Adult Conviction Expungement and Record-Sealing Eligibility in New Hampshire

At a glance

Requirements one by one

Relief name and legal effect

New Hampshire calls the remedy annulment. Under N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 651:5(X), the person is ordinarily treated as if never arrested, convicted, or sentenced. The court record is sealed, state police remove the annulled criminal-history record and notify appropriate state and federal agencies, and the arresting and prosecuting agencies mark their files as annulled.

Annulment is not deletion from every source. The statute preserves later- sentencing and law-enforcement uses and protects reporting or databases that do not remove older information.

Automatic or clean-slate relief

General conviction annulment is not automatic. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 651:5(I) requires a timely petition to the sentencing court.

There is a streamlined mandatory branch for a violation or class B misdemeanor that was the highest conviction in a case disposed of on or after January 1, 2019. The court gives the prosecutor 20 days to object on eligibility or sentence-completion grounds; absent a timely valid objection, the court shall annul. The person must still file the petition.

Convictions eligible by petition

The ordinary schedule covers violations, class B and class A misdemeanors, and class B and class A felonies unless a permanent bar applies. It also assigns special clocks to sexual assault under § 632-A:4, felony indecent exposure or lewdness, misdemeanor domestic violence, and a class A misdemeanor or felony under § 318-B:26(II).

N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 651:5-b separately permits an anytime petition for an arrest or conviction involving three-quarters of an ounce of marijuana or less when the offense occurred before September 16, 2017. A successful veterans- court participant has the separate one-year route in § 490-I:1(IV), but the ordinary § 651:5 procedures still apply.

Excluded offenses and statuses

Section 651:5(V) permanently excludes a violent crime, felony obstruction-of- justice crime, and any offense that received an extended term under § 651:6. The definitions cover listed homicide, first-degree assault, aggravated or felonious sexual assault, kidnapping or criminal restraint, class A felony arson, robbery, specified incest or child-solicitation offenses, felony child- sexual-abuse-image offenses, witness/evidence tampering, and felonious obstruction of governmental operations.

The multiple-record rule is unusually broad. If annulment of any part of the person's record is barred under paragraph V, no petition may be brought and no annulment granted. A pending charge also pauses a filed petition when a conviction would create a bar or extend the waiting period.

Waiting period and when it starts

Under N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 651:5(III), after completing every sentence term and condition, the person must remain conviction-free for:

• one year for a violation;
• two years for a class B misdemeanor;
• three years for a class A misdemeanor;
• five years for a class B felony;
• ten years for a class A felony;
• ten years for sexual assault under § 632-A:4;
• ten years for felony indecent exposure or lewdness;
• ten years for misdemeanor domestic violence; and
• two years for a class A misdemeanor or felony under § 318-B:26(II).

The permitted later event is a motor-vehicle offense classified as a violation, other than the driving-under-the-influence and specified habitual-offender offenses named in the lead-in.

RSA 265-A:21(I) uses a different DWI clock: ten years from conviction. An annulled DWI record remains in a permanent file that may be opened for sentencing under RSA 265-A:3.

The historical marijuana route has no wait. The veterans-court route requires one year after completion of all court-imposed programs and conditions.

Sentence, restitution, and new-record conditions

Every sentence term and condition must be complete before the ordinary clean- record period begins. The statute then requires no new crime during the applicable period, subject to the narrow motor-vehicle-violation exception.

When a person has multiple convictions, every offense of record must clear the applicable waiting period, and no part may carry a permanent bar. A conviction from another state does not count if the conduct would not be an offense under New Hampshire law.

Petition process and decision standard

The petition goes to the sentencing court. The general decision is discretionary: the court must conclude that annulment will assist rehabilitation and be consistent with public welfare. It may grant or deny without a hearing unless the petitioner requests one.

The Department of Corrections reports on state and federal convictions, arrests, prosecutions, and other useful information. It charges $100 for that investigation, and the Department of Safety charges a successful petitioner $100 to correct the criminal-history record. Both fees have the statute's indigency exception. The prosecutor receives the petition and may be heard on the interest of justice.

After a denial, a new petition may be filed no more frequently than every three years.

Who can still see or use the record

Sealed court records remain available to the person, the person's attorney, a later sentencing court, and law-enforcement personnel for legitimate purposes. Law enforcement may maintain and share the information with other officers for legitimate investigations or civil-suit defense and with the Police Standards and Training Council for officer-fitness review.

A later conviction may use the annulled conviction in sentencing and may count it toward habitual-offender status. Employment, licensing, civil-right, and witness questions must be framed to ask about records that have not been annulled.

Annulment also does not force every public or private publisher to erase the past. Journalists are protected when reporting an annulled record, and public or private entities are protected from liability for not removing or correcting a report made before the annulment.

What trips people up

The clock starts after sentence completion, not merely at conviction. The person must complete all sentence conditions and then maintain the required conviction-free period. DWI is the distinct ten-years-from-conviction rule.

One permanently barred conviction can block the whole record. The multiple- offense rule does not simply leave the excluded count untouched; it bars the annulment petition altogether while any part of the record is ineligible.

Misdemeanor domestic violence does not use the ordinary misdemeanor clock. It carries a ten-year period, and a later domestic-violence conviction delays the earlier one until the newest conviction becomes eligible.

Common questions

Is a class B misdemeanor wait three years? No. The current statute says two years; the ordinary class A misdemeanor wait is three years.

Can a DWI conviction ever be annulled? Yes, after ten years from conviction, but the record remains in a permanent file for the specified later sentencing use.

Does New Hampshire automatically annul an old marijuana conviction? No. The person petitions, serves the prosecutor, and the prosecutor has ten days to object. The court must grant unless the prosecutor proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the amount exceeded three-quarters of an ounce.

Can the person usually deny an annulled conviction? Applications and testimony may ask only about arrests or convictions not annulled by a court, subject to the statute's retained law-enforcement and later-sentencing uses.

Statutes and sources

• N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 651:5 — general annulment eligibility, waits, exclusions, multiple-record and pending-charge rules, process, fees, effect, retained access, and reporting exceptions. https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LXII/651/651-5.htm (accessed 2026-07-20)
• N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 651:5-b — pre-September 16, 2017 marijuana-possession arrest and conviction annulment. https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LXII/651/651-5-b.htm (accessed 2026-07-20)
• N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. §§ 632-A:4, 318-B:26(II), and 651:6 — sexual-assault and controlled-drug offense classes used by the special clocks, and the extended-term sentence referenced by the permanent bar. https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LXII/632-A/632-A-4.htm, https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXX/318-B/318-B-mrg.htm, and https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LXII/651/651-6.htm (accessed 2026-08-12)
• N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 265-A:21 — ten-year DWI clock and retained sentencing file. https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXI/265-A/265-A-21.htm (accessed 2026-07-20)
• N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 490-I:1 — successful veterans-court participant's one-year petition route. https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LI/490-I/490-I-1.htm (accessed 2026-07-20)