google's Results about you for contact details, the publisher's own opt-out, and your state's statutory demand if it has one. Then look at what remains.

Try the free route first

Google removes your home address, phone number, email and — since February 2026 — government ID numbers at no cost. More than 10 million people have used it. It does not cover arrest records, and it will not touch a government or newspaper page, but it is free and it is worth running first.

Open Google’s Results about you tool

Sources

Every claim on this page traces to the sources above, checked on 2026-08-25. Rules in this area change — several of the ones on this page changed in the last three years. If you find something here that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.