Maryland's Clean Slate Act — the bill that would have automatically sealed many older misdemeanor and low-level felony convictions for people who had completed their sentences and stayed crime-free — passed the state Senate in March 2026 but did not get a final House vote before the General Assembly adjourned in April. The bill is not dead, but it is no longer on the 2026 calendar. Here is what the bill would have done, why it stalled, and what people with Maryland convictions should expect from the next session.
What the Maryland Clean Slate Act would have done
The version that passed the Senate was House Bill 360, carried by the House Judiciary Committee and negotiated with the Senate throughout the session. In its final form, the bill would have automatically sealed certain misdemeanor convictions three years after the person completed their sentence, and certain low-level felony convictions seven years after. Drug-possession convictions that were already decriminalized would have been eligible for sealing immediately. The bill did not apply to violent offenses, sex offenses, or convictions requiring registration.
Critically, the bill did not require the person to file a petition. The state's Criminal Justice Information System would have matched sealed records against existing databases and pushed the sealing through without the applicant paying a filing fee, hiring an attorney, or even knowing the process was happening. That is the structural difference between Maryland's bill and the expungement process that has been on the books for decades.
Why the bill stalled
Two things slowed the bill down. First, the Senate amended it to add a waiting-period trigger for certain repeat convictions that the House had not included in its version. The amendment was negotiated and accepted, but it pushed the bill back into conference committee late in the session. Second, the House Appropriations Committee flagged a fiscal note from the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services estimating implementation costs in the high single-digit millions over the first three years, mostly for systems work in the Criminal Justice Information System and additional court staff to handle the petitions that the bill did not eliminate.
Neither objection was framed as opposition to automatic sealing. Both were framed as implementation concerns. That distinction matters for what happens next, because it means the policy fight has largely been settled — what remains is a funding and timing argument about when and how the state can build the infrastructure to run automatic sealing at scale.
What people with Maryland convictions should do now
If you have a Maryland conviction and you were waiting to see if the bill would seal your record automatically, the short answer is that nothing has changed for you yet. Maryland's existing expungement process — which requires a petition, a filing fee (waivable), and a waiting period that depends on the disposition — is still the only path to a sealed record. Several categories of convictions became eligible for expungement under changes that took effect in 2024 and 2025, including many misdemeanor cannabis convictions and certain misdemeanor convictions after a three-year wait. Petition-based expungement is still free for people who qualify, and the Maryland Office of the Public Defender and a handful of nonprofit legal services organizations help with petitions for people who cannot afford an attorney.
Two practical things worth doing now. First, pull your own record from the Criminal Justice Information System portal before applying for anything that requires a background check, so you know exactly what is on file. Second, if you have a conviction that is eligible for petition-based expungement under current law, file the petition now. There is no benefit to waiting for automatic sealing that did not pass, and the petition-based path can clear a record in roughly 90 days once filed.
What to watch in the next session
The bill's sponsors have said they intend to reintroduce the Clean Slate Act in January 2027. The key questions for the next session are whether the Appropriations Committee signs off on the implementation funding before the bill is brought to a floor vote, and whether the conference-committee amendments from this session survive the renegotiation. Advocates expect the policy language to be largely unchanged.
For people watching the bill from outside Maryland, the Maryland Clean Slate Act is also worth tracking because it sits in a group of state-level automatic-sealing bills that are being negotiated in roughly half a dozen other states this year. The mechanisms are similar across states — automatic matching against court databases, waiting periods that vary by offense category, exclusions for violent and registrable offenses — but the funding fights and the implementation timelines vary widely. Maryland's bill is one of the more ambitious drafts currently in play.