Ban the Box Laws:A State-by-State Guide for Employers
Thirty-seven states and more than 150 cities regulate when you can ask an applicant about a criminal record. Fifteen of those states reach private employers. Here is which rules apply to you, when the question becomes legal, and what a violation actually costs.
Most ban the box violations I have seen were not decisions. They were leftovers. A conviction checkbox sitting in an application template nobody had opened since 2019, or a PDF application still downloadable from a careers page that the new ATS replaced two years ago. The company had no policy of screening people out. It just never went looking for the box.
That matters because enforcement does not ask about intent. In Los Angeles County, a single non-compliant application form is a violation per affected applicant, and the fine climbs to $20,000 by the third. New York City penalties reach $250,000 when the Commission on Human Rights finds willful conduct. A stale form multiplied by a few hundred applicants is not a paperwork problem.
The National Employment Law Project counts 37 states and D.C. with a ban the box policy, plus over 150 cities and counties. Fifteen states extend it to private employers. The tricky part is that these laws do not agree with each other on the one thing employers need to know: at what point in the process the question becomes legal. This guide sorts that out. If you are building the screening process itself, read it alongside our guides to pre-employment background checks and E-Verify requirements by state.
One caveat before we start. I am a hiring practitioner, not an employment lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice. Fair chance ordinances change fast at the city level. Use this to understand the shape of the rules and to brief your counsel with better questions than “are we okay on ban the box?”
Scope
How wide the coverage actually goes
The headline number, 37 states, overstates how many employers are bound. Most of those laws regulate public hiring. The number that decides whether a private company has an obligation is much smaller, and city ordinances are where the real exposure lives.
37
States with a ban the box law
Plus Washington, D.C. and more than 150 cities and counties
15
States that bind private employers
The rest apply only to public agencies or public contractors
2021
Year the federal law took effect
Federal agencies and federal contractors, since December 20
$20,000
LA County penalty, third violation
Assessed per violation, per affected applicant
The federal piece is the Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act, passed in 2019 and effective December 20, 2021. It bars federal agencies and federal contractors from asking about criminal history before a conditional offer. If you hold a federal contract of any size, that rule already applies to you regardless of what your state says.
Hawaii got there first, in 1998, and for a long time was the only state that reached private employers. The wave that matters for most companies started around 2017 and has not stopped. California’s Fair Chance Act took effect in 2018 and was tightened by new regulations in October 2023. Colorado extended its law to all employers in September 2021. Los Angeles County passed its own ordinance for private employers effective September 2024, which is stricter than the state law it sits inside.
My read is that the local layer is the risk most teams miss. A company headquartered in Texas with remote employees in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle is subject to three city ordinances its HR team probably never read. Remote hiring spread the compliance surface faster than most policies caught up. Remote hiring widened the map, and the applicable law follows where the employee works, not where your office is.
By State
The 15 states that regulate private employers
Employee thresholds matter here. Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey exempt small employers below 15 people. California sets the bar at 5. Eight states cover everyone with a single employee. If you are near a threshold, remember that headcount usually counts all employees nationwide, not just the ones in that state.
| State | Who is covered | What makes it distinct |
|---|---|---|
| California | 5+ employees | Individualized assessment plus two written notices |
| Colorado | All employers | No criminal history language in the job ad either |
| Connecticut | All employers | Application only; timing of the check is unrestricted |
| Hawaii | All employers | First state to pass one, back in 1998 |
| Illinois | 15+ employees | Wait until an interview or a conditional offer |
| Maine | All employers | Effective October 2021 |
| Maryland | 15+ employees | Counties may layer stricter rules on top |
| Massachusetts | All employers | Sealed and juvenile records are off limits entirely |
| Minnesota | All employers | Wait until an interview or a conditional offer |
| New Jersey | 15+ employees | Opportunity to Compete Act, no ads referencing records |
| New Mexico | All employers | Application only |
| Oregon | All employers | Wait until an initial interview |
| Rhode Island | All employers | Application only; interview questions are allowed |
| Vermont | All employers | Application only |
| Washington | All employers | No screening out before the qualification review |
California is the one to design around. Its Fair Chance Act applies at five employees, blocks criminal inquiry until after a conditional offer, and requires a written individualized assessment before any rejection. The candidate gets at least five business days to respond with evidence of rehabilitation or an error in the record. If they say they are disputing it, you owe them another five days. Then a second written notice if you still proceed.
