New York reported in mid-September 2026 that the state has now expunged roughly three hundred thousand cannabis convictions under the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, a milestone for the automated record-clearing system that the Office of Court Administration and the Division of Criminal Justice Services have been running since the law took effect. The number is a useful progress marker, but it is also a reminder that the people whose records are still on file are the harder cases — and that an expungement on paper does not always mean the record has disappeared from every background check database overnight.
What the 300,000 figure actually counts
The count covers convictions for conduct that is no longer criminal under New York law — most importantly, conviction records for possession of small amounts of marijuana that the 2021 reform reclassified from a misdemeanor to a violation, and for low-level sale convictions that have since been reclassified or made eligible for expungement. The Office of Court Administration processes these as a batch operation, matching eligible conviction records against the statutory criteria and issuing an order that the record be sealed under the new designation.
What the count does not include is just as important. It does not include arrest records that did not result in a conviction, even though advocates have long argued that arrest-only records cause most of the same collateral damage as convictions. It does not include convictions for conduct that remains criminal under the reformed statute, and it does not include out-of-state convictions that may still appear on a federal background check or a private database pulling from other states. People in those categories are not part of the 300,000, and they should not assume the headline milestone applies to them.
Why automated processing matters in New York
New York's MRTA expungement provision was designed to run automatically, in contrast to the petition-driven expungement model that most states had on the books before 2018. Under the petition model, the person with the conviction had to know the law was available, find the right form, file it with the right court, and follow up if the court asked for more documentation. That process generated huge disparities in who actually got relief, with people who had lawyers or steady internet access getting their records cleared and everyone else left behind. The MRTA model flipped that: the state is supposed to identify eligible convictions on its own and seal them without any action by the person whose record is involved.
Automated processing is also why the 300,000 figure is a milestone rather than a ceiling. The state has been processing eligible convictions in batches as the data feeds from the Office of Court Administration, the Division of Criminal Justice Services, and the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision align. Each completed batch adds to the cumulative total, and the cadence has accelerated as the data plumbing has matured. The next milestones are likely to come more quickly than the first ones did.
What an expunged record still looks like in practice
An expunged or sealed New York cannabis conviction is supposed to be treated as if it did not occur for most purposes — it should not appear on a standard employment background check, it should not be available to landlords running tenant screenings, and it should not be a basis for denying a professional license. In practice, the data takes time to propagate. Private background-check companies pull from a mix of state repositories, county courthouse systems, and commercial databases that are not always updated immediately after an expungement order is entered. People whose records have just been cleared sometimes see the old charge on a background check for weeks or months afterward, especially if the check is run through a database that has not yet been refreshed.
This is not a New York-specific problem — it is the implementation gap that every state with an automated expungement law has had to work through. The mitigation is the same in most of them: people whose records have just been cleared should keep a copy of the expungement order and provide it to any employer, landlord, or licensing body that receives a stale background check showing the old charge. Most states, including New York, have a process for correcting background-check companies when they report an expunged conviction, but the process works best when the affected person initiates it with the documentation in hand.
What to do if your record is still showing up
Anyone who believes they have a New York cannabis conviction that should have been cleared under MRTA can check the status through the Office of Court Administration's online portal or by contacting the court in the county where the conviction was entered. If the record is eligible and has not yet been processed, the portal will typically show a pending status and an expected batch window. If the record is not eligible — because the conviction was for conduct that remains criminal, because the case was handled in a different state, or because the record is an arrest without a conviction — the answer will be that no expungement is available under this statute, and a different legal pathway may apply.
For arrest-only records and for out-of-state convictions, the practical options are narrower. Some arrest-only records can be sealed under a separate New York statute for old, uncontested arrests, but the eligibility criteria are different from MRTA. Out-of-state convictions generally need to be addressed in the state where they were entered, not in New York. Anyone in either of those categories should treat the 300,000 milestone as progress on a long road, not as a guarantee that their own record is part of it.