San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance: Coverage, Notices, and Penalties

The San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, found in Police Code Article 49, limits how employers and affordable housing providers can use your criminal history. It delays any background check until after a conditional offer, places several categories of records permanently off-limits, and requires an individualized review plus a written notice and response window before you can be rejected over a conviction.

Who the Ordinance Covers

The employment rules reach any employer located or doing business in San Francisco with five or more employees, counted wherever those employees work. That includes for-profit companies, nonprofits, and staffing or placement agencies. It does not cover the City and County of San Francisco, other local government units, or state or federal government employers.¹

The housing side is narrower than many renters assume. It applies only to “Affordable Housing,” defined as residential buildings in San Francisco that have received city funding tied to rent restrictions, along with below-market-rate units under the Planning Code.¹ Private landlords renting market-rate apartments are not bound by these housing rules. Property management companies that make tenancy decisions for a covered affordable housing provider are themselves treated as housing providers under the law.

One more boundary worth knowing: if federal or state law independently requires a criminal background check for a specific position, the ordinance does not apply to that position. Law enforcement, certain childcare roles, and some financial industry jobs can fall into this exemption. For most private-sector jobs, no such override exists, and the full ordinance applies.

Criminal Records That Can Never Be Used

Both employers and affordable housing providers are permanently barred from asking about or considering several categories of records. You do not have to disclose them, and the decision-maker cannot use them even if the information surfaces by accident.

For employment decisions under Section 4904, off-limits records include:

For affordable housing decisions, Section 4906 mirrors these prohibitions and adds one more category: convictions for conduct that has since been decriminalized, such as certain cannabis offenses covered by California Health and Safety Code Sections 11362.1 and 11362.2.³

When a Background Check Can Happen

No application form, interview question, or screening step can touch criminal history before a conditional offer is on the table. This is the “Ban the Box” piece of the ordinance.

For employers, the sequence is simple: your qualifications, interview, and experience get evaluated first, and only after the employer has decided you are the person they want to hire can the background check begin.²

For affordable housing providers, the timing works a bit differently. The provider must first determine that you are legally eligible for the unit and that you meet their rental history and credit criteria before looking at any criminal records. The housing application itself cannot ask about convictions, arrests, or any of the off-limits categories.³

The Individualized Assessment

If a background check turns up a conviction that is not in one of the off-limits categories, the employer or housing provider still cannot reject you automatically. The ordinance requires an individualized assessment that weighs three things: whether the conviction is directly related to the duties of the job or the requirements of the housing, how much time has passed since the conviction or unresolved arrest, and any evidence of rehabilitation or mitigating circumstances you have provided.²

A blanket policy of rejecting everyone with a felony would violate this requirement. The assessment has to be genuinely specific to you and the role in question. A decade-old shoplifting conviction has no obvious connection to an office management job, and an employer who treats it as disqualifying has not done the work the ordinance demands.

The Adverse Action Notice and Your Right to Respond

If, after that assessment, the employer or housing provider still intends to reject you based on your conviction history, they cannot simply send a denial letter. They must first give you written notice of the intended adverse action, identify the specific conviction behind the decision, and provide you with a copy of the background check report.²

Your response window depends on the context:

For employment, you have seven days from the date the notice is provided to submit evidence of rehabilitation, mitigating circumstances, or inaccuracies in the report. The employer must delay the adverse action for a reasonable period and reconsider in light of what you send.
For housing, you have 14 days from the date the housing provider sends the notice to respond with the same types of evidence.

Use this window. Certificates from rehabilitation programs, letters from past employers or community organizations, and documentation showing errors in the background report are all fair game. A surprising number of background reports contain mistakes, and this is your chance to catch them before the decision becomes final.

How the Local Law Overlaps With California’s Fair Chance Act

California’s statewide Fair Chance Act also prohibits employers with five or more employees from asking about conviction history before a conditional offer.⁴ If you are applying for work in San Francisco, both laws apply, and the employer must follow whichever is more protective. In practice, that usually means following the city ordinance.

San Francisco goes beyond state law in several concrete ways: the seven-year lookback cap on convictions (state law has no blanket time cutoff), the exclusion of infractions, and the exclusion of convictions for decriminalized conduct. State law requires an individualized assessment too, but the city version layers on the written notice and response period described above. If your rights were violated, you may have claims under both, which can mean filing with both the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement and the California Civil Rights Department.

Penalties and How to File a Complaint

Administrative penalties for employment violations reach up to $500 for a first violation, $1,000 for a second, and $2,000 for each subsequent violation.⁵ If a violation affected multiple applicants, the penalty applies to each person individually, so an illegal screening policy used across an applicant pool adds up quickly.

You can also bring a civil lawsuit after first filing a complaint with the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement and exhausting administrative remedies. A successful civil action can recover reinstatement, back pay, attorney’s fees, and liquidated damages of $500 per affected person for each day the violation continued.

You have 60 days from the violation to file a complaint. Where you file depends on the issue:

Employment complaints go to the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (OLSE), 415-554-5192 or FCE@sfgov.org.⁶
Housing complaints go to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, 415-252-2500 or hrc.info@sfgov.org.⁶

Sixty days is a short clock, so act quickly if something feels wrong. A common pattern: you get a conditional offer, undergo a background check, and then receive a generic rejection without ever seeing a written notice identifying a specific conviction. That alone does not prove a violation, but it strongly suggests the employer skipped the adverse action process entirely. It is worth reporting, and filing that administrative complaint also preserves your ability to pursue a civil case later.

1
American Legal Publishing. San Francisco Police Code SEC 4903 – Definitions
2
American Legal Publishing. San Francisco Police Code SEC 4904 – Procedures for Use of Criminal History Information in Employment Decisions
3
American Legal Publishing. San Francisco Police Code SEC 4906 – Procedures for Use of Criminal History Information in Housing Decisions
4
California Civil Rights Department. Fair Chance Act
5
American Legal Publishing. San Francisco Police Code SEC 4907 – Notice and Posting Requirements
6
San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement. Fair Chance Ordinance Enforcement Report