Expunction or nondisclosure: clearing a Texas record

A case ends. Months later someone runs a background check and there it is, an arrest, sometimes with no disposition attached. People are genuinely shocked, because they were told the case was dismissed and they assumed that meant it was gone.

It is not gone. A dismissal ends the prosecution. Clearing the record is a separate proceeding that you have to go and ask for.

The difference, in one line each

An expunction destroys the records. Agencies are ordered to delete them, and afterwards you may generally deny that the arrest happened.

An order of nondisclosure seals the records from public view, although police, prosecutors and certain licensing agencies can still see them. The record continues to exist. The public loses access to it.

Expunction is better, but nondisclosure is available in situations where expunction is not, particularly after deferred adjudication community supervision.

The expunction statute is new, and most of the internet has not caught up

This is the practical warning in this post. The old expunction chapter, Chapter 55, was repealed. Expunction now lives in Chapter 55A of the Code of Criminal Procedure, effective January 1, 2025, and it was already amended again effective September 2025.

The restructuring was not cosmetic. Where the old law had a single article listing the grounds, Chapter 55A splits them across subchapters: mandatory expunction, special circumstances requiring mandatory expunction, discretionary expunction, and a subchapter setting out when expunction is prohibited.

So there is no longer one article to point at, because which provision applies depends entirely on how your case ended. Anything you read citing article 55.01 is citing a repealed statute.

When expunction is generally available

The clearest routes are an acquittal at trial, and an arrest where no charge was ever presented within the statutory period, which includes a no-billed felony. There are others, and there are exceptions inside each of them.

Two things commonly defeat it: a conviction, and community supervision, which is what Texas calls probation. So if you were convicted, or you completed straight probation, having the record destroyed is usually off the table.

What nondisclosure covers

Orders of nondisclosure are in the Government Code, chapter 411, subchapter E-1. Deferred adjudication is a form of supervision where the judge never enters a finding of guilt, so long as you complete it. The main path after deferred adjudication is section 411.0725, which requires filing a petition, waiting out a period that depends on the offense, and meeting the conditions in section 411.074.

There is also an automatic track at section 411.072 for certain non-violent misdemeanors, where no petition is required at all.

That one is worth checking, because people pay lawyers for something the statute already did.

Why this matters more than clients expect

An arrest record with no disposition reads worse than a conviction to a lot of employers, because they cannot tell what happened and they assume the worst. Landlords run the same checks. So do licensing boards, nursing and teaching and commercial driving among them, and so do universities.

The people most affected are often the ones whose cases came out best. A dismissal that never gets expunged follows someone for years.

The timing question

There are waiting periods, they differ by offense and by how the case ended, and getting them wrong means filing early and being denied.

There is generally no deadline on the other end, so if your case ended in 2019 and nobody ever told you this was possible, it is very often still possible now. It is worth asking about a case you think is long finished.