What changed on August 10, 2026
If you hire for any role that touches San Francisco, these rules already apply to you. Amendments to San Francisco’s Fair Chance Ordinance (FCO) took effect on August 10, 2026, and they reach further than most local ban-the-box laws. The Board of Supervisors passed them on July 7, and Mayor Daniel Lurie signed them on July 10. Penalties have doubled, out-of-state convictions have gained new protections, and your adverse action process has picked up extra steps. If you already build hiring around fair chance compliance, this is the layer that now sits on top.
Who the FCO covers
The FCO reaches any employer doing business in San Francisco with five or more employees worldwide, counting your entire workforce, not just your SF staff. A role is covered once it involves about eight or more hours of work per week in the city, including hybrid and remote roles where someone regularly works in San Francisco. If you run a centralized screening process, any SF-qualifying role follows the FCO, not just your home-state rules. California’s statewide Fair Chance Act applies on top, and the more protective rule controls.
The three big changes
Out-of-state conviction protections
You can no longer use an out-of-state conviction or unresolved arrest when the underlying conduct is lawful in California and falls into one of four newly protected categories: abortion-related healthcare, gender-affirming care, drag performances, and pregnancy loss including miscarriage and stillbirth. These records can never count as a “Directly-Related Conviction” under the FCO, so your screening criteria and adjudication matrices need to mark them non-actionable for every SF-covered role.
Stronger adverse action steps
The FCO already gives a candidate seven days to respond to a pre-adverse action notice. Now, when someone responds inside that window, you must confirm receipt within 14 days, delay the final decision for a reasonable period while you review the new information, and reconsider. If the candidate makes a reasonable showing that your decision rests on a conviction that is not directly related to the job, you have to withdraw the adverse action. One deadline closes the process, and it is not new. Once you take final adverse action you have 30 days to notify the candidate of it, counted from the date they responded or, if they did not respond, from the date of your original notice. The hiring decision stays yours; the ordinance only structures how you reach it.
Doubled penalties
Administrative penalties from the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (OLSE) now run $1,000 per affected individual for a first violation, $2,000 for a second, and $4,000 after that, double the prior amounts. Liquidated damages in a civil lawsuit rise from $500 to $1,000 per person for each day a violation continues. Mishandle five candidates for two weeks and the liquidated damages alone reach $70,000, before legal fees or an OLSE investigation.
The baseline you should already meet
The amendments build on rules that are already in force, so confirm these are in place first: no questions about conviction history or unresolved arrests until after a conditional offer, including indirect ones like “Can you pass a background check?”; a standing off-limits list covering arrests without conviction, dismissed or expunged records, juvenile matters, infractions, decriminalized conduct, diversion programs, and any conviction more than seven years old measured from sentencing; the required Fair Chance statement in every SF job ad; the current FCO poster in English, Chinese, Spanish, and any language spoken by at least 5% of your workforce; an individualized assessment before any adverse decision; and three years of records available to OLSE.
Your San Francisco compliance checklist
- Map coverage. List every role with about eight or more hours a week in San Francisco, including hybrid and remote. Five or more employees worldwide plus one SF-touching role means the FCO applies.
- Clean up applications and ads. Remove criminal-history questions and self-disclosure checkboxes from SF applications, confirm the Fair Chance statement is on every posting including third-party boards, and delete blanket exclusions like “no felons.”
- Reset background check criteria. Tell your screening provider to suppress the off-limits categories for SF roles and to flag out-of-state records tied to abortion care, gender-affirming care, drag performances, and pregnancy loss as non-actionable.
- Rebuild the adverse action workflow. Add the 14-day receipt confirmation, a documented pause to reconsider, a clear path to withdraw when a conviction is not directly related, and the 30-day deadline to notify the candidate of any final adverse action. Automated adverse action keeps the timing and notices correct as the process gets more complex.
- Train HR, recruiters, and hiring managers. Cover the pre-offer timing rule, the full off-limits list, the new out-of-state protections, and how to run an individualized assessment.
- Update policies and offer letters. Reflect both the California Fair Chance Act and the SF FCO, and add an escalation path for complex out-of-state records.
- Refresh posters and notices. Confirm the latest city poster is displayed in every required language and that FCO rights appear in onboarding.
- Tighten recordkeeping. Store ads, applications, reports, assessment notes, and adverse action correspondence for three years, organized for an OLSE audit.
How a screening partner keeps this manageable
The 2026 amendments make San Francisco compliance more demanding to run, and a screening partner set up for this work absorbs much of that complexity before it reaches your team. Jurisdiction-specific filtering routes SF positions through their own ruleset, so an out-of-state conviction gets tested against California law before anyone sees it. A structured adverse action process captures job relevance, time elapsed, and rehabilitation evidence, which doubles as the audit trail the reconsideration step now requires.
KRESS supplies the verified data and the compliant workflow, plus a real person to call when a record does not look right, and the hiring decision stays with you. Female-owned and Houston-based, KRESS has screened since 1997, and you can read the full text on the city’s official Fair Chance Ordinance page.
Frequently asked questions
When do the SF Fair Chance Ordinance amendments take effect?
They took effect on August 10, 2026. The Board of Supervisors passed them on July 7 and Mayor Lurie signed them on July 10. The existing FCO remains in force too, so there is no grace period for the rules you already follow.
Does the SF FCO apply to employers outside San Francisco?
Yes, if you do business in San Francisco and have five or more employees worldwide. The role has to involve about eight or more hours of work per week in the city, and that includes remote or hybrid roles where the employee regularly performs SF-based work.
What convictions cannot be used against applicants now?
The existing off-limits list still applies: non-conviction arrests, expunged records, juvenile adjudications, convictions older than seven years, infractions, and decriminalized conduct. The amendments add out-of-state convictions for abortion-related healthcare, gender-affirming care, drag performances, and pregnancy loss including miscarriage and stillbirth. None can support an adverse decision.
How long do I have to tell a candidate about a final adverse action?
Thirty days. The clock runs from the date the candidate responded to your pre-adverse action notice or, if they never responded, from the date you sent that notice.
What are the penalties after August 2026?
OLSE administrative penalties are $1,000 for a first violation, $2,000 for a second, and $4,000 for later ones, each per affected individual. Liquidated damages in a civil suit are $1,000 per person for each day the violation continues. Every figure is double the pre-amendment amount.
How is the FCO different from California’s Fair Chance Act?
Both bar criminal-history questions before a conditional offer. The SF FCO goes further: a broader off-limits list including the seven-year cap, required job-posting language, OLSE reporting, and the out-of-state protections. In San Francisco you comply with both, applying whichever rule protects the applicant more.
These rules are in force now, and with penalties doubled the margin for a misstep is thin. If you want your SF screening rules, adverse action workflow, and notices checked against the new requirements, KRESS will walk you through a compliance review of your San Francisco hiring. Get a quote to start, or reach out to our team directly.