California may have already cleared part of your record — and it did not tell you.

The Attorney General's own description is worth quoting, because it corrects the most common misunderstanding. Automatic relief is not "a dismissal, sealing or expungement of a person's state summary criminal history information record." What the Department does is add a notation next to the entry — reading "arrest relief granted" or "relief granted," with the date and the statute — and that notation then controls who is allowed to see the record when a background check is run through the Department.

The record does not disappear. It is not deleted or destroyed. It stays in the state's criminal history system, and it stays visible to a defined list of agencies. What changes is that ordinary employers running a Department of Justice background check should no longer see it.

The Department also notifies the superior court, which is then required to limit public access to the court file.

The framework was created by Assembly Bill 1076 in 2019, but it did not begin operating until July 1, 2022, and a companion bill pushed the reach of the review back to records from January 1, 1973.

Senate Bill 731 and Assembly Bill 567 then expanded it substantially — most importantly, extending automatic relief to felony convictions — and after a budget-bill delay those expansions became operative on October 1, 2024.

So both of these statements are true, and you need both: automatic relief has been running since July 2022, and the expanded version — including felonies — has been running since October 2024. One honest caveat written into the statutes themselves: the program is expressly "subject to an appropriation in the annual Budget Act," and the Legislature has already delayed it more than once.

For arrests, Penal Code section 851.93 sets out the categories. A misdemeanor arrest where the charge was filed and then dismissed qualifies immediately. A misdemeanor arrest where no charges were ever filed qualifies one year after the arrest. A felony arrest where no charges were filed qualifies after three years — or six years if the offense carried a possible sentence of eight years or more. An arrest resolved through a diversion or deferred entry of judgment program qualifies on successful completion.

Now the gap that matters most, and that we have not seen explained anywhere else: a felony that was charged and then dismissed does not fit any of those categories. The dismissal provision covers misdemeanors only, and the felony provisions require that no charges were ever filed. Unless the case ended through a listed diversion program, that arrest gets no automatic relief at all — it requires a petition under Penal Code section 851.91.

If your felony case was dismissed, that is very likely you. It is also, in our experience, the single most common situation where someone assumes the state has handled it and no one ever has.

For convictions, Penal Code section 1203.425 requires all of the following: you are not required to register as a sex offender; you have no active supervision record; you are not currently serving a sentence and have no pending charges; and the conviction itself fits one of the qualifying categories.

Those categories are: a conviction where you were granted probation and completed it without revocation — relief follows completion, with no additional waiting period; an infraction or misdemeanor where you completed the sentence and at least one year has passed since judgment; or a felony where you completed all incarceration, probation, mandatory supervision, postrelease community supervision and parole, and four years have passed since you finished supervision without a new felony conviction.

One point that surprises people, including lawyers: a state prison sentence no longer disqualifies you from automatic conviction relief. Senate Bill 731 removed that bar. (This is genuinely different from a felony *reduction* under Penal Code section 17(b), where a prison sentence still does block relief — the two are not the same test.)

The felony category excludes serious felonies listed in Penal Code section 1192.7(c), violent felonies under section 667.5, and felonies requiring sex offender registration. And a person required to register is ineligible for automatic conviction relief entirely — not just as to that count.

This is in the statute and is almost never mentioned publicly. A prosecuting attorney or probation department may file a petition up to 90 days before you become eligible, asking the court to block automatic relief on the ground that granting it "would pose a substantial threat to the public safety."

The court must hold a hearing within 45 days. The prosecutor carries the initial burden. But if the court finds that burden met, the burden shifts to you to show that the hardship of not getting relief outweighs the public safety concern — which means putting on evidence of hardship and good character, on a short clock.

A person who loses that hearing is not out of options: the statute expressly preserves the ordinary petition routes. But this is a hearing no one should walk into unrepresented, and the timeline gives very little warning.

It does not restore firearm rights. Both statutes say so expressly, and both preserve your exposure to a felon-in-possession charge if the record would otherwise create it.

It does not excuse disclosure when you apply for employment as a peace officer, for public office, for enrollment as an in-home supportive services provider, or for contracting with the California State Lottery. (Note that this list is *not* the same as the one attached to a court-ordered expungement — a point commonly gotten wrong.)

It does not stop criminal justice agencies from seeing and using the record exactly as before, and it does not prevent a district attorney from prosecuting the offense within the statute of limitations.

It does not end an unexpired criminal protective order, and in any later prosecution the prior conviction "may be pleaded and proved and shall have the same effect as if the relief had not been granted."

And relief is still visible to several categories of background check: police hiring, criminal justice agencies, caregiving licensors (community care, elder residential care, child day care), and — for convictions from January 1, 2020 forward — school districts, with a narrow exception for older simple drug-possession convictions. Driver's license consequences also survive.

Both statutes grant relief only "if the relevant information is present in the department's electronic records." The Department cannot relieve a record it cannot see — and a great many California court dispositions never reach it.

The scale of that gap is documented. Across counties, the share of arrests with no disposition recorded has ranged from roughly 17% to more than half, depending on the county and year. And in February 2026 the Los Angeles Superior Court publicly disclosed a backlog of about 464,000 arrest disposition reports, affecting roughly 408,000 people and dating back to the early 1980s — including approximately 84,000 dismissals that were never transmitted to the Department of Justice.

Read that last figure again in practical terms. Tens of thousands of people had their cases dismissed, are legally entitled to relief, and have a state record that still shows an unresolved arrest — with no notice, no letter, and no way to know.

A Department of Justice background check and a commercial background check are different systems. Private screening companies build their databases from county court records and data vendors, not from your state record. Nothing in these statutes binds them.

So a conviction that received automatic relief can — and does — keep appearing on private background reports, sometimes for years, because the vendor's copy was scraped before the relief and never refreshed.

Here is why that hurts more with automatic relief than with a court petition: someone who petitions and wins walks out with a signed court order they can send to a screening company to force a correction. Someone who received automatic relief gets no order, no notice, and no document at all — only a notation on a record they have never seen. When a stale conviction surfaces in a job application, they have nothing to dispute it with.

First: get your own record. The Department of Justice lets you request your state summary criminal history, and if relief was granted you will see the notation next to the entry, with the date and the statute. Until you look, you are guessing. The Department confirms relief on request — but you have to ask.

Second: check whether the relief that should have happened actually did. If your disposition never reached the Department, or your case is one of the categories automatic relief does not reach — a dismissed felony arrest being the clearest example — nothing has happened and nothing will happen on its own.

Third, and this is the honest bottom line of this whole page: if the state already relieved your record, you should not pay anyone to do it again. That is why we pull the record first. If it turns out the law has already done the work, we will tell you, and there will be nothing to buy. If it has not — and often it has not — a petition produces something automatic relief never does: a court order with your name on it, in your hand.