Can a felony be sealed in Texas?

Mostly no for convictions, yes for completed deferred adjudication. Texas law never seals a felony conviction through nondisclosure — the conviction statutes reach only certain misdemeanors. But a felony deferred adjudication that ended in discharge and dismissal can be sealed by petition under Government Code § 411.0725 five years later, and a dismissal or acquittal supports full expunction.

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What Does It Mean to Seal a Felony Record in Texas?

Texas statutes never use the word "seal." The remedy people mean when they ask about sealing is an order of nondisclosure under Government Code chapter 411, subchapter E-1 — the block of statutes running from § 411.072 through § 411.0775. The order directs courts, clerks, and the Department of Public Safety to stop releasing the criminal history record to the public. The case does not vanish; it goes behind a curtain that the general public, landlords, and most private employers cannot pull back.

Two practical effects follow. First, under § 411.0755, you are no longer required to admit the sealed proceeding on applications for employment, information, or licensing — a statutory right to say no, with narrow carve-outs. Second, private background-check vendors that purchase DPS data must purge the sealed record from their reports once DPS pushes the order out to them. That combination is what restores apartment applications, job screenings, and volunteer clearances for most people.

Sealing is the weaker sibling of expunction, the destruction remedy in Code of Criminal Procedure chapter 55A (the former chapter 55, recodified effective January 1, 2025). An expunged record is physically destroyed or returned; a sealed record survives and remains fully visible to law enforcement, prosecutors, and a long list of state licensing agencies. Which remedy you can reach depends almost entirely on how the felony case ended — which is why the honest answer to the title question splits three ways.

Can a Felony Conviction Be Sealed?

No. This is the part most callers do not want to hear, so it deserves to be said plainly: no order of nondisclosure can seal a Texas felony conviction. The legislature wrote four conviction-based sealing statutes — § 411.073 (community supervision following conviction), § 411.0731 (DWI community supervision), § 411.0735 (completed sentence), and § 411.0736 (DWI conviction) — and every one of them is expressly limited to certain misdemeanors. A felony conviction sits outside all four, whether the sentence was probation, state jail, or prison, and no waiting period changes that.

Three narrow doors remain. A full pardon from the governor, acting on a Board of Pardons and Paroles recommendation, converts the case into expunction material under chapter 55A — rare, slow, but real. Judicial clemency under Code of Criminal Procedure article 42A.701(f) lets a judge who terminates probation early set aside the verdict and dismiss the case, releasing most legal disabilities; the trap is that the record itself stays public, so clemency improves your legal status without improving your Google results. And § 411.0728 gives trafficking victims a sealing path for a short list of low-level offenses — marijuana possession or delivery, small theft, and prostitution — committed solely as a victim of trafficking, one of the only places Texas law seals a conviction at all.

One charging-stage insight matters here more than any post-conviction fix. When a state jail felony is reduced under Penal Code § 12.44, the two subsections lead to opposite record outcomes: a § 12.44(a) sentence is still a felony conviction punished as a misdemeanor — never sealable — while a § 12.44(b) prosecution as a Class A misdemeanor produces a misdemeanor conviction that can qualify for nondisclosure under § 411.0735's two-year timeline. Defense lawyers fight for the (b) version precisely because of this page's question.

When Can a Felony Deferred Adjudication Be Sealed?

Deferred adjudication is where felony sealing genuinely works. If the judge deferred a finding of guilt under Code of Criminal Procedure article 42A.101, you completed supervision, and the court entered a discharge and dismissal under article 42A.111, then § 411.0725 lets you petition the same court for an order of nondisclosure. The statute excludes DWI and boating-while-intoxicated deferreds (those run through § 411.0726) and conditions relief on six requirements:

1. Deferred adjudication, not conviction. The case must have ended in discharge and dismissal — a revoked deferred that proceeded to adjudication is a conviction and falls back to the section above.
2. An offense outside § 411.074(b). The disqualified-offense list below ends eligibility no matter how clean the years since have been.
3. No disqualifying history. A conviction or deferred for any listed offense anywhere in your past — not just the case you want sealed — bars relief.
4. A clean waiting period. From sentencing through filing, no new conviction or deferred adjudication except fine-only traffic offenses.
5. The five-year wait. For felonies, § 411.0725(e) opens the courthouse door on the fifth anniversary of the discharge and dismissal — not the plea date, a distinction that surprises people who count from the wrong end of supervision.
6. An interest-of-justice finding. Even a fully eligible petitioner must persuade the judge that sealing serves the interest of justice — a discretionary determination, addressed in the process section below.

