DuPage County Expungement: Eligibility, Filing, and Hearing

A DuPage County expungement is a court order from the 18th Judicial Circuit in Wheaton that requires law enforcement to destroy your arrest records (or return them to you) and directs the court to impound its own file so agencies respond to future inquiries as though no record ever existed.¹ It is available only for records that did not end in a conviction, plus a narrow set of special dispositions. If you have a conviction, the parallel remedy is sealing, which hides the record from most public searches and standard background checks but leaves it visible to law enforcement and certain employers.

Choosing the wrong relief is the fastest way to lose months. Before anything else, figure out which category your record falls into.

Who Qualifies for Expungement

Under 20 ILCS 2630/5.2, expungement is available if your case ended in any of the following ways:

You were arrested but the State’s Attorney never filed charges.
You went to trial and were acquitted.
The charges were dismissed, including by a nolle prosequi order on the prosecutor’s motion.
Your conviction was vacated or reversed.
You successfully completed court supervision, which Illinois law does not treat as a conviction.
You successfully completed qualified probation under drug-treatment statutes (sometimes called 710/1410, Second Chance, or TASC probation).¹

If you failed to complete supervision or qualified probation, the disposition converts to a conviction and expungement is no longer available.

Some offenses are permanently excluded even when supervision was completed. You cannot expunge supervision for DUI, sex offenses involving a minor, or reckless driving unless it qualifies under the youthful offender exception. Convictions of any kind, and most minor traffic convictions, are also excluded.¹ For those, look at sealing instead.

How Long You Have to Wait

Even an eligible record has a clock attached:

Arrests without charges, acquittals, and dismissals: no waiting period. You can file as soon as the case is final.
Completed supervision for most offenses: two years after the supervision term ended.
Completed supervision for certain offenses (including domestic battery, driving without insurance, and criminal sexual abuse): five years after the supervision ended.
Qualified probation: five years after satisfactory termination.¹

The clock runs from when your sentence terminated, not from your arrest date or the court order date. Filing early is a common reason petitions get denied. If you aren’t certain of the termination date, pull the court file or your official criminal history before filing.

When Sealing Is the Right Path Instead

If your record includes a conviction, misdemeanor or felony, expungement is off the table and sealing is the alternative. Sealing covers most felony and misdemeanor convictions as well as first-offender probation under the Cannabis Control Act, the Controlled Substances Act, and similar statutes.¹

The general waiting period to seal a conviction is three years after your last sentence ends. The court may waive the waiting period if you earned a high school diploma, GED, associate’s degree, career certificate, or bachelor’s degree during your sentence or mandatory supervised release. Beginning June 1, 2026, Illinois is reducing certain sealing waiting periods from three years to two for qualifying categories, including misdemeanor convictions and felony sentences that did not involve incarceration.

Sealed records remain visible to law enforcement, prosecutors, correctional institutions, the military, court services, and the Department of Children and Family Services. Employers required by law to run fingerprint-based background checks (banks, schools, park districts, fire departments, healthcare organizations, childcare facilities) can see sealed felony convictions. Some professional licensing agencies can also see them, and federal agencies, including immigration authorities, may access both sealed and expunged records because state court orders don’t bind federal databases.

Sealing exclusions mirror many of the expungement exclusions: DUI, sex crimes, domestic battery, and animal care crimes cannot be sealed. Anyone still required to register under the Sex Offender Registration Act, Arsonist Registration Act, or Murderer and Violent Offender Against Youth Registration Act cannot seal those conviction records until registration ends.¹

Minor Cannabis Records

Illinois created a separate automatic process for minor cannabis offenses (30 grams or less, no penalty enhancement, no accompanying violent crime) when it legalized recreational marijuana. Non-conviction cannabis arrests were put on a staggered automatic expungement schedule by the Illinois State Police, and all statutory deadlines have now passed. If you had a qualifying arrest, verify its current status through the Access and Review process below rather than assuming it was cleared. For cannabis convictions, you can file your own motion to vacate and expunge directly with the circuit court.²

Pull Your Criminal History First

A petition filed with the wrong case number, charge description, or agency name is reliably denied. Before you draft anything, get your official criminal history transcript from the Illinois State Police through its Access and Review process. ISP does not charge for the request itself, though the fingerprint vendor may charge a processing fee.³

Visit any Illinois law enforcement facility, correctional facility, or licensed fingerprint vendor during business hours. They take your prints and send the information to ISP, which mails back your transcript along with a Record Challenge form you can use to dispute errors.³ The transcript lists every case number, arresting agency, charge, and disposition. Your petition must match those details exactly. If you were arrested by more than one DuPage jurisdiction (say, once by Naperville police and once by the DuPage County Sheriff), each arrest involves a separate agency that must be named and notified on its own.

