Public records in Virginia

It gives you a right to request records held by government bodies in Virginia, and it obliges those bodies to respond. That is a right of access to what an agency holds - not a search engine, and not a database of people.

Two consequences people are regularly surprised by. First, a records law says nothing about information held by private companies: employers, landlords, banks and social platforms are outside it entirely. Second, the right is to records, not to answers - you generally have to identify what you want well enough for someone to find it, and “everything you have about this person” is usually not a valid request.

Every state also exempts categories of record from disclosure, and those exemptions are where most of the complexity lives. Assume the existence of a record is a separate question from whether it is releasable.

Start with the official guidance above when it requires a form or a particular submission route. Otherwise, this structure helps an agency identify existing records without turning your request into an open-ended question.

This is a drafting aid, not an official state form. Save the request, proof of delivery, every cost estimate, and every response in one place.

There is no single office. Records are held by whichever body created them, which is why “how do I get X in Virginia” has a different answer for each X:

• Court records - held by the court that heard the case. Some states run a statewide portal; others are county by county, and a few are both.
• Property records - usually the county recorder, assessor, or registry of deeds, and often searchable online.
• Vital records - birth, death, marriage, divorce. Held by a state vital-records office, a county clerk, or split between them, and typically the most restricted category.
• Criminal history - held by a state agency, with access rules that differ sharply from state to state.
• Business filings- the state’s corporate registry, generally the most open of the categories.

We’ve deliberately not named the specific office for each of these. They differ by record type and by county, they change, and a confident wrong pointer costs you an afternoon. Search for the record type plus Virginia on a .gov domain, and start from the office that would have created the record.

Records being public does not make every use of them lawful. In the United States the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs information used to decide someone’s eligibility for employment, credit, housing, insurance, or tenancy.

For those decisions you need a consumer reporting agency operating under the FCRA, with the subject’s consent and their right to see and dispute what was reported. A public-records search - ours included - meets none of those requirements, and DeepSearch states plainly that it is not a consumer reporting agency. That is a real constraint, not boilerplate.

Reading a public record to satisfy yourself that someone is who they say they are is ordinary. Using it to monitor or pressure a person who doesn’t want to hear from you is not, and the information having been public is not a defence.

This is general information, not legal advice. Records laws are amended and interpreted by courts; if a decision matters, take proper advice.