Spent Convictions in Victoria: The Spent Convictions Act 2021

Victoria's Spent Convictions Act 2021 spends most convictions automatically after 10 years for an adult or 5 years for a young offender, but a serious conviction can only ever be spent, if at all, by applying to the Magistrates' Court.

This article covers how the Spent Convictions Act 2021 (Vic) works generally. It does not assess whether any individual reader's own conviction is, or will become, spent. For advice on a specific record, consult a lawyer admitted in Victoria.

Victoria sits alongside seven other states and territories covered on Spent Convictions in Australia, which sets out the Commonwealth Crimes Act 1914 scheme and the national comparison table. This page covers Victoria's own machinery under the Spent Convictions Act 2021.

Victoria's First Dedicated Spent Convictions Scheme

The Spent Convictions Act 2021 (Vic), No. 13 of 2021, was assented on 30 March 2021. Most of the Act commenced on 1 December 2021; the Magistrates' Court application pathway for serious convictions, Division 2 of Part 2, commenced later, on 1 July 2022, confirmed independently by the Magistrates' Court of Victoria's own scheme page. The Act applies retrospectively (s6): because the conviction period clock runs from the date of the original finding of guilt rather than from the Act's commencement, an old, non-serious conviction whose period had already run out before 1 December 2021 became spent immediately on commencement.

Before this Act, Victoria had no dedicated spent-convictions legislation at all; disclosure ran on Victoria Police's own administrative Information Release Policy rather than on statute. This is stated consistently by multiple official and quasi-official sources, though the two DJCS pages most likely to state it directly were blocked on every transport tried this session, so it is carried here as well corroborated rather than independently confirmed against a primary DJCS source.

Three Ways a Conviction Becomes Spent

The Act sets out three separate pathways, confirmed from the Act's own text and Victoria's Department of Justice and Community Safety (DJCS):

Spent immediately (s7). No waiting period and no application, where the conviction was not recorded by the court; it is a qualified finding of guilt under mental impairment legislation; the offence was committed when the person was under 15, which applies even to what would otherwise be a serious conviction; the only penalty was a Children's Court fine; or it is an infringement conviction. If a condition such as a good behaviour bond is attached, the conviction is not spent until the condition is completed (s7(2)).

Spent automatically on expiry of the conviction period (s8). This applies to any conviction that is not a serious conviction and is not already covered by the immediate category above.

Spent only by application to the Magistrates' Court (Division 2, ss11-19). This applies to a serious conviction, and only after the ordinary conviction period has already expired (s11(2)). Eligibility is narrower than for an ordinary conviction: for a serious violence or sexual offence, the applicant must have received no prison term at all; for a conviction that is serious only because of its sentence length, any prison term actually imposed must have been 5 years or less (s11(1)(b)). A refused application cannot be repeated within 2 years absent new information (s11(4)). The Court weighs offence seriousness, victim impact, the applicant's personal circumstances, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-specific factors, age and maturity at the time of offending, rehabilitation, and public safety risk (s19(2)).

Waiting Periods: Adults and Young Offenders

The conviction period is pinned to s9: 10 years for an adult, or anyone not sentenced as a child or young offender, and 5 years for a child or young offender sentenced under any of several named youth-justice statutes. "Young offender" is defined in s3 as a person under 21 at the time of sentencing, not at the time of offending, a detail worth noting since juvenile schemes elsewhere typically key off age at the time of the offence rather than at sentencing. Under s10, the conviction period starts on the date of the finding of guilt and restarts if the person is convicted again during the period, unless the new conviction's only penalty is a fine of 10 penalty units or less, a restitution or compensation order, no penalty at all, or is itself unrecorded (s10(3)).

What Counts as a "Serious Conviction"

Pinned to s3 and confirmed word-for-word across the Act's own text, DJCS's program page and the Magistrates' Court of Victoria's own scheme page: a serious conviction means a conviction for which a term of imprisonment or detention of more than 30 months is imposed, or a conviction for a sexual offence, or a conviction for a serious violence offence. "Sexual offence" cross-refers to section 4 of the Criminal Procedure Act 2009; "serious violence offence" cross-refers to Schedule 2 of the Serious Offenders Act 2018, which DJCS lists as covering offences such as murder, manslaughter, child homicide, defensive homicide, causing serious injury intentionally or recklessly in circumstances of gross violence, kidnapping and arson causing death, along with conspiracy, incitement or attempt on any of those. The sexual offence and serious violence offence categories carry no sentence qualifier at all; they are serious regardless of the sentence actually imposed.

What Being Spent Means, and the Disclosure Offence

Under s20, once a conviction is spent, it does not form part of a person's criminal record, the person is not required to disclose its existence or any information about it, and the person must not even be asked to disclose it. A spent conviction is not revived by a later conviction (s20(2)).

