Where California Keeps the Records That Locate a Person
Every firm on this search result sells reach – databases, coverage, decades of it. Almost none of them tells you what California law actually lets a member of the public see, and in this state that is the whole game. An unlawful detainer file here is closed to the public from the moment it is filed, and stays closed forever unless the landlord takes judgment against every defendant inside sixty days. Eleven further categories of case, family and criminal among them, are available at a courthouse terminal and by rule may not be published online at all. And the courts prohibit bulk distribution of case records outright, which quietly disposes of the idea that anybody holds a private copy of the California judiciary. Knowing which of those tiers a record sits in is what separates a search that finishes from one that produces a confident, wrong silence. Public records and lawfully licensed data are our only inputs, and a reason the law recognises is settled in writing before a file opens. General information here, not legal advice.
The Eviction File Is Closed From the Day It Is Filed, and Usually Stays Closed
Code of Civil Procedure section 1161.2, read the way it is actually written.
Most explanations of this rule describe it as a sixty-day delay. That is not what the statute does, and the difference decides whether an entire category of California research is possible at all.
Section 1161.2 opens by restricting not merely the file but the finding aids alongside it. What the clerk may release is limited civil case records under this chapter “including the court file, index, and register of actions” – and then the subdivision narrows to a single word, “only as follows”. That word only is what carries the section. What follows is an exhaustive list of who may look, and everybody outside it is excluded by default.
The four routes in, and what each one demands
- (A) A party, or a party’s attorney. The straightforward case.
- (B) Anyone able to hand the clerk three things at once – one plaintiff’s name, one defendant’s name, and the address of the premises, which the statute specifies must run down to “the apartment or unit number, if any.”
- (C) A resident of the premises who supplies a party name or the case number and shows proof of residency.
- (D) Anyone with a court order, obtainable ex parte, on a showing of good cause. The statute says good cause “includes, but is not limited to” newsgathering by a person described in Evidence Code section 1070, and evidence-gathering by a party to an unlawful detainer action solely to request judicial notice under Evidence Code section 452(d). The Legislature adds that it intends “a simple procedure be established” for that application.
Look carefully at route (B), because it is the one people assume solves the problem. To use it you must already supply the premises address down to the unit number. It is a lookup keyed to a place, not to a person. You cannot use a California eviction record to discover where somebody lives, because the statute requires you to already know where they lived before it will let you in. That single design choice removes unlawful detainer from the toolkit of anyone trying to locate a person, and it is the reason we do not offer it as one.
Why “sixty-day delay” is the wrong description
Two later subparagraphs do open the file to the general public, and both are conditional on the landlord winning. Subparagraph (F) opens it after sixty days only “if judgment against all defendants has been entered for the plaintiff within 60 days of the filing of the complaint.” Subparagraph (E) opens it by court order where judgment is entered for the plaintiff after trial more than sixty days out.
So the case becomes public if the landlord prevails, and does not otherwise. A tenant who wins, a case that settles, a case dismissed, a case that simply takes longer than two months – none of those ever reaches the general public at all. Two further wrinkles sit alongside: for a residential complaint founded on section 1161a, subparagraph (G)(i) requires judgment against all defendants for the plaintiff after a trial; and subparagraph (G)(ii) switches subparagraphs (E) and (F) off entirely for actions filed between 4 March 2020 and 30 September 2021 based on an alleged default in the payment of rent. That pandemic-era cohort is permanently outside public view. The parties may also stipulate to an order barring access altogether.
And the defendant is told
One more feature worth knowing before anybody plans around this. The clerk mails notice to each defendant named in the action, at the address given in the complaint, stating that an eviction action has been filed naming them and that access to the court file will be delayed for sixty days except through the routes above. California does not merely restrict this record. It tells the person it concerns that the restriction exists.
