How Far Back Do Background Checks Go by State?

Under FCRA §605, most background-check items — civil judgments, paid tax liens, collection accounts, and arrests that never led to conviction — must drop off a consumer report after seven years, and bankruptcies after ten, but criminal convictions carry no federal reporting time limit at all; several states go further, removing the federal high-salary exception or capping conviction reporting on their own. Getting this wrong in either direction — reporting too much, or assuming a national default that a given state does not follow — is a compliance failure, not a gray area.

Every enterprise HR leader, general counsel, and talent-acquisition executive eventually asks some version of the same question: how far back can we actually look? The honest answer has two layers. There is a federal floor set by the Fair Credit Reporting Act that applies everywhere a consumer reporting agency compiles a report, and there is a patchwork of state statutes layered on top of it that, in a meaningful number of jurisdictions, is stricter than federal law. A screening policy built only around the federal seven-year rule will be non-compliant the moment it is applied to a candidate in a state with a tighter standard. This guide separates what the law actually says from the shorthand most people repeat about it.

What does “how far back” actually mean in a background check?

“How far back” is really a question about reportability, not about what happened. A record does not disappear from a courthouse file because time has passed — it becomes unreportable on a consumer report used for employment, tenancy, or credit purposes once it crosses the applicable statutory line, whether that line is set by the FCRA, by a state statute, or by an expungement or sealing order. Three separate mechanisms can remove or restrict an old record from a screening report, and they are frequently confused with one another: the FCRA’s reporting-age limits, a state law imposing its own (often shorter) limits, and a court-ordered expungement or sealing that removes the record from the public source entirely. A defensible policy accounts for all three.

What is the FCRA seven-year rule, exactly?

The Fair Credit Reporting Act, at 15 U.S.C. §1681c, tells consumer reporting agencies which categories of adverse information may not be included in a report once they age past a set number of years. The Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on the statute confirms the core categories: civil suits and civil judgments, paid tax liens, and accounts placed for collection generally cannot be reported once they are more than seven years old, and bankruptcies cannot be reported once they are more than ten years old. Arrests that did not result in a conviction fall under the same seven-year cap — this is the piece people most often mean when they invoke “the seven-year rule.”

What the statute does not put a federal time limit on is criminal convictions. A conviction — as opposed to an arrest that never proceeded to conviction — can be reported by a consumer reporting agency indefinitely under federal law, no matter how old it is. This distinction between arrests and convictions is the most consequential, and most frequently misunderstood, feature of the entire rule.

Does the $75,000 salary threshold change anything?

Yes. The FCRA’s seven- and ten-year caps described above do not apply at all to a report used in connection with employment at an annual salary that is expected to equal or exceed $75,000, or in connection with certain underwriting of life insurance or credit at a comparable amount. For those higher-compensation roles, a consumer reporting agency may report civil judgments, paid tax liens, collections, non-conviction arrests, and bankruptcies without regard to age — federal law simply does not impose the cap in that context. This exception is a frequent source of confusion because most consumer-facing explanations of “the seven-year rule” omit it entirely, and because — as covered below — a number of states have eliminated this exception within their own borders.

FCRA reporting limits by record type

Record type	Federal reporting limit	$75k+ salary exception applies?
Criminal convictions	No federal time limit	N/A — never capped federally
Arrests without conviction	7 years	Yes — cap removed above threshold
Civil suits & civil judgments	7 years	Yes — cap removed above threshold
Paid tax liens	7 years	Yes — cap removed above threshold
Accounts placed for collection	7 years	Yes — cap removed above threshold
Bankruptcies	10 years	Yes — cap removed above threshold

This table reflects the federal baseline only. The moment a candidate’s work location, residence, or the applicable state’s choice-of-law rule brings a stricter state statute into play, the right-hand columns can no longer be relied on as the final word.

How do state laws change the seven-year rule?

A meaningful number of states have enacted their own background-check statutes that are more restrictive than the FCRA, and they tend to fall into a few recurring categories rather than one uniform pattern:

• States that remove the federal salary exception. Some states apply a seven-year cap on civil judgments, tax liens, collections, and non-conviction arrests regardless of the position’s pay — meaning the FCRA’s $75,000 carve-out simply does not exist under that state’s own consumer-reporting statute, even though it still exists federally. California is the most frequently cited example: its state consumer-reporting statutes do not include the federal high-salary exception, so the seven-year cap applies there without regard to compensation.
• States that extend limits to conviction records themselves. A smaller group of states restrict how far back a conviction can be reported or considered for certain employment purposes, layering a state-specific ceiling onto a category the FCRA leaves uncapped federally.
• States with individualized-assessment and fair-chance frameworks. Rather than a fixed lookback number, some states require that any consideration of criminal history be tied to an individualized assessment of the offense’s nature, its age, and its relevance to the specific job — effectively limiting how heavily an old record can be weighed even where it remains reportable.
• States with expanded expungement and sealing regimes. Several states have broadened eligibility for sealing or expunging older or lower-level convictions, which removes the record from the source entirely rather than merely capping how a consumer reporting agency may report it — a sealed or expunged record generally should not appear on a compliant background check at all.