Unlawfully disclosing a spent conviction is an offence under s23: a person with access to conviction records must not disclose information they know, or should reasonably know, relates to a spent conviction without lawful authority or written consent, subject to a defence where the accused took all reasonable steps to avoid the disclosure (s23(2)) and a carve-out for library or archive public-record access (s23(3)). The maximum penalty is 40 penalty units. A separate, lesser offence at s24, obtaining spent conviction information by fraud or dishonesty, carries a maximum penalty of 20 penalty units.

Victoria's penalty unit value is set annually by the Treasurer, effective each 1 July; the current value, for 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027, is $209.10, confirmed directly from DJCS's own penalties and values page. On that figure, the s23 offence carries a maximum fine of $8,364; because the value resets every 1 July, this dollar figure should be re-derived rather than treated as fixed.

Where a Spent Conviction Still Counts

Most exemptions sit inside the Spent Convictions Act 2021 itself (ss21-22 and the table at the foot of s22), supplemented by the separate Spent Convictions Regulations 2021 and DJCS's own exemptions factsheet. Confirmed exclusions relevant to background checks:

The Working with Children Check processing body has an exemption to see a person's full criminal history, spent or not, even for a volunteering-only check; seeing it does not automatically bar the check, it means the decision maker can weigh it. Victoria Police has a matching exemption for firearms licensing under the Firearms Act 1996 and for private security licensing under the Private Security Act 2004, both confirmed in the Act's own s22 table. Law enforcement agencies, courts and tribunals have broad exemptions for performing law enforcement functions (s21), and Victoria Police, Corrections Victoria, IBAC, the Sheriff and several others appear as employing-agency exemptions in the s22 table.

Other named exemptions in the s22 table and DJCS's own exemptions page include health practitioner registration (AHPRA), bus, taxi and rideshare driver accreditation, teaching, legal admission, marriage celebrants and ministers of religion, gambling and casino licensing, disability-worker registration, and liquor and real estate agent licensing (the last two most likely sit in the Regulations rather than the Act's own table, and this was not independently confirmed). Courts and tribunals may also use a spent conviction in sentencing and reference it in published decisions (s21(3)).

Two exemptions sit entirely outside the Spent Convictions Act 2021, in separate legislation: a driver history report from VicRoads can continue to show a spent driving conviction and use it for licence sanctions, under the Road Safety Act 1986, a genuinely different document from a police check; and a spent conviction for a sexual offence does not affect a person's registration status or reporting obligations under the Sex Offenders Registration Act 2004.

How This Appears on a National Police Check

Confirmed directly from DJCS's own page on the topic: a police check sourced from Victoria Police will not disclose a spent Victorian conviction unless the requesting agency holds a specific exemption, and an out-of-state or Commonwealth conviction that is spent under that other jurisdiction's own scheme is likewise withheld unless an exemption applies. A conviction being withheld from the check does not erase it from Victoria Police's own records or reverse the original sentence; it is a disclosure restriction, not an expungement. See National Police Checks in Australia for general check mechanics.

Anti-Discrimination Protection

Part 6 of the Spent Convictions Act 2021 itself amended the Equal Opportunity Act 2010: s27 inserted a definition of "spent conviction" and s28 inserted a new protected attribute, "(pb) a spent conviction," at EOA s6. Part 6 later repealed itself on 1 December 2022, an ordinary self-repealing amending mechanic under the Interpretation of Legislation Act 1984; the amendment it made continues in force even though the amending provision is gone. The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission's own 2022 guideline confirms the protection is live and relied on in practice, covering both a presumed spent conviction and discrimination by association with someone who has one. This is a real contrast with New South Wales, which has no equivalent ground in its own Anti-Discrimination Act 1977.

Recent Reforms: 2021 and 2025

The Spent Convictions Act 2021 is itself the headline reform. A further layer followed in 2025: the Youth Justice Act 2024 (Vic) raised Victoria's minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12, effective 30 September 2025. To support that change, DJCS confirms a new "spent childhood conviction" information-management scheme has been inserted into the Spent Convictions Act 2021 itself: a conviction against a 10 or 11 year old is, as before, spent immediately, but now carries tighter restrictions on how it can ever be used or disclosed, barred from law enforcement use, adverse character assessments, and licensing or employment refusal decisions in most circumstances, with only narrow named exceptions. This is a live, dated reform that postdates the original 2021 Act text.

This article provides general legal information about Victoria's spent-conviction scheme. It does not assess whether any individual reader's own conviction is, or will become, spent. For advice on a specific record, consult a lawyer admitted in Victoria.

Related reading: Spent Convictions in Australia, National Police Checks in Australia, Criminal Record and Employment Rights in Australia, the Working with Children Check in Victoria, and Spent Convictions in New South Wales.