List Of Offences That Will Be Filtered From A DBS Certificate

Some offences have the opportunity to be “filtered” from appearing in your DBS check, which means they won’t appear at all.

This is different to when offences become “spent”, as spent convictions and cautions are still disclosed on Standard and Enhanced DBS checks.

List Of Offences That Will Be Filtered From A DBS Certificate

There’s no exhaustive list of offences that will be filtered from a DBS certificate because the amount of time it takes to filter an offence depends on the age of the offender along with the severity of the offence.

The table below is a handy way to check how long it takes until your offence is filtered:

So, for example, if a 25-year-old gets a caution for a non-specified offence, it will appear on their DBS check for the next 6 years.

Another example: A 17-year-old is convicted for a non-specified offence – this will appear on their DBS check for the next 5.5 years, unless the conviction resulted in a prison sentence, in which case it will never be filtered.

What Is A Specified Offence?

We’ve mentioned this term quite a bit, and without knowing what a Specified Offence is, it’s impossible to say when an offence will be filtered. Put simply:

Specified Offences are offences which will never be filtered from your DBS certificate.

We can’t provide the whole list of specified offences here – it’s 26 pages long. Instead, here is a link to the government’s list:

List of Specified Offences

We recommend searching within the list for your offence, to see if it’s there.

Summary

In summary, there isn’t a single list of offences that will be filtered from a DBS certificate as such, but we’ve provided all the necessary resources on this page to find out which of your offences will be filtered, and how long it’ll take.