The Short Version
California skip tracing is decided by which access tier a record sits in, not by which county you search. Tier one is sealed by statute: under CCP 1161.2 unlawful detainer files and indexes are closed from filing, and public only where the landlord takes judgment against every defendant within sixty days. Tier two is public but courthouse-only: rule 2.503(c) names eleven categories whose records a court may not put online. Tier three is online, one case at a time: rule 2.503(f) allows access only by case number, caption or name. Our inputs are public records and licensed data, the lawful reason is stated first, and we take nothing from inside a private financial account. General information, not legal advice.
Eleven Case Types the Courts May Not Put Online
Rule of Court 2.503 draws the line between public and internet-public, and enumerates it.
The second tier catches more people out than the first, because the records in it are genuinely public. You can walk into the courthouse and read them on a terminal. What a California court may not do is publish them over the internet, and the list of what falls in that bucket is set by rule rather than by any clerk’s discretion. Where the record you need is courthouse-only and the courthouse is not somewhere you can reach, you can open a California file and have it requested case by case at the counter that holds it.
Rule 2.503, amended effective 1 January 2019 and originally adopted as rule 2073 in July 2002, splits the world in two. Subdivision (b) says a court holding these in electronic form “must provide electronic access to them, both remotely and at the courthouse“: registers of actions as defined in Government Code section 69845, calendars and indexes in all cases, plus all court records in civil cases other than the exceptions. Subdivision (c) then lists those exceptions as records a court must make available at the courthouse but “may not provide public remote access” to:
- Proceedings under the Family Code – dissolution, legal separation, nullity, child and spousal support, child custody, and domestic violence prevention proceedings
- Juvenile court proceedings
- Guardianship or conservatorship proceedings
- Mental health proceedings
- Criminal proceedings
- Proceedings to compromise the claims of a minor or a person with a disability
- Civil harassment proceedings under Code of Civil Procedure section 527.6
- Workplace violence prevention proceedings under section 527.8
- Private postsecondary school violence prevention proceedings under section 527.85
- Elder or dependent adult abuse prevention proceedings under Welfare and Institutions Code section 15657.03
- Gun violence prevention proceedings under Penal Code sections 18100 to 18205
Eleven, counted off the rule’s own numbering rather than summarised from somebody else’s description of it.
The distinction most commentary gets backwards
Notice which half of the file moves. Subdivision (b)(1) requires remote access to registers of actions, calendars and indexes in all cases – including every one of the eleven. It is the underlying records that are courthouse-only. So for a California family or criminal matter you can very often confirm online that a case exists, who the parties are and what has happened on the docket, while the documents themselves stay behind a courthouse terminal. A researcher who treats the index hit as the whole story understates what is available; a researcher who treats the missing documents as evidence of a sealed or non-existent case overstates it. Both errors are common and they point in opposite directions.
There is no scraped copy of the California courts, and the rule says why
Subdivision (f) is short and worth quoting: “The court may only grant electronic access to an electronic record when the record is identified by the number of the case, the caption of the case, or the name of a party, and only on a case-by-case basis.” The Advisory Committee comment explains the purpose without hedging. The limitations “prohibit bulk distribution of those records”, and rest on “the qualitative difference between obtaining information from a specific case file and obtaining bulk information that may be manipulated to compile personal information culled from any document, paper, or exhibit filed in a lawsuit”, which “may be exploited for commercial or other purposes unrelated to the operations of the courts, at the expense of privacy rights of individuals.”
We quote that because it describes the boundary we work inside rather than one imposed on us. California research here means identified, case-by-case lookups against named parties, with the reason for each on file, and a finding assembled that way survives being questioned. And subdivision (d) adds a practical qualifier: a court must provide electronic access only “to the extent it determines it has the resources and technical capacity to do so”, so what is available varies by court as well as by rule. Where the question underneath is enforcement rather than location, that sits in our note on California judgment collection.
Watch: Sealed, Courthouse-Only, or Online
How a California request is sorted before it is sent.
Watch Overview
Fifty-Eight Counties, and One That Is Its Own Country
The scale is the reason a statewide search is not a plan.
