Sex Offender Registry Lookup

Every U.S. state and territory maintains a public sex offender registry, and there's also a national tool (NSOPW) that searches them all at once. This page routes you straight to the official source for your state — we don't store or reproduce any registry data ourselves, so you're always seeing the current, authoritative information directly from the government agency responsible for it.

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National Search: NSOPW.gov

The U.S. Department of Justice's National Sex Offender Public Website searches every state, tribal, and territory registry from one place. Best starting point if you're not sure which state to check.

Search NSOPW →

Search by State

Every state's registry is accessible through NSOPW.gov — the actively-maintained DOJ search that routes to each state's current registry system. Pick your state below to open it there.

How Sex Offender Registries Work

Registries were established under federal legislation — most importantly the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 (SORNA) — which created national minimum standards while leaving each state to run its own system. That's why the search experience varies so much: some states let you search by name only, others by address radius, others show interactive maps. All of them are authoritative for offenders registered in that state, and all of them roll up into the NSOPW national search.

The three federal tiers

Under SORNA, registered offenses fall into three tiers based on the underlying crime, and the tier determines how often the person must re-register and how long they remain on the registry:

Tier I — the least serious registrable offenses; typically 15 years of registration with annual verification
Tier II — more serious offenses; 25 years, verification every six months
Tier III — the most serious offenses, including offenses against children; lifetime registration with quarterly verification

Not every state uses the federal tier system directly — some use their own classification (Levels 1/2/3, or "Sexually Violent Predator" designations) — but every registered record includes the underlying conviction, so you're never guessing at severity when you read a listing.

What registries do — and don't — tell you

A public registry entry generally shows the person's name, photograph, physical description, current registered address, the offense of conviction, and often the date of last verification. What it does not tell you is whether that person has committed any new offenses since — only the underlying conviction that put them on the registry in the first place. Registries also don't include people whose offenses fall outside registration requirements, unregistered individuals in violation, or people accused but not convicted.

Use registry data responsibly. These lookups exist to help families make informed safety decisions. Harassment, vigilantism, or discrimination based on registry status is illegal in every state and undermines the system's public-safety purpose. If you have a specific concern, contact local law enforcement.

Practical searches families actually run

Before moving: check the destination address against the state registry's map view. Most state sites let you draw a radius or view a neighborhood-level map.
Before hiring a babysitter, tutor, or caregiver: a name search on NSOPW covers every state at once.
When your kid starts spending time at a friend's house: the map view over your area gives context without requiring a specific name.
Buying a house: the registry check pairs naturally with the safety and hazard research on our other tools — pattern captured in our neighborhood research guide.

If information looks wrong

Every state registry publishes a contact for reporting errors or apparent unregistered offenders. Because we don't reproduce registry data on this site, corrections always need to go to the source — the state's own registry office is the only entity that can update a record.

Part of a Full Neighborhood Safety Picture

Registry data is one signal among many. For the broader safety context of an area, our ZIP Code Search gives you crime rate estimates, real Census demographics, and a comfortable-living income benchmark for any ZIP. Flood zones, wildfire activity, seismic history, and local weather round out the natural-hazard side — see exactly where every number comes from on our Data & Methodology page.