A guide to using North Carolina’s online court records system
Ever read a crime story in The Charlotte Observer and wanted to learn more about the charges someone faces? Need to double-check when you’re supposed to go to traffic court? Curious who’s suing the mayor?
There’s a tool for that.
As we’ve reported, it’s not perfect. Records aren’t always posted to eCourts promptly — or at all; there are some quirks; at the time of this writing, about a dozen counties aren’t yet in the system.
It’s confusing at first, no doubt. But eCourts, the state’s free online court record system, has its uses.
Instead of driving to the courthouse or calling the clerk’s office, you can find police affidavits, lawsuits, arrest warrants and more with a few mouse clicks. Here at the Observer, we use it daily.
Now, I’ll show you how to.
Make sure your case is local, not federal. If you want to research a federal case, this guide won’t help you.
A different online database, PACER, stores federal records.
If you have paperwork from the case you want to learn more about, check the top. It should say whether yours is a federal or state case.
Another good rule of thumb: If the arresting agency is local — say, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department — the case is probably in the local court system. If that agency is federal — like the FBI — it’s likely in federal court.
Searching for a case by number
To get to eCourts’ search function, go to nccourts.gov/portal. Then click the Smart Search button.
There are two ways to find someone’s file.
A case number will zero in on the specific file you’re looking for. You will need to have that number ahead of time, though.
I’m not going to single out any one person facing charges for the sake of this guide, but don’t worry if you don’t have a case number. We’ll get to that soon.
If you do have one, search it as is.
That case number should pop up as a link. Click it. You will see a page full of information. The person’s charges, the date they were filed and the agency that filed them are all at the top of the page.
Further down, under Case Events, you can find a listing of different files in the case — that person’s arrest warrants, police affidavits and the like. Whatever paper trail there is should be listed. So long as those documents have been uploaded by the clerk’s office, you can download the records and read them yourself. Click the PDF icons.
You can also see the next hearing date.
Searching by someone’s name
Go to the same link from before. Again, hit Smart Search.
Format your search this way: LASTNAME,FIRSTNAME. If you don’t know of anyone facing charges, maybe check our crime coverage and look for someone with a unique name.
If case numbers with links do populate, you’ve found cases tied to that name. Click them for the information I described in the last section.
Once we search, we see the last case number we clicked and several others. Bear in mind that every John Smith is not the same John Smith. But we can find clues. PDFs might include birthdays to compare, middle names might be listed and so on.
When searching, you can also select Advanced Filtering Options to narrow things down.
You can search law enforcement agencies this way, too. Look up Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and you’ll find lawsuits against the department, court petitions filed by officers and more.
Some codes you should know
If you use the search I just described to look up a public figure, like a police chief or a mayor in a big city, you will probably find links. To be clear, that doesn’t mean they’re facing criminal charges. It could just be a lawsuit, an old traffic ticket or something else.
Every case number will begin with the year the case began, followed by a code telling you whether it’s civil or criminal or something else, followed by a unique number, followed by a three-digit code for whatever county it’s in. (Mecklenburg County’s code is 590.)
CR means a criminal case. CV means a civil case, like a lawsuit. IF means infraction. There are others, too.
Don’t assume; read the records. When searching a person’s name, they could pop up as a defendant or a plaintiff. ECourts is broad like that.
Checking the warrant box
When I was a breaking news reporter at the Asheville Citizen Times, I would wake up at 6 a.m. every weekday and go to the Buncombe County magistrate’s office. There, I’d thumb through arrest warrants and search warrants from the day before, looking for a good story.
Now, I do that online.
If you want to find all new arrest warrants, search warrants or lawsuits filed in the last week or so, there are codes you can enter in Smart Search. (Again, same link.)
Criminal warrants are under 25CR*, search warrants 25SW*, lawsuits 25CV* and infractions under 25IF*. Narrow your search by whatever dates you’d like.
If you are reading this in 2026 or 2027, remember to change the number to correspond with whatever year you’re in. Cases from 2024 start with 24, cases from 2023 start with 23 and so on. I assume eCourts will continue to use that system.
(Note: I and others have seen glitches when narrowing these searches to Mecklenburg County. So, I usually skip that step and manually click on each Mecklenburg link I want to read. It takes longer, but such is life.)
Be ready for missing files
North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts spokesperson Graham Wilson shared this info for the public: Older cases might be missing PDFs.
“Older closed cases may not contain documents because the records retention period has passed and those records were lawfully destroyed by the clerk’s office prior to eCourts,” Wilson wrote in an email. “Case details (defendant name, charge(s), disposition, etc.) are still available on Portal.”
You will likely run into another problem that we’ve grown accustomed to at the Observer. A file will be listed, but there will be no PDF to download and read. Like we reported last year, the clerk’s office is choosing to redact information now that records live online. That appears to be slowing down the public’s access.
Still, these are public records. You are entitled to read them. If a file isn’t on eCourts, your best bet is to call the county clerk’s office and politely ask that they post the missing PDF. In my experience, they’re accommodating.
There are lots of other parts of eCourts to try out, but the above searches are how I use it about 90 percent of the time. It’s young enough that it’s still changing, so your best bet is to play with it and experiment.
Happy digging.
Ryan Oehrli covers criminal justice in the Charlotte region for The Charlotte Observer. His work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The Observer maintains full editorial control of its journalism.
This story was originally published August 13, 2025 at 5:00 AM.