Pennsylvania Public Records Search — Free Official Government Sources

Pennsylvania is unusually centralized for a state with 67 counties, largely because of the Unified Judicial System portal. UJS gives free statewide docket search across the magisterial district courts, the Courts of Common Pleas, and the appellate courts, and the docket sheets it returns as PDFs include charges, dispositions, sentences, bail, and attorney of record. Very few states hand that much criminal detail to the public at no cost, which makes the UJS Portal the reference example when we describe what a good statewide system looks like on our court records hub.

The state's open-records statute is the Right-to-Know Law, rewritten in 2008 to flip the presumption: Commonwealth and local agency records are presumed public and the agency carries the burden of proving an exemption. Agencies have five business days to grant, deny, or invoke a 30-day extension, and denials are appealed to the independent Office of Open Records, which publishes its final determinations as searchable precedent. The judiciary is deliberately outside the RTKL — court records are governed by the Supreme Court's own public access policy instead, which is why case files and financial records of the courts follow different rules.

Business filings run through the Department of State's business entity search on the modernized Business Filing Services platform, where entity status, registered office, officers, and scanned filing images are free to view. Since 2025 Pennsylvania also requires most domestic and foreign entities to file an annual report, replacing the old decennial report, so an entity's standing now changes on a yearly cycle worth checking before you rely on it. UCC financing statements are filed centrally with the Department of State rather than at the county, unlike deeds and mortgages.

Property records stay local: each county's Recorder of Deeds holds deeds, mortgages, and liens, while the county assessment office sets values. Pennsylvania is a disclosure state — the 1% state realty transfer tax plus local transfer tax is calculated on the actual consideration, so recorded deeds and transfer tax statements show what a property sold for. The wrinkle is assessment: Pennsylvania has no statutory reassessment cycle, so counties operate on base-year values that can be decades old, and comparing an assessed value to a market price without applying the county's common level ratio produces nonsense. Philadelphia and Allegheny County run their own parcel systems (Atlas and the Real Estate Portal) rather than a shared statewide viewer, a distinction we cover on the property records hub.