The October 2023 regulations closed the loopholes employers had been using. You cannot state in a job ad that people with records need not apply. You cannot include a conviction question on a form a third-party vendor renders on your behalf. And an “individualized assessment” that reproduces the same paragraph for every candidate is evidence against you, not for you.
At the other end sits Rhode Island, where the law regulates the application form and stops there. You can ask the same question verbally in the first interview. That gap between states is exactly why a single national policy beats fifteen state-specific ones, a point I come back to below.
Timing
Four stages, four different rules
Ban the box is a timing law more than a content law. The question itself stays legal almost everywhere. What changes is how far into your process you have to be before you can ask it.
Colorado, New Jersey and several cities ban language like 'no felons' or 'clean record required' in the posting itself. This is the cheapest violation to avoid and the easiest one for a regulator to find.
Every ban the box law covers this stage. Remove the checkbox, the free-text 'explain any convictions' field, and any third-party form your ATS renders on the apply page.
Rhode Island, Connecticut and Vermont let you ask once the interview starts. California, Washington and most fair chance cities do not. Train interviewers on which rule applies where the job sits.
No US jurisdiction stops you from running a criminal check after a conditional offer. Standardize here and you comply everywhere without tracking 150 local ordinances.
Here is my honest recommendation, and it saves more time than any state-by-state matrix: pick the conditional offer line and apply it everywhere. No jurisdiction in the country bars a criminal check after a conditional offer. Setting that as the company-wide rule makes you compliant in all 50 states and every city ordinance currently on the books, and it survives the next 30 cities that pass one.
The objection is usually cost. Why interview five people and extend an offer only to disqualify someone on a record you could have caught in week one? The math does not support that worry. Criminal checks run roughly $15 to $50 per candidate and only a small fraction of finalists come back with anything disqualifying, so checking at the offer stage on a handful of finalists costs less than screening an entire applicant pool. It also aligns with EEOC enforcement guidance, which has held since 2012 that blanket exclusions based on conviction records can violate Title VII through disparate impact, independent of any ban the box statute.
The EEOC point gets overlooked. Even in a state with no fair chance law at all, a rejection policy that screens out every applicant with a felony is exposed under federal law. Ban the box regulates timing. Title VII regulates the decision. You need to be right on both.
Enforcement
What a violation costs
Penalties vary more than the rules do. Some jurisdictions cap exposure in the low thousands. Others multiply per applicant, which is where a bad application form turns into a real number.
Los Angeles County, CA
Per violation, per affected applicant
First violation
Up to $5,000
Repeat
Up to $20,000 by the third
New York City, NY
Commission penalties reach $250,000 for willful conduct
First violation
$500 to $3,500
Repeat
$1,000 to $10,000
California (statewide)
Damages, back pay and attorney fees, no statutory cap
First violation
Civil Rights Department complaint
Repeat
Private lawsuit under FEHA
The per-applicant multiplier is the part to internalize. LA County’s ordinance assesses penalties per violation and per aggrieved employee. Run a non-compliant application for one quarter in a market where you receive 400 applicants and the arithmetic stops being abstract.
Private litigation is the bigger risk in California. FEHA claims carry no statutory cap, and plaintiff firms have built practices around Fair Chance Act notice defects the same way they did around FCRA disclosure forms. A defective form is easy to prove and applies uniformly to a class. That combination is what makes it attractive to file.
Implementation
A compliance audit you can run this week
This takes an afternoon if your application templates live in one system. Longer if they do not, which is usually the real finding.
- Delete the conviction checkbox from every application template
- Audit third-party apply forms, job board feeds and PDF applications
- Move all criminal screening to after the conditional offer
- Write an individualized assessment template before you need it
- Give candidates the full notice period to dispute a record
- Log who ran which check, when, and on what legal basis
- Asking about arrests that never led to a conviction
- Copying one state policy across every location you hire in
- Rejecting on a record without documenting job relevance
- Sending a rejection the same day the report lands
- Letting interviewers freestyle questions about 'anything in your past'
- Assuming a national vendor's default form is compliant in your city
Start with an inventory of every surface a candidate can apply through. Your careers page, each job board that syndicates your postings, referral forms, agency submission templates, event sign-up sheets, and any PDF still cached on your site. I have found stale conviction questions in all of those. The board feeds are the sneakiest, because a field you deleted in your applicant tracking system can still render on a partner site that cached an older schema.
Then write the individualized assessment template before you need it. Under the California and LA County rules you need three things documented: the nature and gravity of the offense, the time elapsed since it happened, and the specific relationship between the offense and the duties of this job. A template with those as prompts, filled in freshly each time, is defensible. A saved paragraph you paste is not.
