California Penal Code Section 290: Sex Offender Registration

California Penal Code 290, the Sex Offender Registration Act, requires anyone convicted of a listed sex offense to register in person with local law enforcement, keep that registration current every year and after every move, and continue doing so for 10 years, 20 years, or life depending on the offense. Willful violations are prosecuted as misdemeanors or felonies tracking the underlying conviction, and some registrants can eventually petition a court to end the obligation.

Who Has to Register

Penal Code 290(c) lists the triggering offenses. The categories include rape and sexual assault, child molestation, lewd acts with a minor, sexual exploitation of children and child pornography offenses, kidnapping committed with sexual intent, human trafficking for a sex act, and indecent exposure when charged as a felony or a repeat offense.¹ Attempts and conspiracies to commit those offenses count too. The duty attaches whether the conviction came from a California court, a federal court, or a military tribunal.

One narrow carve-out: if the registrant was no more than ten years older than the minor at the time of the offense and this is the person’s only registerable conviction, certain statutory rape and related charges do not trigger registration.¹

How Long You Have to Register

Senate Bill 384 replaced lifetime registration for everyone with a three-tier system in 2021. Your tier is the single most important fact about your obligation because it controls both duration and whether you can ever petition off the registry.

Tier 1 carries a minimum registration period of 10 years. It covers the least serious qualifying offenses, including misdemeanor indecent exposure and certain non-violent offenses.
Tier 2 carries a minimum registration period of 20 years. It covers mid-range offenses such as lewd acts with a minor aged 14 to 17 and non-forcible sex offenses involving minors.
Tier 3 is lifetime registration. It covers forcible sex crimes, sex crimes against children under 14, cases where the registrant has been adjudicated a sexually violent predator, and cases placed in Tier 3 based on a risk assessment rather than the offense itself.

If you don’t know which tier applies to you, the registering law enforcement agency or a defense attorney can confirm it. Getting this wrong, or guessing, is how people end up prosecuted for registration violations years into what they thought was compliance.

How to Register

You must register in person within five working days of being released from custody, placed on probation, or moving into a new city or county.¹ You register with the chief of police in the city where you live, or with the county sheriff if you live in an unincorporated area or a city without its own police department. If you live on a UC, CSU, or community college campus, you also register with the campus police.

At registration you give personal identifying information, fingerprints, a current photograph, and a description of the qualifying offense. That data feeds the California Sex and Arson Registry.² There is no fee.

Keeping Your Registration Current

The initial sign-up is only the start. Most failure-to-register prosecutions grow out of a missed update, not a missed first registration.

Annual Birthday Update

Every registrant must appear in person within five working days of their birthday each year to update the registration on the Department of Justice annual update form.³ Forgetting is not a defense if you knew about the requirement.

Moving

If you move, you must notify your current registering agency in person within five working days before or after you leave, and then register with law enforcement in your new location within five working days of arriving.¹ If you regularly stay at more than one residence, you register at each. When you stop living at a registered address, you have five working days to tell the agency with jurisdiction over that location.

School and Work on Campus

If you enroll as a student, take a job, volunteer, or carry on a vocation at a college, university, or community college, you must register with the campus police. If there is no campus police department, you register with the local agency that has jurisdiction over the campus. Registrants whose victim was under 16 are also barred from working directly with minors in any unsupervised setting.

Transients

If you have no fixed address, you must re-register at least once every 30 days with law enforcement in whatever jurisdiction you are physically present.⁴ You must still complete the annual birthday update, in whichever jurisdiction you are in on that date. The 30-day cycle runs continuously; it does not reset when you cross jurisdictions. If you miss the window, you can be prosecuted in any county where you happen to be at the time.

Sexually Violent Predators

Anyone adjudicated a sexually violent predator verifies address and employment every 90 days rather than once a year.³

Penalties for Failure to Register

Every penalty under the Act requires the violation to be willful. Within that limit, the exposure tracks the underlying conviction.

If your underlying conviction was a misdemeanor, a willful registration violation is also a misdemeanor, with up to one year in county jail.⁵ A second or subsequent willful failure, however, is a felony.

If your underlying conviction was a felony, a willful registration violation is a felony punishable by 16 months, two years, or three years in state prison.⁵ If a court grants probation instead of prison, the law still requires at least 90 days in county jail as a probation condition.

Failing to complete the 30-day transient re-registration is a misdemeanor punishable by 30 days to six months in county jail. A third or subsequent transient violation becomes a felony.⁵

A felony failure to register counts as a new felony on your record and can interact with the Three Strikes law. After Proposition 36 (2012), a third-strike life sentence generally requires the new felony to be serious or violent, but exceptions remain for people with priors for offenses like rape or child molestation. In those cases, a registration violation alone can carry 25 years to life.

