Court Records by State: How to Search, What's Public, and How to Seal Them

Court records are split across three separate systems: federal courts through PACER, most state trial courts through a state-run portal (or no portal at all), and county clerk offices for the rest. No single search covers all three, and each system prices access differently.

This guide explains how that fragmentation actually works, what a court records search costs depending on where you live, why the courts sit outside most state public-records laws, and what stays public versus sealed. It then links out to a page for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, each covering the real portal name, what it costs, what it excludes, and how that state's own sealing or expungement process works.

Information last verified on 2026-08-10. This article has not yet been reviewed by a licensed lawyer.

What Is a Court Record?

A court record is the official docket, filings, orders, and judgments generated by a specific case, held by the court (or court system) where that case was filed. That includes the register of actions (a chronological list of what happened and when), the documents themselves, and any judgment or order the court issued.

Court records are a different thing from two records types readers often confuse them with. A property record, like a deed, mortgage, or lien, is recorded with the county recorder or register of deeds, not the court, unless that property dispute became an actual lawsuit; see property records for that distinction. A vital record, like a marriage license or a final divorce decree, is a document you can order as a standalone certificate; the underlying divorce case docket is a separate thing you would search for on a court portal. See marriage and divorce records for ordering a decree itself.

Federal, State, and County: Why There's No Single Search

No official source explains this in one place, which is the single biggest source of confusion for a first-time search. Court records in the United States sit in three layers, and a search that comes up empty on one layer usually just means you searched the wrong one.

Federal courts. District courts, bankruptcy courts, and courts of appeals are searched through PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), the federal judiciary's own system, which provides electronic access to "more than 1 billion documents filed at all federal courts." A federal case is anything filed in federal court: most federal crimes, bankruptcy, many civil-rights claims, and civil suits between parties from different states over a large enough amount. PACER's Case Locator lets you search by party name across every federal court nationwide when you don't know which specific court a case was filed in.

State courts. Every state runs its own system, and the shape varies a great deal. Some states run one unified statewide portal covering most or all trial courts, for example Pennsylvania's UJS Portal or Minnesota's MCRO. Others split access by court type or level, for example Connecticut and Virginia, where civil, family, and criminal cases each have a separate look-up tool. A third group has no statewide search at all; California, Texas, Georgia, and Ohio all fall here, and records are searched court by court or county by county instead. The 51-state table below names the real system for every state.

County and municipal courts. Even in states with a statewide portal, some cities and counties run their own separate, more current systems instead of, or alongside, the state tool. Washington's statewide search explicitly defers to separate King County, Pierce County, Kitsap County, Seattle Municipal, and Spokane Municipal systems for current data. When a state portal comes back empty for a case you know exists, checking whether that county runs its own system is often the fix.

Free vs. Paid: What a Court Records Search Actually Costs

Federal (PACER). The per-page fee is $0.10, capped at $3.00 per document for case documents, docket sheets, and case-specific reports, though transcripts are not capped. Audio files cost $2.40 each. Fees are waived entirely for account holders who accrue $30.00 or less in a quarter, which the federal courts say covers about 75 percent of PACER users. There is no fee to print or save. A free, crowd-sourced alternative, RECAP, mirrors a partial archive of PACER documents that other users have already purchased, through a free browser extension.

State portals: mostly free, with real exceptions. Most state-run portals are free, several with no registration required at all, including Minnesota's MCRO, Pennsylvania's UJS Portal, and Wisconsin's WCCA. But a meaningful minority charge for search itself: Alabama's Alacourt starts at $9.99 per name or case-number search through its Just One Look product; Nebraska's JUSTICE system charges a flat $17.00 per search regardless of whether it finds anything; South Dakota's PARS charges $20.00 per search; and Oregon's full-coverage OJCIN OnLine sits behind a subscription with a setup fee reported at $160 to $170 depending on the source. New York adds a separate $95.00 paid product, CHRS, for a full statewide criminal-history search including disposed cases, on top of its free eCourts tools.

