Did California Already Give You Automatic Record Relief?

Before you spend a dollar on a petition, there is a real chance California's Department of Justice has already acted on your case without telling you. This is the first thing to check, and almost nobody checks it.

Updated October 10, 2026

If you are searching for whether your California record has already been handled, the honest answer is: maybe, and there is only one way to find out for sure. Since October 1, 2024, the California Department of Justice (DOJ) has been running a monthly, automatic process that reviews old arrests and convictions and grants relief to people who qualify, with no petition, no lawyer, and no fee. It has already touched millions of records. It has also, by its own description, not told most of those people it happened.

What automatic record relief actually is

Automatic record relief comes from two statutes. Penal Code § 1203.425 covers convictions. Penal Code § 851.93 covers arrests that did not lead to a conviction. Both became operative on October 1, 2024, and both direct the DOJ to review its own criminal history database every month, going back to records from January 1, 1973 forward, and flag the ones that qualify -- without anyone filing anything.

To qualify for automatic relief on a conviction, a person generally cannot be required to register under the Sex Offender Registration Act, cannot be on any form of active supervision, cannot currently be serving a sentence or facing pending charges, and must fall into one of a few waiting-period categories: probation completed without revocation, an infraction or misdemeanor with no probation after one full year has passed, or a felony where incarceration, probation, mandatory supervision, PRCS, and parole are all finished and four years have passed with no new felony conviction (Penal Code § 1203.425(a)(1)(B)). Serious felonies (Penal Code § 1192.7(c)), violent felonies (Penal Code § 667.5), and offenses that require sex offender registration do not qualify.

Arrests follow a similar logic under Penal Code § 851.93: a dismissed misdemeanor qualifies right away; a misdemeanor arrest with no charges filed qualifies after one year; a non-serious felony arrest with no charges filed qualifies after three years; and arrests for the most serious felonies take six years. Successful completion of certain diversion programs also qualifies.

The numbers, straight from the DOJ's own report

The DOJ has published its own data on how this is going, in a report titled “Demographic Analysis of AB 1076 Automatic Record Relief Cases” (November 2024). Between July 1, 2022 and December 31, 2023 -- the period the report covers -- the Department granted automatic record relief to 6,861,324 individuals, across 11,876,503 separate arrest and conviction events.

Read that middle row again: only 42.70% of the people who got automatic relief had every single arrest or conviction on their record covered. The other 57.30% had at least one event the automatic process did not reach -- meaning a person can have genuinely received free, automatic relief and still have something sitting on their record that a petition could address.

Nobody is told. Not even you.

That is not a gap in a form letter program -- it is how the law was built. The courts get a data feed. You do not. If you want to know whether your name is in that 6.8 million, the DOJ will not reach out and tell you. You have to go ask.

What automatic relief is not

What automatic relief actually does is add a notation to your record inside the DOJ's own database -- the same database background check companies and licensing agencies query. That notation changes how the record is shared going forward, in many of the same ways a court order under Penal Code § 1203.4 does. But it is a flag inside a government record system, not a court judgment, and it does not touch the underlying case file sitting in your county's court records.

How to check whether you have it

There is exactly one reliable way to know: request your own official California criminal history record from the DOJ. This is sometimes called a RAP sheet (Record of Arrest and Prosecution). Here is the process.

1. Go to a Live Scan fingerprinting location (many local police and sheriff's departments offer this, along with private Live Scan businesses).
2. Bring a completed DOJ Record Review application (form BCIA 8016RR) and ask for the “Record Review” service, which is how you request your own record rather than a background check for someone else.
3. Pay the DOJ's processing fee -- currently $25.
4. Wait for your results to come back from the DOJ by mail.
5. Read every entry carefully. Next to a conviction that received automatic relief, look for a notation reading “relief granted” (Penal Code § 1203.425(a)(2)(B)). Next to a qualifying arrest, look for “arrest relief granted” (Penal Code § 851.93(b)(2)).

If you see that language next to an entry, the DOJ has already acted on it. If an entry has no such notation, it has not received automatic relief, and it may be something worth asking a lawyer about.

Four reasons to petition anyway, even if you already have automatic relief

Having automatic relief on some or all of your record does not necessarily mean there is nothing left to do. There are at least four situations where a petition still matters.

• Automatic relief does not reduce a felony to a misdemeanor. That is a separate process under Penal Code § 17(b), and the automatic-relief statute specifically preserves your ability to still ask a court for that reduction (Penal Code § 1203.425(a)(4)(D), (a)(5)).
• Automatic relief produces no document you can hand to anyone. It is a notation inside a DOJ database. A landlord, an employer, or a licensing board that wants to see proof of a dismissal in writing is not going to accept “the DOJ's computer flagged it” as that proof.
• For many professional and occupational licenses, Business and Professions Code § 480(c) requires an applicant whose conviction was dismissed to “provide proof of the dismissal if it is not reflected on the report furnished by the Department of Justice.” If the automatic relief notation did not make it onto the specific report a licensing board pulls, you need something else to show them.
• Automatic relief changes what the DOJ shares going forward. It does nothing about commercial background check companies that already copied your record before the notation existed, or that pull from other public sources entirely. Those private databases are not required to go back and update themselves just because the DOJ's own record changed.

Why this is the most important article on this site

Every other article here assumes you still need to do something. This one exists because, for a meaningful share of people searching for help with a California record, the honest first answer is: find out what you already have before you decide what you need. It costs $25 and a fingerprint appointment to find out. It is worth doing before anything else.

Legal information on this page was last checked against primary sources in October 2026. California law changes; if you are reading this long after that date, confirm before you rely on it.