Registrants who travel between states and fail to update their registration can also be prosecuted federally under 18 U.S.C. § 2250, which carries up to 10 years in federal prison, and 5 to 30 years if the person also commits a crime of violence.⁶

Where You Can Live and What the Public Can See

Penal Code 3003.5 prohibits any Section 290 registrant from living within 2,000 feet of a public or private school, or a park where children regularly gather.⁷ Cities and counties can impose tighter local rules on top of that. The California Supreme Court has upheld the restriction as applied to parolees; by the statute’s plain text it applies to all registrants. Parole agents actively enforce the 2,000-foot rule, and registrants who have completed parole most often encounter enforcement when trying to establish a new address.

California’s Megan’s Law website, operated by the Department of Justice, publishes certain registrant information, and how much appears depends on tier and offense.⁸ Tier 3 and certain serious-offense listings show name, aliases, photograph, physical description, date of birth, criminal history for the registerable offense, residential address, and risk-level assessment. Tier 2 listings for specified offenses show the same identifying details but only community of residence and ZIP code. People required to register based on a juvenile adjudication are excluded from the public site entirely. The site never discloses the victim’s name, birth date, address, or relationship to the registrant, and it does not list the registrant’s employer. Some registrants are excluded from public disclosure under state law, so the site is not a complete list of everyone registered in California.⁹

Getting Off the Registry

Tier 1 and Tier 2 registrants can petition the superior court to end their registration obligation once they have completed their minimum period.¹⁰ The petition goes on file on or after your next birthday following the end of the minimum period, with proof of current registration, served on the registering agency and the district attorney in both the county of registration and the county of conviction. If the district attorney does not request a hearing within 60 days and you meet the statutory conditions, the court can grant the petition without a hearing.

Tier 1 petitioners qualify after 10 years. Tier 2 petitioners generally qualify after 20 years, but some can petition after 10 years if all of the following are true: no new conviction for a registerable offense since release, no new conviction for a violent felony since release, the original offense involved no more than one victim aged 14 to 17, the registrant was under 21 at the time, and the offense was not a violent felony (with a narrow exception for certain lewd-act charges) or a human trafficking offense.¹¹

Tier 3 lifetime registrants generally cannot petition off. The only opening is for people placed in Tier 3 solely because of a risk-level assessment rather than the offense itself; they can petition after 20 years, provided they have no new convictions for registerable offenses or violent felonies and are not required to register for certain serious offenses against children.¹¹

You must keep registering fully and on time while the petition is pending. A lapse during that period can end the petition and start a new criminal case.

Defenses to a Failure-to-Register Charge

Because every registration offense must be willful, the question in most cases is what you knew and what you did about it.

Lack of willfulness is the central defense. Genuine confusion over which agency has jurisdiction after a move, a documented medical emergency during the five-day window, or a closed office during that window can all defeat willfulness. Simply forgetting, or finding the process inconvenient, does not.

Reliance on official misinformation can also defeat willfulness. If a registering officer told you that you did not need to re-register after a move within the same city and you can document who said it, the reliance is a defense.

Actual compliance is sometimes the answer. Paperwork gets lost, databases fail to update, and an agency can neglect to enter your information. If you can show you appeared and completed the process, the charge should fail.

Two Myths That Keep Causing Trouble

An expungement under Penal Code 1203.4 does not end your duty to register. It can help with employment background checks and other collateral consequences, but it has no effect on Section 290 obligations.

A Certificate of Rehabilitation does not automatically end registration either.¹² It may support a petition under Penal Code 290.5, but you still have to file that petition and get a court order. Until a court actually grants termination, keep registering on schedule.

1
California Legislative Information. California Penal Code 290 – Sex Offender Registration Act
2
State of California – Department of Justice – Office of the Attorney General. California Sex Offender Registry
3
California Legislative Information. California Penal Code 290.012 – Annual Update
4
California Legislative Information. California Penal Code 290.011 – Transient Registration
5
California Legislative Information. California Penal Code 290.018 – Penalties
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 U.S. Code 2250 – Failure to Register
7
California Legislative Information. California Penal Code 3003.5 – Residency Restrictions
8
California Legislative Information. California Penal Code 290.46 – Public Disclosure
9
Megan’s Law Website. Disclaimer – Megan’s Law Website
10
California Legislative Information. California Penal Code 290.5 – Termination of Registration
11
Judicial Council of California. CR-415 Petition to Terminate Sex Offender Registration
12
California Courts Self Help. Certificate of Rehabilitation