Rhode Island fair housing law does not protect a criminal record
The Rhode Island Fair Housing Practices Act lists what a landlord may not consider, and the list is long: race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, lawful source of income, military status as a veteran with an honorable discharge or an honorable or general administrative discharge, servicemember in the armed forces, country of ancestral origin, disability, age, familial status, and whether a tenant or applicant is or has been the victim of domestic abuse.
A criminal record is not on that list. The Act does not mention criminal records at all — and § 34-37-4(c) preserves, in terms, an owner's privilege to "establish standards and preferences and set terms, conditions, limitations, or specifications" in renting, provided those standards do not discriminate on the grounds the Act does list. A criminal-record standard is not one of those grounds, so nothing in the Act disturbs it.
So a Rhode Island landlord may run a background check, may have a policy about criminal records, and may turn you down on one. That is the honest starting point.
Which is exactly why the record itself is the thing to deal with
If the law will not stop a landlord looking, the useful move is to change what there is to find. That is what expungement and sealing do, and it is why housing is one of the most common reasons people file.
§ 12-1.3-4(a) releases a person whose record is expunged "from all penalties and disabilities resulting from the crime." § 12-1.3-4(c) is the operative one for a tenant screening: the custodian of the records "shall not disclose the existence of the records upon inquiry from any source," subject to a short list of exceptions — the individual themselves, a sentencing court, a bar admission or disciplinary body, the commissioner of elementary and secondary education, and a law enforcement agency in a narrow situation. A tenant screening company is not among them.
And § 12-1.3-4(d) provides that anyone who willfully releases or allows access to records they know to have been expunged shall be civilly liable.
A point of precision worth having
§ 12-1.3-4(b) — the provision that lets you say you were never convicted — names "any application for employment, license, or other civil right or privilege, or any appearance as a witness." It does not name housing in terms.
Whether a rental application is an "other civil right or privilege" is an interpretive question, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. What is not in doubt is the rest: the penalties and disabilities are lifted, and the custodian is directed not to disclose the record's existence. In practice that is what decides a tenant screening.
If your case never ended in a conviction
A great many housing problems are caused by charges that were dismissed, and those are a different and easier procedure — sealing, not expungement, under § 12-1-12.1.
If your case was dismissed under Rule 48(a) on or after 1 January 2023, it was sealed automatically 10 to 20 days after the dismissal, with no motion and no fee. If a Rule 48(a) dismissal came earlier, the clerk can seal it administratively at your request. The full treatment is on sealing dismissed charges.
It is worth checking whether that has actually happened. An arrest that was dismissed years ago can still be sitting in a database somewhere, and a screening company that bought the data before the sealing may never have refreshed it.
Check what a landlord would actually see
Before you assume the worst, look. The Judiciary's public portal is free and takes about ten minutes, and it shows you the same public record a screening company starts from.
The official version is the BCI report from the Attorney General — $5, in person or by post. If you are going to file anything, file from that.
What to do next
Work out which statute governs your case. The eligibility checker does it in about two minutes and cites the section behind every answer — and it will tell you if your record is one of the kinds that clears on its own with nothing filed at all.
None of this is a guarantee about any particular landlord. It is about making sure the record they find is the record you are actually entitled to have.
