About Open Public Records

What we do

Open Public Records helps people find and evaluate public-record access through state, county, city, court, and agency sources. Coverage and available record types vary by jurisdiction.

We are not a directory. We are not a data broker. We are not a background-check service. We do not sell records, we do not sell access, and we do not take advertising from companies that do.

Who we are

The site is run by Search Systems, an independent public-records research company founded in 1997. We have been doing this work for almost thirty years.

Why we built this

We built Open Public Records because somebody had to. There are thousands of "find public records" websites on the internet. Almost all of them are directories. They list a phone number, link to an official portal, and walk away.

They do not tell you the portal has been down for two years. They do not tell you the agency charges fifty dollars for a record the law calls free. They do not tell you the county clerk office stopped answering its phone in 2019. Most of them are AI content farms running the same template over forty thousand pages.

We are not that, and we will not become that.

How we work

• Every public-record portal is physically tested - we visit the URL, time the response, and verify it returns what it claims.
• Every agency contact phone is called and logged.
• Every state, county, and city gets a letter grade based on real delivery, not marketing claims.
• We integrate federal data sources: DOJ, FBI, EPA, IRS, CFPB, HHS-OIG, FDIC, NPPES, FCC, OFAC, and 23 local arrest feeds.
• News is aggregated from 69 RSS feeds across U.S. Attorney offices, FBI field offices, SEC, FTC, OCC, and IRS-CI.

How we search court-case pages

Each court-case page shows the public docket entry and then checks the names listed on that case against other public sources. All of these checks are name-based only. We have not verified that any record, person, or business shown is the same individual or entity named in the case. Results may include relatives, namesakes, businesses with similar names, or wholly unrelated parties who happen to share the name. Treat every result as a research starting point, not as established fact. This information is for general informational purposes and may not be used for any purpose covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (credit, employment, housing, insurance, tenant screening, and similar decisions). See our FCRA Notice.

• Public arrest and booking feeds. We check open-data arrest feeds where the publishing agency includes full names: Dallas PD, King County WA Jail, Providence RI Police, Montgomery County MD, Norfolk VA PD, and the San Diego County Sheriff. Many city police departments (for example LAPD, NYPD, Chicago, Cincinnati) redact names; we mark those as anonymized and cannot confirm a name match there.
• U.S. Treasury sanctions list (SDN). The U.S. Treasury keeps a list of people and companies that Americans can't legally do business with, including terrorists, drug traffickers, and sanctioned foreign officials. We refresh our copy daily from OpenSanctions.org.
• Federal healthcare exclusion list (HHS-OIG LEIE). The Office of Inspector General publishes the List of Excluded Individuals/Entities: people and companies banned from Medicare, Medicaid, and all federal health programs for reasons such as fraud, patient abuse, license revocation, or controlled-substance violations. Source: oig.hhs.gov/exclusions/.
• Other cases with the same name. We search our archive of U.S. court cases for other cases where a party shares the same last name (or business name). Sharing a name does not mean it is the same person or entity.

Contact

Press inquiries, data corrections, removal requests, or general questions: contact us.

For FCRA-related questions, see our FCRA Notice. For privacy and data-removal requests, see our Privacy Policy.