EEOC Rescinds 2012 Guidance on Arrest and Conviction Records
The EEOC voted on Oct. 28, 2026 to immediately rescind its 2012 Title VII enforcement guidance on arrest and conviction records, yet the agency urged employers to keep individualized assessments of applicants' criminal histories.
On October 28, 2026, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted to rescind, effective immediately, its "Enforcement Guidance on the Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records in Employment Decisions Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act," announcing the action the following day. The withdrawn guidance had been published in 2012 and provided the agency's published framework for analyzing arrest and conviction records under Title VII's disparate-impact principles. Rescission withdraws that interpretive guidance, but it does not repeal Title VII itself or any judicial precedent construing it, and the reported material describes no change to other federal regimes such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act or to state fair-chance laws. It also notes no litigation challenging the vote and no replacement guidance, so whether further agency action, new guidance, or a court challenge follows remains uncertain. For employers, the operative point in the report is that withdrawal of federal guidance is not a licence to abandon individualized assessment: hiring criteria, screening-vendor instructions and adverse-action procedures should still document job-relatedness and business necessity for each applicant's record rather than treating any arrest or conviction as dispositive, and counsel should re-test those workflows and preserve decision documentation.