Last, train the interviewers. Compliance work usually stops at the application form and never reaches the people in the room. A hiring manager asking a friendly “anything in your background we should know about?” in a first-round call creates the same liability as the checkbox you deleted. Fold it into your interviewer training and hold everyone to a structured interview script where the questions are fixed in advance.
The Debate
Does ban the box do what it was meant to do?
Worth being honest about the evidence, because the research is genuinely mixed. Studies by Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr, and separately by Jennifer Doleac and Benjamin Hansen, found that when employers lose access to conviction information early, some substitute racial assumptions instead, and callback rates for young Black men without records fell in covered jurisdictions. Other work finds employment gains for people with records. Both findings can be true at once.
What I take from it is narrower than either camp usually argues. Removing information without replacing it with structure invites guesswork, and guesswork is where bias lives. The employers who get a good outcome from fair chance hiring are the ones who paired it with a skills-based process and a scored rubric, so the early stages have something real to evaluate. The ones who just deleted a checkbox moved the decision-making into a darker room.
There is also a business case that stands on its own. BLS JOLTS data shows millions of open positions in the US at any given month, and roughly one in three American adults has some kind of criminal record. Writing off that population wholesale is a talent decision before it is a legal one. See also our guidance on reducing bias in hiring.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does ban the box actually mean?
It means removing the checkbox that asks applicants whether they have a criminal conviction from your job application. The broader family of fair chance laws goes further, pushing any criminal history question to a later stage of hiring and forcing employers to justify a rejection based on a record. The name comes from the literal box on paper applications, which is why some laws only regulate the form and say nothing about what you ask in an interview.
How many states have ban the box laws in 2026?
Thirty-seven states plus Washington, D.C. have adopted one, along with more than 150 cities and counties, according to the National Employment Law Project. Only 15 of those states extend the rule to private employers: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. The rest cover public agencies or public contractors only.
Does ban the box apply to private employers?
In 15 states and roughly 20 cities and counties, yes. Everywhere else the state law reaches only government hiring. City ordinances often fill the gap, so a private employer in a non-covered state can still be regulated at the municipal level. Los Angeles County, New York City, Philadelphia, Austin, Seattle, Chicago and Washington, D.C. all bind private employers directly.
When can an employer ask about criminal history?
It depends on the jurisdiction. Rhode Island, Connecticut and Vermont allow the question once an interview begins. California, Washington and most fair chance cities require you to wait for a conditional offer. No US jurisdiction prohibits a criminal check after a conditional offer, which makes that stage the one safe policy if you hire across multiple states.
What are the penalties for violating ban the box laws?
Los Angeles County assesses up to $5,000 for a first violation, rising to $20,000 by the third, counted per violation and per affected applicant. New York City issues per se penalties from $500 to $3,500 for first violations and up to $10,000 for repeats, with the Commission on Human Rights able to impose up to $250,000 for willful conduct. California routes claims through the Civil Rights Department and private FEHA lawsuits, where there is no cap.
Do ban the box laws stop you from rejecting someone with a record?
No. They change when you can ask and what you have to do before you decide. California, New York City and Los Angeles County require an individualized assessment: weigh the nature of the offense, how long ago it happened and how it relates to the job, then put your reasoning in writing and give the candidate a set number of business days to respond before the rejection becomes final.
Are there exempt roles?
Yes, and the exemptions are narrower than most employers assume. Positions regulated by federal or state law, such as childcare, elder care, law enforcement, commercial trucking under FMCSA rules and roles requiring a security clearance, typically carry a statutory carve-out. A broad internal rule like 'anything involving cash' does not qualify. Cite the specific statute that mandates the check, or follow the standard process.
Resources & Further Reading
Related Guides
- Pre-Employment Background Checks: A Complete Guide
The FCRA process that runs after the conditional offer
- Employment Background Check Cost: What Employers Pay
Per-check pricing that makes offer-stage screening cheap
- E-Verify Requirements by State
The other state-by-state hiring compliance patchwork
- How to Run a Hiring Process Audit
A framework for finding stale forms and undocumented steps
External Sources
- NELP: Ban the Box State and Local Guide
The most current jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction tracker
- EEOC Guidance on Arrest and Conviction Records
Federal Title VII limits that apply in every state
- California Civil Rights Department: Fair Chance Act
Notice templates and the individualized assessment standard
- NCSL: Barriers to Work for People with Records
Legislative tracking on fair chance and licensing reform
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