Expungement, sealing, and Clean Slate — three different things
Expungement destroys the record. Sealing — 'limited access' in Pennsylvania — hides it from the public and most employers, while police, courts, and certain licensing and federal screenings can still see it. Clean Slate is Pennsylvania's automatic sealing law: qualifying records seal by operation of law, with no petition and no fee, on a rolling monthly cycle. Knowing which remedy a record qualifies for — and which it never will — is the entire game.
The eligibility map, as it stands after the 2023 Clean Slate expansion: charges that ended in dismissal, withdrawal, or acquittal can be expunged at any time, and Clean Slate seals them automatically on an ongoing basis. Summary convictions can be expunged after five arrest-free years. Most second- and third-degree misdemeanors seal automatically after seven conviction-free years; eligible first-degree misdemeanors can be sealed by petition after seven; certain felonies — including qualifying drug felonies — after ten. Restitution must be paid first. First- and second-degree felonies, crimes of violence, firearms offenses, sex offenses, and most domestic-violence-related convictions are excluded from sealing entirely — for those, a pardon is the remaining path, and since 2023 a full pardon leads to automatic expungement.
ARD, and who still sees a sealed record
Completing ARD entitles most people to expungement of the arrest record — but a petition usually must be filed; it does not happen by itself. Prosecutors retain DUI-ARD information for the ten-year lookback, PennDOT keeps the notation on the driving record, and ARD counts as a conviction against a commercial driver's license — nuances that matter when deciding whether ARD is the right resolution in the first place.
Sealed records are hidden, not gone. Criminal justice agencies and courts always see them; so do child-protective screenings and employers required by federal law to check criminal history, such as banks. Immigration authorities apply their own rules, and expunged or sealed state convictions generally still count for immigration purposes. Older commercial background databases can also lag behind a sealing. The honest framing: sealing dramatically shrinks who can see a record — it does not rewrite history for every audience.
How the process actually works — and why it should be verified
Petitions are filed in the county where the case happened, on statewide forms, with filing fees that vary by county; the District Attorney has a window to object, and unopposed petitions are often granted without a hearing. For non-conviction records, the Commonwealth bears the burden of justifying keeping the record. One caveat from the case law: charges dismissed as part of a plea bargain may be refused expungement, because courts decline to obscure the circumstances of the related conviction — though Clean Slate now typically seals those counts automatically anyway.
Automatic sealing runs on a monthly administrative cycle, which means records seal on a rolling schedule rather than on the eligibility anniversary — and errors happen. The verification step is worth doing: confirming the docket no longer appears on the public UJS portal and requesting a current record check. A clean record that exists on paper but not in the databases employers actually search is not yet a clean record.
