Virginia's Clean Slate Act is now law. Effective July 1, 2026, the state began automatically sealing certain misdemeanor convictions from public view without requiring the person convicted to file anything. The law combines true automatic sealing for some offenses with a streamlined petition path for others, and it puts Virginia among the roughly dozen states that have moved record sealing from an opt-in court process to a government-driven one. The first batch of sealed records is already being processed by the Virginia State Police and the circuit court clerks.
What is sealed automatically
Under the new law, convictions for a defined list of misdemeanor offenses are sealed automatically seven years after the date of conviction, provided the person has no new convictions on their record during that waiting period and has satisfied any court-ordered conditions such as fines, restitution, or probation. The covered offenses include many common misdemeanors — petit larceny, possession of small amounts of marijuana, trespassing, some driving-related offenses — but it excludes a substantial list of offenses that the legislature carved out of automatic treatment.
When a conviction qualifies, the sealing happens through the Virginia State Police, which maintains the central criminal history repository, and through the circuit court clerk in the county or city where the case was decided. The clerk updates the public court file; the State Police updates the criminal history record that is released to background check vendors. Neither step requires the person whose record is being sealed to appear, file a motion, or pay a fee.
What still requires a petition
The Clean Slate Act does not make every eligible record automatic. Convictions for certain felonies, including many property and drug felonies that would otherwise qualify, still require the person to file a petition for sealing. The petition process has been simplified — the prior five-year waiting period has been adjusted, the list of disqualifying offenses has been narrowed, and there is now a clearer statutory right to sealing once the criteria are met — but the burden of filing remains with the person with the record.
Convictions that fall outside the statute entirely, including certain violent felonies, sex offenses requiring registration, and offenses carrying an active protective order at the time of application, are not eligible for either automatic or petition-based sealing under the current law. A separate process — a governor's pardon — remains the only path for some of these records.
How to find out whether a record has been sealed
Virginia residents can request a copy of their own criminal history record from the Virginia State Police through the existing Central Criminal Records Exchange request process. A sealed conviction should no longer appear on that record for most purposes. For the court file itself, the clerk's office in the originating jurisdiction can confirm whether the case has been sealed; many clerks now post a status check online.
The State Police has said it will issue a formal notice to people whose convictions have been sealed under the automatic process, but that notification is administrative and may take several months to roll out across all qualifying cases. People who believe they qualify should not wait for the notice to act on jobs, housing, or licensing — they can check their own record directly.
What this changes for background checks and employers
Virginia law now restricts how sealed convictions can be used in employment, housing, and licensing decisions. Most private employers cannot ask about a sealed conviction, and consumer reporting agencies are required to omit sealed records from background check reports they sell for most non-criminal-justice purposes. There are narrow exceptions — law enforcement, certain licensed occupations working with children or vulnerable adults, and a few regulatory positions — where sealed records can still be considered.
For employers, the practical effect is that a background check run on a Virginia resident with a sealed misdemeanor conviction should come back showing no record of that conviction for general hiring decisions. Employers who currently rely on third-party background checks should confirm that their vendor is pulling from the State Police record and not from a database that has not yet been updated.
What to watch for next
Two things will shape how the law actually performs in its first year. The first is implementation pace: whether the State Police and the clerks can keep up with the initial cohort of cases that crossed the seven-year mark between the law's passage and its effective date. The second is whether the legislature expands the automatic list in a future session — advocates have already identified additional misdemeanor categories, and a few neighboring states, particularly North Carolina, are watching how Virginia's hybrid model performs before deciding whether to follow the same path.