Because state legislatures amend these statutes regularly, the specific list of which states fall into which category shifts. A national screening policy should be reviewed against current state law — ideally by counsel or a screening partner who tracks it continuously — rather than built once and left static.

Building a multi-state lookback policy that holds up

1. Start from the strictest applicable law, not the federal floor. Determine the candidate’s work state (and, where relevant, residence state) and apply whichever standard — federal or state — is more restrictive for that record type.
2. Never assume the $75,000 exception travels with the role. Confirm whether the candidate’s work state recognizes the federal salary exception before relying on it to report older civil, tax-lien, collection, or non-conviction-arrest information.
3. Separate arrests from convictions in every policy document. Treat non-conviction arrests as capped at seven years by default, and treat convictions as a category requiring a state-by-state check rather than an assumed indefinite reportability.
4. Build an individualized-assessment step into adjudication for any conviction that is reportable, regardless of whether the candidate’s state legally requires it — it is both a discrimination-risk mitigant and, in an increasing number of states, an outright requirement.
5. Confirm sealing and expungement status before reporting anything. A record that has been sealed or expunged under the candidate’s state law generally should not surface on a compliant report; a screening provider using stale database sources can miss this.
6. Re-validate the policy on a fixed schedule. State legislatures amend fair-chance and consumer-reporting statutes frequently enough that an annual, documented review is the minimum acceptable cadence for a multi-state employer.

What about expungement, sealing, and set-aside records?

Expungement, sealing, and set-aside are distinct legal mechanisms, and they do not always produce the same practical result. An expunged record is typically treated as if it did not occur and should not be reported. A sealed record is generally closed to public and commercial access, which as a practical matter keeps it out of a properly sourced background check, though it has not been erased from the underlying court file. A set-aside or vacated conviction may still appear in a record search depending on the jurisdiction and how the underlying docket is annotated, which is precisely why a source-verified, county-level search — rather than a single aggregated database pull — matters: database aggregators are frequently slow to reflect a sealing or expungement order, and reporting a record that has been legally sealed exposes the employer and the reporting agency to real liability, independent of the seven-year question entirely.

What this means for Arizona employers and nationwide screening programs

Arizona generally tracks the federal FCRA framework described above, but any Arizona-headquartered employer hiring outside the state — which describes nearly every enterprise client we work with — is still bound by the stricter standard wherever it applies to a given candidate’s work location. Honeybadger Solutions builds background-intelligence programs in-house, delivered nationwide and internationally, specifically to manage this jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction variation: source-verified county, state, and federal court searches, current sealing and expungement status, and an adjudication framework that applies the strictest applicable lookback rather than a single national default. Clients across the Phoenix metro, Tucson and Oro Valley, and Casa Grande and Pinal County get the same multi-state discipline as our national accounts.

Frequently asked questions

Can a felony conviction show up on a background check after seven years?

Under federal law, yes — the FCRA places no time limit on reporting criminal convictions, unlike arrests that never led to conviction, which are capped at seven years. Some states impose their own limits on how far back a conviction can be reported or considered for employment purposes, so the answer can change once a state-specific statute applies to the candidate.

Does the seven-year rule apply to every job, no matter the salary?

Not under federal law. The FCRA removes its seven- and ten-year caps entirely for positions paying an annual salary of $75,000 or more, allowing older civil judgments, tax liens, collections, and non-conviction arrests to be reported without regard to age. A number of states do not recognize this exception within their own borders, so the practical answer depends on which state’s law governs the specific hire.

Why did a database background check show a record that should have been sealed?

This is one of the most common failures in low-cost, database-only screening. Commercial aggregator databases are frequently not updated in real time when a court seals or expunges a record, so a stale feed can surface information the source court no longer makes available. A source-verified search performed directly at the county or state court level at the time of the check is the reliable way to catch a sealing or expungement before it becomes a reporting error.

Is there one nationwide rule we can apply to every candidate regardless of state?

No single lookback rule works safely across every state. The FCRA sets a federal floor, but a meaningful number of states impose stricter limits, remove the federal salary exception, or require an individualized assessment of criminal history rather than a fixed cutoff. A defensible multi-state policy applies the strictest law that governs each candidate’s specific work location rather than a single company-wide default.