Indiana Eviction Record Sealing Law 2025

Senate Enrolled Act 142 requires Indiana courts to seal an eviction case on the court's own motion, without requiring the tenant to file anything, when the case is dismissed, when a judgment is entered in the tenant's favor, or when a judgment against the tenant is later overturned on appeal.

[Cite: Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 142 (2025), P.L. 128-2025]

That's a meaningful shift in who carries the burden. Before this law, a tenant who won an eviction case outright still had to know to ask a court to seal that record, and many simply never did, leaving a case that legally favored them sitting visible in screening databases indefinitely.

Once a case is sealed, it isn't accessible to landlords during tenant screening.

[Cite: independent policy analyses of Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 142]

For a property manager running background checks on applicants, that means a sealed case simply won't surface, the same way it wouldn't have surfaced if the filing had never happened. A landlord relying on a screening report that predates a case's sealing, or on a screening vendor that hasn't updated its database, could still be working from outdated information even after the underlying case is legally sealed.

Not every favorable outcome triggers automatic sealing. A tenant who satisfies a money judgment, meaning they actually paid what the court ordered them to pay the landlord, has to petition the court to seal that case, though they can do so immediately once the judgment is paid off.

[Cite: Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 142 (2025), P.L. 128-2025]

Separately, a tenant can petition to seal a case seven years after a final order, as long as no money judgment was ever entered against them in that case.

[Cite: Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 142 (2025), P.L. 128-2025]

An earlier version of this bill moved toward fully automatic sealing across the board. Legislative committee testimony describes a deliberate shift away from that approach, driven by practical concerns about tasking courts with tracking down and sealing older cases, some of which lack complete or usable case numbers in the court system.

[Cite: legislative committee testimony on SB 142, as reported by contemporaneous Indiana legislative coverage]

The compromise that emerged lets a judge seal a case automatically at the moment a qualifying outcome occurs, while leaving the two other categories, satisfied judgments and old cases with no money owed, to a tenant-initiated petition process instead.

This is the point most worth being precise about. The automatic sealing mechanism is tied to case outcomes occurring on or after the effective date. It isn't a retroactive sweep that goes back and seals every eligible closed case sitting in Indiana's court system already.

[Cite: independent policy analyses of Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 142; legislative committee testimony on SB 142]

A tenant whose eviction case was dismissed in 2023, for example, doesn't automatically get that case sealed just because this law took effect in 2025. That tenant still has to file a motion asking a court to seal the older case, even though the underlying outcome, a dismissal, is exactly the kind of outcome that would trigger automatic sealing if it happened today.

This deserves being stated plainly rather than guessed at. Housing advocates specifically raised concerns during the bill's committee process, urging that sealed eviction records actually be removed from commercial tenant-screening databases, not just from court records. No source reviewed for this article, including contemporaneous coverage of that same committee testimony, identifies a specific penalty, fine, or liability provision in the enacted law for a landlord or screening company that continues to report or rely on a record that has since been sealed.

[Cite: legislative committee testimony on SB 142, as reported by contemporaneous Indiana legislative coverage]

That gap doesn't mean a landlord using a sealed record faces zero consequence under any circumstance; other general legal principles around inaccurate or improperly used screening information could still apply. But it does mean this specific statute, as far as available sources confirm, doesn't spell out a dedicated penalty scheme tied directly to violating the sealing requirement.

Given that sealed records won't appear in a compliant search, but that vendor databases don't necessarily update in real time, a property manager should treat a screening report showing an eviction filing as potentially incomplete rather than fully current, particularly for filings that are old enough to have gone through a dismissal, tenant win, or paid-off judgment.

[Cite: independent policy analyses of Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 142]

Beyond dismissals and tenant-favorable judgments at the trial level, the automatic sealing requirement also covers a judgment against the tenant that gets overturned on appeal.

[Cite: Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 142 (2025), P.L. 128-2025]

That's a distinct scenario from a straightforward win at the initial hearing. A tenant who lost at the trial court level but later succeeded on appeal is entitled to the same automatic sealing outcome as a tenant who was never found liable in the first place, once that appellate reversal becomes final.

The seven-year petition-based sealing option for cases with no money judgment entered remains relevant for a specific category of older case: one that didn't end in a clean dismissal or clear tenant win, but also never resulted in the tenant owing money.

[Cite: Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 142 (2025), P.L. 128-2025]

That's a narrower, slower path than the automatic mechanism, but it exists precisely for cases that don't fit neatly into the automatic-sealing categories described above.

The practical starting point is updating internal screening review procedures to account for the fact that a dismissed, tenant-won, or appeal-reversed Indiana eviction case occurring on or after July 1, 2025 should already be sealed and shouldn't surface in a properly updated screening report. Confirming with any third-party screening vendor how quickly their database reflects newly sealed Indiana records is worth doing directly, given that no source confirms a specific liability consequence tied to a vendor lagging behind.

Treating an applicant's own account of a dismissed or won eviction case as worth verifying directly, rather than assuming a screening report alone tells the complete current story, helps close the gap between what this law requires courts to do and what a screening database may actually reflect in practice.