California’s 58 counties are administered as peers and are nothing of the sort in practice. Los Angeles County holds 9,757,179 people. That is more residents than live in most states, inside one county recorder’s jurisdiction and one Superior Court. San Diego at 3,298,799 and Orange at 3,170,435 would each be substantial states in their own right. Riverside follows at 2,529,933, San Bernardino at 2,214,281, Santa Clara at 1,926,325, Alameda at 1,649,060 and Sacramento at 1,611,231.
Two consequences follow directly, and both are about search order rather than scenery.
At this scale a name stops being evidence
In a county of nine and three-quarter million people, a common name is not shared by a handful of individuals but by hundreds. A match that would be persuasive in a county of forty thousand proves nothing at all in Los Angeles. This is why identity confirmation in California is not a preliminary formality but the substance of the early work: nothing an address says counts until the person behind it has been separated from everybody sharing the name, and the separating evidence has to be documentary rather than probabilistic. That falls hardest on an asset search run behind a judgment, because recorder indexes are organised by name rather than by person: a grantor-grantee hit on a common surname in Los Angeles County is a candidate document and not a holding, and attributing it to your debtor takes the same documentary separation the address work takes.
The moves that look like disappearances are usually short
The metropolitan regions here are multi-county by construction. Somebody who leaves Los Angeles County very often lands in Orange, Riverside or San Bernardino without changing anything about their working life. Somebody leaving Santa Clara lands in Alameda, San Mateo or further into the Central Valley. A single-county search in California is not a narrow search; it is a search of one jurisdiction inside a region that routinely operates as several. We settle which counties are worked and in what order at the outset, write that decision down, and say in the report which counties were not reached – because in a state this size, silence about coverage is the most misleading thing a report can contain. The broader approach to placing a person here sits on our page about searching for a person in California.
The recorder is a separate question from the court
Land, liens and recorded judgments sit with the county recorder for the county where the property is, and that is a different office and a different index from the Superior Court that holds the case file. In several California counties those functions are combined into a Clerk-Recorder, and in others they are not. The practical rule we work to is simple: confirm which office in that specific county holds the class of record being asked for, rather than assuming the arrangement from a neighbouring county. For a creditor the county answer carries a second consequence, because placing a judgment debtor in a particular California county is what decides where recording an abstract of judgment is worth doing: the abstract binds real property in the county where it is recorded, so land the debtor picks up in Riverside sits outside an abstract recorded only in Los Angeles. Where the question is what a creditor may lawfully reach, that belongs with California asset exemptions and California wage garnishment limits, offered as general legal information rather than advice.
Six Ways a California Search Reports a False Absence
Each returns nothing, and each nothing means something different.
A Sealed Eviction Read as No Eviction
Under CCP 1161.2 the file, index and register are closed unless the landlord won inside sixty days.
Missing Documents Read as a Sealed Case
In the eleven rule 2.503(c) categories the index is online and the documents are courthouse-only. Both are public.
One County Searched in a Six-County Region
Leaving Los Angeles County usually means Orange, Riverside or San Bernardino, not leaving the region.
A Namesake Accepted at Metropolitan Scale
A name match that would be near-conclusive in a small county is close to meaningless in a county of millions.
A Court’s Own Capacity Mistaken for the Rule
Rule 2.503 requires electronic access only so far as a court has the resources and technical capacity for it.
The Recorder Asked for a Case File
Deeds, liens and recorded judgments sit with the county recorder; the case file sits with the Superior Court.
Which Tier Does the Record You Want Sit In
Sort before you search, because in California the sorting is the expertise.