Note what is missing from felony practice: the near-automatic path. Section 411.072 — the provision that entitles qualifying first-time misdemeanor deferreds to sealing with a $28 fee and minimal friction — is a misdemeanor-only statute. Every felony nondisclosure in Texas is a contested-capable, judge-decided petition. The table maps the full decision tree.

Which Felonies Can Never Be Sealed?

Section 411.074(b) draws a hard perimeter around nondisclosure. No order may issue — for any case, on any timeline — if the offense you want sealed, or any offense in your history that ended in conviction or deferred adjudication, is one of these:

• Any offense requiring sex-offender registration under Code of Criminal Procedure chapter 62
• Murder (Penal Code § 19.02) and capital murder (§ 19.03)
• Aggravated kidnapping (§ 20.04)
• Trafficking of persons (§ 20A.02) and continuous trafficking (§ 20A.03)
• Injury to a child, elderly individual, or disabled individual (§ 22.04)
• Abandoning or endangering a child (§ 22.041)
• Violation of a protective order or bond condition in a family-violence case (§§ 25.07, 25.072)
• Stalking (§ 42.072)
• Any other offense involving family violence as defined by Family Code § 71.004

Two features of this list do the most damage in practice. The history rule means a decades-old family-violence deferred can block sealing of an unrelated theft case today. And the court-finding rule in § 411.074(b)(2) means that if the judgment in the case you want sealed carries an affirmative family-violence finding, eligibility ends there — one of many reasons the fight over that finding at the plea stage matters years later.

Sealing vs. Expunction: Which Remedy Fits Your Case?

People use "sealed" and "expunged" interchangeably; Texas law does not. Expunction obliterates — agencies must destroy or return their files, and you may deny the arrest ever happened. Nondisclosure hides — the public loses access while government keeps it. The catch is that you rarely get to choose, because eligibility tracks the case outcome, not your preference.

The boundary between the two remedies is policed strictly, and the case law is unforgiving on a point that traps deferred-adjudication clients: completing deferred does not back you into expunction. In Ex Parte M.A.S., No. 13-19-00516-CV (Tex. App. Jul 1, 2021), the Corpus Christi court reversed an expunction because the petitioner had served community supervision on one charge from the arrest — the legislature, it explained, "drew a line at not permitting expunction if a person received community supervision," and a later nondisclosure order on that charge did not move the line. The same opinion confirms that felony expunction is arrest-based: every offense arising from the arrest must independently qualify, so one supervised count poisons the whole arrest. If your felony arrest produced two dismissed counts and one deferred count, the deferred count caps you at sealing — for all three.

How Does the Nondisclosure Petition Process Work?

The petition is a civil filing inside your old criminal case. It goes to the court that placed you on deferred adjudication — not to a new court, and not to the county where you live now — under the original cause number, accompanied by the district clerk's standard civil filing fee (a few hundred dollars; confirm the current amount with the clerk). Attach the discharge-and-dismissal order and lay out the eligibility facts: offense, dates, completion, clean record since.

The State gets notice and a chance to respond. Some prosecutors' offices review and waive hearings on clean petitions; others request a setting, particularly where the underlying facts were ugly or the eligibility math is close. At the hearing, the statute requires two findings stacked on top of each other: that you are entitled to file, and that issuing the order serves the interest of justice. The second finding is genuinely discretionary. In Ex Parte R.S., No. 02-18-00150-CV (Tex. App. Aug 1, 2019), the Fort Worth court affirmed a denial because the petitioner never overcame the trial court's finding that the order would not serve that interest — and the appellate court reviews such a finding only for abuse of discretion, presuming the evidence supported it where no record shows otherwise. The practical lesson: build a record. Pay stubs, transcripts, treatment completion, community service, letters — the petition that reads like a rehabilitation file gets granted; the bare form gets a coin flip.