Paid vendors instead of a state-run search. Colorado is the clearest example of a state routing case-register access to commercial resellers: the Colorado Judicial Branch's own Access Guide to Public Records states plainly that "limited access to court records is available online through the third-party vendors linked below," naming LexisNexis, Tessera Data, and Background Information Services, and that "there are charges for these services." Colorado's own free Docket Search tool only covers hearing and calendar information, not a full case register. New Jersey runs a similar split: its free public search, Find a Case, covers criminal, civil, and judgment records at no cost, while a separate Electronic Access Program charges $4.00 per minute with a $500.00 minimum account balance for bulk commercial access, and even that paid tier "excludes actual text or images of filed documents."

The free fallback almost everywhere: the courthouse itself. Even in paid or fragmented states, in-person access at a courthouse public terminal is typically free. South Dakota's Public Access Terminals waive the state's own $20.00 online search fee. Wyoming has no statewide remote portal at all, but its Rules Governing Access to Case Records guarantee free terminal, physical, and archive access at any courthouse. When cost is the obstacle, the courthouse is usually the answer.

Why Court Records Sit Outside State FOIA Laws

A reader who files a state public-records (FOIA) request for a court case file is filing in the wrong system. Judicial branch records are governed by a parallel, separate body of court rules, issued by the judiciary itself, not by a state's legislature-enacted public-records act. This shows up directly in how individual states describe it: New Hampshire's own Right-to-Know Law, RSA 91-A, "does not apply to the judicial branch at all," according to the state's own court-records guidance, and court access instead runs on the judiciary's own rules. Kansas is a notable exception; its courts affirmatively apply the Kansas Open Records Act to judicial branch records, which is unusual among the states.

For records held by an executive-branch agency instead of a court, for example a police incident report or an agency's internal correspondence, the correct front door is a state public-records or FOIA request. See public records laws by state for that separate process.

Court Records by State

The table below lists, for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the real portal (or system) currently used to search court records, whether it is free or paid, and what categories of case commonly stay offline even where a portal exists. Each state name links to a full page covering search mechanics, exact fees, what's public versus confidential, and how that state's own sealing or expungement process works.

What's Public, What's Sealed, and What's Expunged

The general pattern. Every state we've checked in detail starts from the same baseline: court records are presumptively public, then a specific, enumerated list of case categories is carved out as confidential or access-restricted. No state runs it the other way around, with records confidential unless affirmatively opened.

Public does not always mean online. California's Rule of Court 2.503 draws a distinction worth understanding even outside California, because the underlying confusion, "I was told this is public, so why can't I find it online," shows up everywhere. The rule sorts electronic records into three tiers: available both remotely and at the courthouse; available at the courthouse only, with courts affirmatively barred from providing public remote access; and sealed or confidential, available to neither. The courthouse-only tier includes family law, juvenile, guardianship and conservatorship, mental health, criminal, and several protective-order case types. Those records are public, they are simply not permitted online. Washington's GR 31 draws a different line entirely, restricting juvenile offender records from bulk online distribution rather than carving out family law, which is a reminder that this structure is state-specific; check the relevant state's own page rather than assuming California's categories apply elsewhere.

Sealed and expunged are different actions, in the state's own words. Massachusetts states the distinction about as plainly as any state does: "Having a criminal record expunged means that the record will be permanently destroyed so that it's no longer accessible by the court or any other state, municipal, or county agencies. It's not the same as having a record sealed," where the record continues to exist but access is restricted. Terminology inverts between states in ways that matter. Texas has no statutory "sealing" at all; its hide-the-record remedy is an order of nondisclosure, and its destroy-the-record remedy is expunction. New York runs two separate sealing mechanisms under different statutes, an automatic Clean Slate track and an older petition-based track, that are easy to conflate but operate on entirely different timelines and eligibility rules.