This is the sorting sheet a California file is opened against. The middle column gives the access tier as the statute or rule sets it. The right column gives the consequence for a search.
| Record | Access tier | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Unlawful detainer file, index, register | Sealed from filing under CCP 1161.2 Tier 1 | Public only if the landlord took judgment against all defendants inside sixty days. |
| Family law, including DV prevention | Courthouse-only under rule 2.503(c)(1) | Register and index remain online; the documents themselves do not. |
| Criminal case records | Courthouse-only under rule 2.503(c)(5) | An online index hit with no documents is normal, not evidence of sealing. |
| Restraining and prevention orders | Courthouse-only, rule 2.503(c)(7) to (11) | Civil harassment, workplace, school, elder abuse and gun violence proceedings. |
| General civil case records | Remote access required so far as feasible, rule 2.503(b)(2) | Available, but only case-by-case by number, caption or party name. |
| Any court record in bulk | Prohibited, rule 2.503(f) and committee comment | Nobody lawfully holds a wholesale copy of California court records. |
| Deeds, liens, recorded judgments | County recorder for the county where the property lies | A separate office and index from the Superior Court, combined in some counties only. |
Who Sends Us California Work
Six recurring requests, and the California constraint each one runs into.
Counsel in Civil Litigation
Which findings need a courthouse visit rather than a screen
Enforcement of a Judgment
Recorder indexes county by county, on an existing judgment
Servers With Papers Out
A confirmed address in the right county before anyone drives
Probate and Beneficiaries
Heirs traced across a state where families spread six counties wide
Lenders Holding a Bad Note
A balance already in default, never a pending application
Property Owners Post-Tenancy
A departed tenant and a balance owed, never a screening decision
How a California File Is Worked
Tier first, identity second, counties written down, coverage stated.
Sort the Request Into a Tier
Whether the record being asked for is sealed by statute, courthouse-only by rule, or remotely available is settled before anything is searched, so the answer that comes back can be interpreted correctly.
Fix the Identity Before the Address
At the population scale of the larger counties a name match carries almost no weight on its own. The individual is separated from their namesakes documentarily before any address is treated as theirs.
Choose the Counties, With Reasons
Which of the 58 get worked and in what order is decided at the start and written down, so a thin first pass can be revisited against the reasoning rather than restarted from instinct.
Report the Tier Alongside the Finding
Where a record type was closed to us by statute or rule, the report names the provision instead of showing a blank, so a client can tell an absence from an inaccessibility.
Two Things This Firm Will Not Do in California
Both of them are things California itself legislated against.
No tenant screening, and California explains the reason better than we could
Property owners and lenders both appear in the audience grid above, so this needs stating without softening. The status this firm does not hold is that of a consumer reporting agency, and a California research file from us is correspondingly not a consumer report. That puts four uses off limits, in our hands and in yours once delivered: deciding a tenancy application, deciding a hire or a promotion, deciding whether credit is advanced, and pricing or writing an insurance policy. Screening a prospective tenant and screening a job candidate are the two requests that reach us most often, and neither is work this firm performs.
California adds a second reason on top of the federal one, and it is specific enough to be worth spelling out. CCP 1161.2 exists to stop an eviction filing becoming a permanent mark against a tenant. The Legislature sealed the file, sealed the index, sealed the register of actions, and opened them to the public only where the landlord actually prevailed – and then made the clerk write to the tenant to say so. A firm that turned around and sold eviction-history screening would be selling precisely the product that statute was written to prevent. So an owner or lender who needs to evaluate somebody currently applying gets pointed to a regulated screening provider with adverse-action notices and a dispute route. What we do for them sits at the opposite end of the timeline: the person has already gone, and the balance already exists.
Nobody here invents a reason to be handed a record
The inputs are the public record and data held under licence. When this firm contacts a Superior Court clerk, a county recorder’s office, an employer or a member of somebody’s family, it does so as itself and for the reason it actually has; there is no invented identity and no invented errand, and no purpose is manufactured to unlock a document that would otherwise stay shut. Account contents are outside the work in both directions – we do not obtain them and we do not report them – and where a matter genuinely hinges on what sits inside an account, that is a subpoena or a court order sought by your attorney rather than anything purchasable. The permissible purpose behind a California request goes into the file at the moment the file is created, so the question of why the research happened has a documented answer a year later rather than a remembered one.
