How to Seal a Criminal Record in Nevada: The Complete Guide

Under NRS 179.285, once a court orders your record sealed, the proceedings are ‘deemed never to have occurred.’ That phrase does real work: you may lawfully answer ‘no’ when employers, landlords, and most applications ask about the arrest or conviction, and the sealed matters stop appearing on standard background checks. Sealing also restores civil rights — including the rights to vote, serve on a jury, and hold office — to the extent they were still suspended.

The one thing sealing does not restore is gun rights. A felony conviction’s firearm prohibition survives sealing; only a pardon can lift it. Anyone who tells you sealing ‘wipes the slate completely clean’ is overselling — but for jobs, housing, licensing, and dignity, it is the closest thing Nevada law offers to a reset.

The practical stakes are hard to overstate. An unsealed record follows you into every application: employers see the arrest even when charges were dropped, landlords see the conviction from a decade ago, and licensing boards see everything. Sealing doesn’t rewrite the past — it just ends the era in which strangers get to read it before deciding what you deserve.

If your charges were dismissed or you were acquitted, there is no waiting period. Under NRS 179.255, you may petition to seal those records any time — the day after the dismissal, if you want — and for acquittals the statute goes further still: the court shall order the records sealed. If prosecutors declined to file charges after an arrest, the records can be sealed once the statute of limitations runs, after 8 years, or earlier by stipulation. This is the most underused rule in Nevada sealing: thousands of people carry arrest records for cases that went nowhere, never realizing the cleanup is available immediately. If any case of yours ended in a dismissal — even alongside a conviction on another count — that piece can usually be dealt with now, not years from now.

Since 2017, NRS 179.2445 has directed courts to apply a rebuttable presumption that qualifying records should be sealed: satisfy the statutory requirements, and the burden effectively shifts to anyone opposing you. The Legislature added teeth in 2023: when the prosecutor stipulates to the sealing, the court shall seal the records — and when the prosecutor neither stipulates nor objects within 30 days, the court may order the sealing without holding a hearing at all. That is why the quality of the petition package matters: a clean, complete filing that draws a stipulation, or at least no objection, from the district attorney’s office often turns sealing into a paperwork exercise rather than a court fight. One caveat: the presumption does not apply to anyone dishonorably discharged from probation.

NRS 179.245 puts some convictions permanently off the table: crimes against a child, the sexual offenses enumerated in the statute, invasion of the home with a deadly weapon (NRS 205.067), and the felony impaired-driving offenses — third-offense DUI, DUI causing death or substantial bodily harm, vehicular homicide while intoxicated, and their felony boating-under-the-influence counterparts. Note what is NOT on the list: ordinary residential burglary is sealable — it just carries the 10-year wait. If a conviction on your record falls in the banned categories, sealing everything else is still often possible — the ineligible count stays visible while the rest disappears. A misdemeanor domestic violence battery, by contrast, IS sealable after its 7-year wait; if you’re weighing a current charge with future sealing in mind, our domestic violence defense page explains what a conviction actually costs long-term.

For the permanently unsealable, the remaining avenue is a pardon — a discretionary, much steeper climb that addresses the conviction itself rather than the record of it. That is a different process with different standards, but it exists, and for the right applicant it is worth a conversation.

Plenty of single-count, single-agency records get sealed pro se. The cases that reward counsel are the messy ones: multiple arrests across agencies, out-of-county entries, a mix of eligible and ineligible counts, wrong dates in the repository, or a prior petition already denied. A Las Vegas record sealing attorney earns the fee by making the DA’s stipulation easy — complete records, correct math on every waiting period, and an order agencies can execute without questions. De Castroverde Law Group has been doing exactly that for Clark County clients for years, in English and Spanish — and because we defend criminal cases every day, we read a SCOPE report the way the DA’s office does, which is exactly the skill a stipulation depends on.