Here's the question, plain: for a job in California, how far back can a background check legally look at someone's criminal history? Seven years. That's the rule, counted from the date of disposition, release, or parole, under California Civil Code 1786.18(a)(7).
You may have also read that employers can see older convictions once a role pays $75,000 or more. That claim is wrong for a California job, and a lot of sites still repeat it as if it were settled. I'll walk through exactly why below. Getting this wrong isn't a small thing. An inaccurate report, a bad hiring decision, or a compliance complaint all tend to start the same way, with someone assuming a rule applied when it didn't.
California consumer reporting agencies, the companies that actually run these checks, can't report an arrest, an indictment, a misdemeanor complaint, or a conviction more than 7 years old. That's the full rule under 1786.18(a)(7), and it applies the same way across all four of those record types.
Notice what that covers. Not just convictions. Arrests and complaints get the same 7-year cap. Federal law doesn't do this. Under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, there's no time limit at all on reporting a conviction. None. California's rule is the one doing the real work here, and it's stricter than what most people assume the law requires.
So where does the $75,000 figure come from, if it isn't a California rule? That's a federal provision, and I'll get to it below. Short version: it doesn't open the door to old convictions for a California job. Not at any salary.
The 7-year count doesn't start on the day of the crime. It starts on whichever of three dates applies and comes latest: the date of disposition (sentencing or a plea), the date someone's released from custody, or the date of parole.
Here's an example, because dates like this are easy to get wrong. Say someone's convicted in 2015 but not released from custody until 2017. The clock starts in 2017, not 2015. That record can still show up on a report until 2024, two years later than you'd guess if you counted from the conviction date alone.
This rule lives in a law called the Investigative Consumer Reporting Agencies Act, ICRAA for short. It covers what's called an "investigative consumer report," the category most employer background checks fall into once a CRA pulls public records or interview-based information together on someone.
One more thing worth knowing, even though it's not this article's focus. Expungements, dismissals under Penal Code 1203.4, and California's Clean Slate Act can all pull a record off a report earlier than 7 years. That's a separate mechanism. Worth knowing it exists, but a topic for its own article.
Federal law, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, sets its own limits under 15 U.S.C. 1681c(a). Bankruptcies get a 10-year cap. Most other negative non-conviction items, arrests, civil suits, judgments, paid tax liens, get 7 years.
Then there's the gap. Federal law explicitly excludes "records of conviction of crimes" from any time limit at all. Read that again. Under federal law by itself, a 30-year-old conviction could show up on a report forever.
California closes that gap. Its own 7-year cap folds convictions in with everything else, which federal law never does. So for a California job, the state rule is the one that actually binds you. It's stricter, and it's the one your screening provider needs to be applying, not the federal floor. That part's not optional.
The real source is 15 U.S.C. 1681c(b)(3), a federal FCRA provision. It lifts the federal 7-year cap when a report is used for a job reasonably expected to pay $75,000 a year or more.
Here's the part almost every article on this skips. That federal exception only ever applied to non-conviction items, old arrests, civil suits, judgments. It was never needed for convictions, because federal law never put a time limit on convictions to begin with. You can't lift a cap that was never there.
Now bring California back into it. California's own 7-year cap has no salary carve-out anywhere in its text. None. It applies the same way whether the job pays $40,000 or $400,000. An employer offering $75,000 or more for a California-based role cannot use the federal salary exception to see conviction records older than 7 years. California's stricter, salary-blind rule still controls.
I'll say this directly. Several background-check and legal-marketing sites describe a $75,000–$125,000 salary exception as if it applies inside California. Based on the actual statute text, that description doesn't hold up. If you've read that somewhere and built a process around it, confirm with your own counsel before you rely on it for a real hiring decision. Laws like this get amended, and I'd rather you double-check than take my word as final.
There is one dollar figure written into California's own statute. It just isn't about hiring.
Under 1786.18(a), a report used to underwrite a life insurance policy of $250,000 or more can look back further than 7 years. That's it. That's the one carve-out.
It's an insurance-underwriting exception, not an employment one. It has no bearing on a hiring decision, no matter how the language gets paraphrased elsewhere. And there's no separate carve-out for "sensitive" industries, finance, healthcare, law enforcement, childcare, that overrides the 7-year cap for standard employment screening. If someone tells you their industry is exempt, ask them to show you where that's written. It isn't.
The 7-year rule only controls what a CRA is allowed to put on the report. It doesn't control what you, the employer, can do with whatever conviction history falls inside that window. That's a separate rule, and it matters just as much.
California's Fair Chance Act, Government Code 12952, covers that second half. If you have 5 or more employees, you can't ask about conviction history before making a conditional job offer. Not on the application. Not in the interview. After the offer, and only after.
Once you do see a conviction, you don't get to act on it right away either. You need an individualized assessment, weighing how serious the offense was, how much time has passed, and how closely it connects to the actual job duties. Skip that step and a denial based on the record alone is a real legal risk. Before you can finalize a denial, you owe the applicant written notice and at least 5 business days to respond, with corrections or evidence of rehabilitation.
So to say this a different way, because it's easy to mix the two up: the 7-year rule and the Fair Chance Act are two different limits, working on two different parts of the process. One controls the report. The other controls what you do with it.
A few things worth checking against your own process.
Both, and arrests and complaints too. 1786.18(a)(7) covers arrests, indictments, misdemeanor complaints, and convictions the same way. It's not limited to felony convictions.
Generally, no, for a standard employment report. The one statutory dollar carve-out is the $250,000 life-insurance underwriting exception, and that's not an employment exception.
No. California applies the same 7-year cap no matter the salary. That's different from the federal exception some sources describe, and it's the single most important thing to take from this whole article.
I'm not going to guess on that one. Federal preemption questions can work differently depending on the employer type. Get a real legal read for that specific situation instead of assuming this article's answer covers it too.