Requests We Decline, and the Programme That Names the Harm
California’s Secretary of State describes the danger in the exact words this trade would otherwise use about itself.
Safe at Home is run by the California Secretary of State’s Office and has been since the programme began in July 1999, under legislation passed in 1998. It offers “a substitute mailing address to receive first class, certified, and registered mail for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, human trafficking, child abduction, and elder or dependent adult abuse, as well as reproductive health care workers and public entity employees who are in fear for their safety.” State, county and city agencies accept that substitute in place of a residential address.
Read the Secretary of State’s own explanation of what the substitute replaces: a residential or mailing address “where a victim can be tracked down“, so as to keep the residence “confidential and out of the hands of someone who might want to harm the victim.” Tracking somebody down through records is, without any qualification, the trade this page describes. California built a programme for the express purpose of stopping that trade working in one class of case, and the reason it did so is that this class of case is the one in which people get hurt.
So those requests are declined here. If what is being asked for is the whereabouts of a former partner, of a person who obtained a restraining order, or of anyone who appears to have moved specifically to be beyond the requester’s reach, the answer is no – to the full request, to any trimmed-down version of it, and to passing it to a firm that would take it. The phrasing changes nothing, nor does the reason offered, nor the account given of the relationship. A page that has just spent two thousand words on how California records can be worked owes the reader that sentence at the same volume.
The court rules point the same way, which is not a coincidence
Look again at the eleven categories rule 2.503(c) keeps off the internet and notice how many of them are protective: domestic violence prevention proceedings under the Family Code, civil harassment under section 527.6, workplace violence under 527.8, school violence under 527.85, elder and dependent adult abuse under Welfare and Institutions Code 15657.03, and gun violence prevention under Penal Code 18100 to 18205. Six of the eleven concern somebody who asked a court for protection. California decided those records should be readable at a courthouse counter and not published to the world, and the reasoning is not obscure. We treat that as an instruction rather than as an obstacle with a workaround.
Reading this because somebody may be looking for you
Then you have arrived at the wrong sort of firm, and saying that is more use to you than anything we could sell. There are three places worth your time instead: a local California domestic violence or victim services organisation, the Superior Court that can grant or extend a protective order, and the Secretary of State’s Safe at Home office, which administers the substitute address itself. Enrolment is not something we handle, safety planning is not something we are trained for, and nothing set out above is intended as advice on keeping your own address out of the record.
Serving papers is the separate case
Court-connected work is not caught by any of this. Where a California case number, a named defendant and an attorney of record arrive together, the errand originates with the court, and the court is waiting for exactly the result being asked for. What we test is whether the stated reason could be verified against a filing by somebody who was not us, or whether the only thing it would verify is that one person wants another person’s location. That test is applied and its answer written down before a California file is opened. Where the underlying worry is instead how much life a claim has left in it, that sits in our note on the California debt collection statute of limitations.
What a California Report Distinguishes
Every finding names the county and the office it came from, so the same document can be pulled again without us. Counties that were not worked appear as counties that were not worked, because at this scale an unqualified result implies a statewide search nobody ran. Most importantly, the report separates three things that all look identical on a screen: a record that does not exist, a record sealed by statute, and a record that is public but only at a courthouse counter. Where a provision closed a door, the report cites the provision. Nothing reaches that report except the public record and data we are licensed to hold; no California matter is taken up until its permissible purpose has been stated and filed; and both of those conditions have governed the work since 2004.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can’t I find a California eviction case?
Because Code of Civil Procedure section 1161.2 closes it. The clerk may allow access to the file, the index and the register of actions only to a party or their attorney, to somebody supplying a plaintiff name, a defendant name and the premises address including the unit number, to a resident of the premises who shows proof of residency, or to a person holding a court order granted on good cause. It opens to the general public sixty days after filing only if judgment against all defendants was entered for the plaintiff within those sixty days, or by court order where the plaintiff won at trial later. If the tenant won, the case settled, or it was dismissed, it never becomes publicly visible.