Preparing and Filing the Petition

The Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Access to Justice has approved standardized expungement forms that every Illinois court must accept, including the Request to Expunge, Seal, or Expunge and Impound; a Notice of Filing; and a proposed order for the judge.⁴ Download them from the Illinois Courts website or get them through the DuPage County Circuit Clerk.

Every field on the petition must match the official record: case number, charges as they appear in the system, arresting agency, arrest date, and final disposition. List each agency that holds related records; each one must receive notice. The proposed order should spell out which records are to be expunged and name those same agencies. Small errors give the State’s Attorney grounds to object.

DuPage County requires e-filing for most petitioners. If you don’t have reliable internet access, a computer, or the ability to file electronically, submit the statewide Certification for Exemption from E-Filing and bring paper copies to the clerk’s counter at the DuPage County Judicial Center in Wheaton.⁵

The filing fee for an expungement or sealing petition in DuPage County is $120.⁶ If you can’t afford it, apply for a fee waiver. You qualify if your income is at or below 125% of the federal poverty level, if you receive means-tested public benefits like SSI, TANF, or SNAP, or if paying would cause substantial hardship to you or your family.⁷

Serving Agencies and the 60-Day Objection Window

Once the clerk accepts the petition, you must serve copies on the DuPage County State’s Attorney, the original arresting agency, and the Illinois State Police. This is a statutory requirement, and missing any one of these agencies will sink the petition.¹

After service, the State’s Attorney and the arresting agency have 60 days to object. The court waits during that period. If no one objects, the judge can grant the petition on the papers without requiring you to appear. If either agency objects, the court sets a hearing. Common objections involve claims that the waiting period hasn’t run, that the petitioner has a pending case, or that the record doesn’t qualify for the relief requested.

Hearing, Order, and Record Destruction

At a contested hearing you appear at the DuPage County Courthouse in Wheaton, and the burden is on you to show the record meets the statutory requirements. In practice, contested hearings are most common when a disposition is ambiguous, such as a dispute over whether supervision was successfully completed or whether the waiting period has run.

Once the judge signs the order, the Circuit Clerk sends certified copies to the Illinois State Police and every arresting agency named in the petition. Those agencies must then destroy their records or return them to you and remove your name from any official index or public record.¹ The court’s own file is impounded rather than destroyed, meaning it can’t be accessed without a separate court order. From filing to final removal, plan for roughly four to six months.

What Changes After Your Record Is Cleared

Once expunged, the record no longer has to be disclosed. If a job application asks whether you’ve been arrested or convicted, you can legally answer “no” for the expunged incident. Illinois law gives similar protection against disclosing sealed records to most employers.

Private background check companies are the practical catch. These firms maintain their own databases scraped from court records, and those databases don’t refresh the moment a judge signs an order. Some vendors take weeks to update, and some don’t update at all without being prompted. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, background check companies must follow reasonable procedures to ensure maximum possible accuracy, and reporting an expunged record fails that standard.⁸

If an employer runs a report that still shows the expunged record and considers taking adverse action (such as pulling a job offer), the FCRA requires a pre-adverse action notice with a copy of the report before the decision is final, giving you a chance to dispute the inaccuracy. A background check company that willfully reports expunged records faces statutory damages of up to $1,000 per violation, plus actual damages and attorney’s fees.⁸ Keep a certified copy of your expungement order; it is your proof when a dispute comes up.

1
Illinois General Assembly. 20 ILCS 2630/5.2 – Expungement, Sealing, and Immediate Sealing
2
Illinois State Police. Expungement of Minor Cannabis Offenses
3
Illinois State Police. Bureau of Identification – What’s on My Record
4
Office of the Illinois Courts. Expungement and Sealing
5
Office of the Illinois Courts. Exemption from E-Filing for Good Cause
6
DuPage County Circuit Clerk. Filing Fees Schedule
7
Illinois General Assembly. 735 ILCS 5/5-105 – Waiver of Court Fees, Costs, and Charges
8
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Fair Credit Reporting – Background Screening