A third, unrelated kind of "sealed." Civil litigation sealing, where a party asks a judge to seal a specific document or exhibit inside an active lawsuit, for example a trade secret or medical record introduced as evidence, is a completely different legal mechanism from criminal-record sealing or expungement. California's Rule of Court 2.550 sets a five-factor test (an overriding interest, a substantial probability that interest is prejudiced without sealing, a narrowly tailored request, and no less-restrictive alternative), a structure most states echo in some form for civil sealing motions.

For your state's specific waiting periods, eligibility rules, and filing process, see expungement by state; this page covers only the general concept.

Using Court Records for a Background Check

This is where court-records searches most often run into federal law. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1681c, consumer reporting agencies cannot report arrests, civil judgments, or paid tax liens older than seven years, or until the applicable statute of limitations expires if that period is longer (bankruptcies get ten years). Criminal convictions are the exception: § 1681c(a)(5) exempts "records of conviction of crimes" from that reporting window entirely, meaning a conviction can be reported indefinitely. An arrest that never became a conviction ages off after seven years; a conviction does not age off under FCRA at all, ever, no matter how old. Only a state's own sealing or expungement action removes a conviction from what a background check will show.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has made clear this cuts both ways for anyone assembling reports, not just traditional background-check companies. Its 2024 Circular states that entities compiling reports from "public sources, such as criminal history records" and marketing them for employment use are subject to FCRA's accuracy and dispute-investigation duties as consumer reporting agencies, whether or not they think of themselves as one.

The Federal Trade Commission has already enforced this against exactly the pattern a court-records reader might otherwise fall into. In 2023, the FTC reached a $5.8 million settlement with TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate over marketing public-records background reports for tenant and employee screening without complying with FCRA. The FTC's own statement: "Companies that compile personal information and sell background reports are on notice: Don't make false claims about the contents of your reports. And, if you market your reports to be used to screen tenants or employees, you are a consumer reporting agency and you must follow the requirements of the FCRA."

The practical rule for this cluster: looking up your own record, or a specific case you already know about, is fine. Using a state court portal, or a people-search product built on top of one, to screen a tenant or job applicant without FCRA compliance is the exact fact pattern that got two companies fined. Employers with legitimate screening needs should use an FCRA-compliant consumer reporting agency and follow the adverse-action notice process; see background check laws by state for that employer-side walkthrough.

Name-based searches also carry a real false-positive risk worth building in from the start. Wisconsin's own court portal warns that if a party used an alias or a different version of their name, "there will be an entry on the WCCA website for each version of the party's name," and a single case can produce multiple entries that do not indicate separate cases. Treat an unverified name match as unconfirmed until you check the case number and other identifying details.

Getting a Certified Copy

A certified copy always comes from the clerk of the court that has the case, not from an online portal. This is worth stating plainly because nearly every verified portal in this cluster explicitly disclaims being the official record. Pennsylvania's UJS Portal states it makes "no representation as to the accuracy, completeness, or utility" of its information. Minnesota's MCRO "does not certify MCRO records or search results." Wisconsin's WCCA describes itself as "not the official judgment and lien docket." For anything you need to submit as proof, whether that's a court, an employer, or a licensing agency, request a certified copy directly from the clerk's office, usually for a per-page or per-document fee.

For the general steps involved in locating a case in the first place, federal versus state versus county, name search versus case number, and what to do when a portal shows nothing, see how to look up court records. For the fuller answer on what's public versus confidential, including sealed and expunged in plain terms, see are court records public.

Disclaimer

This article provides general legal information about how court records are searched and accessed across the United States. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for consulting a licensed attorney about your specific situation. Portal names, fees, coverage, and legal terminology described here reflect their published status as of 2026-08-10 and change over time; always confirm current details on the relevant court's own website before relying on them.

Last updated: 2026-08-10. Portal facts and fees reflect their published status as of August 2026.