Can I use an eviction record to find someone’s current address?
No, and the statute is designed that way. The route into a sealed unlawful detainer file for a non-party requires supplying the premises address including any apartment or unit number. It is a lookup keyed to a place rather than to a person, so you have to know where somebody lived before the clerk will let you see the case. That makes California eviction records useless as a locating tool for anyone outside the case, which is why we do not offer them as one.
Which California court records are available online?
Rule of Court 2.503(b) requires a court holding them electronically to provide access both remotely and at the courthouse to registers of actions, calendars and indexes in all cases, plus all court records in civil cases apart from eleven listed exceptions. Rule 2.503(c) lists those exceptions as records the court must make available at the courthouse but may not put online: Family Code proceedings including domestic violence prevention, juvenile, guardianship and conservatorship, mental health, criminal, minors’ compromises, civil harassment under section 527.6, workplace violence under 527.8, school violence under 527.85, elder abuse under Welfare and Institutions Code 15657.03, and gun violence prevention under Penal Code 18100 to 18205.
I can see the case index but not the documents. Is the case sealed?
Usually not. That pattern is exactly what rule 2.503 produces in the eleven excepted categories: subdivision (b)(1) keeps the register of actions, calendar and index remotely accessible in all cases, while subdivision (c) confines the underlying records to courthouse access. So an online docket with no retrievable documents is the normal appearance of a public criminal or family matter, not evidence that anything has been sealed. A sealing order is a different thing and would need to be established separately.
Does anyone hold a bulk copy of California court records?
Not lawfully. Rule 2.503(f) permits a court to grant electronic access to a record only where it is identified by case number, caption or party name, and only on a case-by-case basis. The Advisory Committee comment states that the limitations prohibit bulk distribution, resting on the difference between obtaining information from a specific case file and obtaining aggregate information that could be manipulated to compile personal profiles, which it says may be exploited commercially at the expense of individual privacy. California research therefore means identified lookups against named parties, with a recorded reason for each.
Does every California court publish the same amount online?
No. Rule 2.503(d) defines the requirement to provide electronic access “to the extent it is feasible to do so” as meaning a court must do so to the extent it determines it has the resources and technical capacity. So availability varies court by court as well as by case type, and a thin result from one Superior Court says nothing about what a neighbouring one publishes. We check what that specific court makes available before describing a result as an absence.
How many counties should a California search cover?
More than one, almost always. The state has 58 counties and its metropolitan regions cross county lines routinely – somebody leaving Los Angeles County, which holds 9,757,179 people on its own, commonly lands in Orange at 3,170,435, Riverside at 2,529,933 or San Bernardino at 2,214,281 without changing anything else about their life. We decide which counties get worked and in what order at the outset, write the reasoning down, and list the counties that were not reached, because at this scale an unqualified result implies a statewide search that nobody actually ran.
Will you locate someone who is in the Safe at Home programme?
No. Safe at Home has been run by the California Secretary of State since July 1999 under legislation passed the year before, and it issues a substitute mailing address that state, county and city agencies must accept in place of a residence. Eligibility reaches survivors of several kinds of violence and abuse, and it also now covers reproductive health care workers and public entity employees who fear for their safety. The Secretary of State’s own description of what the substitute replaces is an address at which a victim can be tracked down – which is a plain statement of the harm. So a request that reads as an effort to reach a former partner, a protective-order applicant, or anyone who has put distance in place on purpose is declined here, whatever framing arrives with it.
Open a California File
Send the name, whatever address history exists even if it is only a county, and the purpose the research is meant to serve. We will sort the request into its access tier before searching anything, separate the individual from their namesakes documentarily before treating any address as theirs, decide which of the 58 counties get worked and record why, and name the provision wherever a statute or a rule rather than an absence of record is what produced a blank. Where enough arrives to work with, a first read normally reaches you within 24 hours. Would rather talk it through first? Get in touch and we will say honestly whether California records are likely to answer the question.
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