After the judge signs, the clerk transmits the order to the Department of Public Safety, which seals its own files and pushes the order to other agencies and the private data vendors that bought the record. Expect the paper trail to thin out over weeks, not overnight — and keep a certified copy of the order for the occasional vendor that needs direct correction.

Who Can Still See a Sealed Felony Record?

Sealing changes who may look, not whether the file exists. Under § 411.0765, criminal justice agencies continue to use the record for criminal-justice purposes — future prosecutions, bail decisions, sentencing enhancement, police licensing. The same section authorizes disclosure to a long roster of noncriminal-justice entities, including the State Board for Educator Certification, the Texas Medical Board, the Texas Board of Nursing, and the Health and Human Services Commission. A sealed felony deferred will follow a teacher, nurse, physician, or child-care operator into licensing proceedings even though their neighbor's background check comes back clean.

Federal systems sit outside the order entirely. The FBI's identification records draw from Texas submissions, and while DPS reports sealing, federal agencies, military recruiters, and security-clearance investigators routinely see the underlying history. Immigration is the sharpest edge: federal immigration law treats a deferred adjudication entered on a guilty plea as a conviction regardless of the later dismissal, and an order of nondisclosure does not change that. Anyone who is not a U.S. citizen should treat sealing as reputation repair, never as immigration protection, and get immigration-specific advice before relying on it.

One more quiet limit comes from the case law discussed above: a nondisclosure order does not block courts from considering the sealed offense in later record-clearing litigation. Ex Parte M.A.S. approved a trial court's reliance on a sealed marijuana case to defeat a related expunction — sealed, the court noted, does not mean invisible to the justice system itself.

County Practice Notes: Collin, Dallas, Denton, and Tarrant

Venue is fixed by the original case, so DFW petitions return to the courthouse where the deferred was served. In Collin County, felony deferreds run through the district courts at the Collin County Courthouse (the Russell A. Steindam Courts Building) in McKinney; petitions are e-filed with the district clerk under the old cause number and routed to the original court. Dallas County felony petitions go back to the district courts at the Frank Crowley Courts Building, with the Dallas County District Attorney's office receiving notice; expect response practice to vary by court and by the age of the case. Denton County petitions return to the courts at the Denton County Courts Building in Denton, and Tarrant County petitions to the criminal district courts at the Tim Curry Criminal Justice Center in Fort Worth.

Practice rhythms differ more than the law does. Filing-fee schedules, whether the DA's office routinely waives hearings, and how quickly a signed order reaches DPS are courthouse-by-courthouse questions, and a petition drafted to the assigned court's habits moves faster than one drafted generically. What does not vary: the five-year clock, the § 411.074(b) list, and the judge's discretion at the end of the process.

What If You Are Not Eligible? Realistic Alternatives

A felony conviction or a disqualified offense does not always end the conversation; it changes which tools remain. Judicial clemency under article 42A.701(f) is available when a judge terminates straight probation early and chooses to set aside the verdict — it restores most civil rights and lets you truthfully say the case was dismissed, though the public record survives. A full pardon through the Board of Pardons and Paroles converts a conviction into expunction material, and while grants are uncommon, complete applications with consistent employment and community history do receive them. For defective pleas — bad immigration admonishments, suppressed evidence that surfaced late — a writ under Code of Criminal Procedure article 11.072 can sometimes unwind the judgment itself, resetting the record question entirely.

The law also keeps moving in one direction. The 2015 session created misdemeanor-conviction sealing, 2017 added the DWI nondisclosure provisions, and later sessions layered in the veterans treatment court and trafficking-victim paths — each expansion grandfathering in old cases. A case ineligible today is worth rechecking after every legislative session, and our eligibility checker tracks the current rules.

A hypothetical shows the stakes at the plea stage. Suppose a Plano warehouse manager pleads to state jail felony theft in 2018 and receives four years of deferred adjudication, discharged and dismissed in 2022. With no disqualifying history, she may petition her McKinney court in 2027 — five years after discharge — and, with a documented work history, stands a realistic chance of sealing. Had the same plea been to straight probation with a conviction, nothing in chapter 411 would ever help her. Same facts, same courtroom, opposite record futures: the sealing analysis was decided the day the plea papers were signed, which is exactly when a defense lawyer earns their fee on this issue.