Will a Dismissed Conviction Show Up on a Background Check?

This is the single most-asked question about California record relief, and the honest answer is: it depends which background check you mean. There are three different systems, and a dismissal does not treat them the same way.

Updated October 10, 2026

People usually ask this question expecting a yes or no. There is not one. “Background check” covers at least three different kinds of checks, built on different laws, pulling from different sources, and a California dismissal under Penal Code § 1203.4 (or one of its relatives) affects each one differently. Understanding which kind of check you are worried about is the whole answer.

The three kinds of background checks

1. Ordinary employment background checks

Most private employers in California that run a background check are bound by California's Fair Chance Act (Gov. Code § 12952), which applies to employers with five or more employees, and by Labor Code § 432.7. Under the Fair Chance Act, a covered employer cannot ask about your conviction history on a job application, and cannot ask about it at all until after making a conditional job offer. Once an offer is made, the employer still cannot consider certain categories, including convictions that have been sealed, dismissed, expunged, or judicially set aside (Gov. Code § 12952(a)(3)(A)).

Labor Code § 432.7 goes further for a specific category: an employer generally cannot ask about, or use as a factor in hiring, an arrest that did not lead to a conviction, participation in a pretrial or posttrial diversion program, or a conviction that has been judicially dismissed or ordered sealed. For most people applying for most private jobs, this is the strongest layer of protection California offers, and a dismissal is squarely covered by it.

This protection is not universal. It does not apply to peace officer positions, criminal justice agencies, or certain positions where a state or federal law specifically requires a background check that reaches dismissed records -- for example, jobs requiring a fingerprint clearance through the DOJ for work with children, the elderly, or in health care.

2. Fingerprint-based DOJ and FBI checks (Live Scan)

This is the one people get wrong most often. A Live Scan fingerprint check run through the California DOJ, or an FBI check run for certain licenses and government jobs, pulls directly from the official criminal history database -- the same one a RAP sheet comes from. A dismissed case does not disappear from that database. It still appears, now carrying a notation that it was dismissed, reduced, or granted automatic relief, depending on which form of relief applied.

That notation matters, but it is not the same as the case vanishing. Licensing boards, for instance, are generally barred from denying a license based solely on a dismissed conviction, but Business and Professions Code § 480(c) still allows the board to require the applicant to “provide proof of the dismissal if it is not reflected on the report furnished by the Department of Justice” -- which only makes sense because the board is looking at a report where the case still shows up.

3. Private commercial background check companies

These companies -- the kind landlords, gig-work platforms, and some employers use -- do not pull from the DOJ's database at all. They scrape county court records, old news databases, and each other's files, often with no connection to whatever happened in the actual criminal case afterward.

Two different laws govern how long these companies can report a record, and they do not agree with each other. Under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, most adverse information cannot be reported after seven years -- but that seven-year limit explicitly excludes “records of convictions of crimes” (15 U.S.C. § 1681c(a)(5)). In plain terms: under federal law alone, a conviction can be reported by a commercial background check company indefinitely; only arrests and civil judgments that did not become convictions are subject to the seven-year cutoff.

California is stricter. Under the state's Investigative Consumer Reporting Agencies Act, a report generally cannot include “records of arrest, indictment, information, misdemeanor complaint, or conviction of a crime that, from the date of disposition, release, or parole, antedate the report by more than seven years” (Civil Code § 1786.18(a)(7)) -- and this seven-year limit does cover convictions, not just arrests. So a California dismissal sitting on a commercial report that is more than seven years old is already something state law restricts, independent of whether a petition was ever filed.

Putting it side by side

Why this trips up so many people

A lot of online advice treats “expungement” as a single switch that turns a record invisible everywhere. It is not. The protection you get through the Fair Chance Act when you apply for a private job is real and strong. The protection you get in front of a licensing board or a government fingerprint check is narrower, because the record is still there -- just flagged. And a commercial database sits outside both of those systems, governed by its own, separate reporting rules.

If you are applying for a specific job, license, or apartment and want to know exactly what will show up, the honest answer depends on which of the three systems above that particular check runs through. That is worth confirming before you assume either the best or the worst.

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.