Felonies vs. Misdemeanors: What’s the Difference?

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Askia Johnson was a Half Moon Bay police officer charged with a felony: embezzling a substantial sum from the police officers’ association he belonged to. A felony conviction would have followed him for the rest of his life. It would have shaped whether he could vote, own a gun, or hold certain jobs.

Then Judge Forcum used a single provision of California law to reduce the conviction to a misdemeanor, and sentenced him to 45 days in jail and two years of probation, according to a patch.com summary.

The same conduct and the same dollar amount produced two very different legal outcomes, with different consequences for the rest of Johnson’s life.

The felony-versus-misdemeanor label changes almost everything about your life after court: voting, guns, jobs, housing, and whether you can stay in the country. But the label is not always fixed, it does not always follow the rules you would expect, and in a few areas a misdemeanor can hurt you as badly as any felony.

The Line Itself, and Why It Is Blurrier Than You Think

The federal definition is clean on paper. Under 18 U.S.C. § 932, a felony means “any offense under Federal or State law punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding 1 year”; 18 U.S.C. § 922 separately defines who is barred from possessing firearms. A misdemeanor sits below that line, with a shorter potential sentence.

Notice the word “punishable.” What matters is the maximum sentence the law allows, not the time you actually serve. You can spend zero days in jail and still carry a felony, because the statute you were convicted under authorized more than a year.

What that clean definition hides is how much human choice decides which side of the line you land on.

Many states have offenses called “wobblers.” California’s Penal Code section 17 is the classic example: certain crimes can be charged and sentenced either as a felony or a misdemeanor. Under section 17(b), a judge can declare the offense a misdemeanor by imposing a county-jail sentence or a non-custodial one (a sentence that doesn’t involve jail) instead of prison.

Oregon does something similar by statute. A crime punishable as a felony that is also punishable by up to a year in jail or by a fine “shall be classed as a misdemeanor” if the court imposes a punishment other than state prison. The exact same crime can show up in state statistics as either a felony or a misdemeanor, depending only on what sentence the judge hands down.

So who decides? Mostly not the defendant.

Prosecutors move first. Cornell’s Wex legal reference quotes the governing principle: the decision whether or not to prosecute, and what charge to bring … generally rests entirely in [the prosecutor’s] discretion. A summary of state supreme court precedent described district attorneys as holding “complete authority” over what charges to bring in their counties.

Then plea bargaining does most of the sorting. A study using internal prosecutor-office data examines how charge severity and plea offers serve as levers prosecutors use to steer outcomes.

That is why the Johnson case is not exotic. It is the system working normally.

Once There Is a Record, It Is Everywhere

Before we get to specific consequences, one uncomfortable fact. A record exists even if you were never convicted.

Justia’s criminal-law explainer puts it bluntly: “even if a criminal case does not result in a conviction, a record of an arrest and a criminal prosecution remains,” and that record “can follow a person for an entire lifetime, affecting his or her ability to find a job, continue with education, or even sign a lease.”

The record is not one file. Police departments, jails, probation offices, courts, and state repositories each keep their own entries. The FBI compiles its own Identity History Summary, the document people call a rap sheet. You can request your own copy for $18, and if you find an error, challenging it costs nothing, with an average response time of about 45 days, according to the FBI’s own guidance.

Knowing what is on your record matters because the felony-or-misdemeanor label affects how difficult that record is to seal or expunge, as later sections detail.

Jobs: The Label Is a Signal, Not Always a Bar

Employers see both felonies and misdemeanors on a background check. What differs is how they are allowed to use them.

Federal anti-discrimination law draws a hard line between arrests and convictions. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidance states that “the fact of an arrest does not establish that criminal conduct has occurred.” An exclusion based only on an arrest, the EEOC concluded, generally is not job related and consistent with business necessity. In other words, an arrest alone usually isn’t a fair reason to reject someone.

Convictions are treated as stronger evidence. Here the EEOC points employers to what it calls the Green factors: how serious the offense was, the time that has passed since the offense or completion of sentence, and the nature of the job sought. A recent felony fraud conviction connects more easily to a job handling money than a decade-old misdemeanor does.

State law adds a concrete layer.

Nine states, including Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont, apply ban-the-box policies to private employers.

Ban-the-box does not erase your record. It moves the question later in the process, after you have had a chance to be judged on your qualifications.

A Brennan Center for Justice analysis found that a felony conviction without imprisonment cuts annual earnings by 22 percent, and a misdemeanor conviction by 16 percent. The gap between the two is real, but the data also show that even a misdemeanor conviction is associated with a measurable long-term earnings reduction.

Employers, for their part, cite negligent-hiring liability and workplace-safety concerns as reasons for considering conviction records. The EEOC’s own guidance recognizes that screening can be lawful where it is job related and consistent with business necessity, a standard that leaves room for employers to weigh a recent, relevant conviction.

Housing: A Federal Standard That Just Reversed Itself

Housing is the area where the ground has shifted most recently, and understanding the shift tells you how much of this is policy rather than fixed law.

Prior HUD guidance leaned hard on the arrest-conviction distinction, stating that arrest records may not be the basis for denying admission, terminating assistance, or evicting tenants from public and other federally-assisted housing.

Then it was pulled back. In late 2025, HUD moved to rescind its criminal-history screening guidance, including the 2016 document. The rescission notice, Notice PIH 2025-26 / H 2025-05, is titled “Rescission of Joint Notice PIH 2015-19 / H 2015-10, Guidance on the Use of Arrest Records in Housing Decisions.”

Supporters of the rescission argue the 2016 framework overreached. As a legal analysis for housing developers and owners notes, the practical effect of the prior guidance was to expose providers to disparate-impact liability even absent any intent to discriminate, narrowing the discretion landlords had to screen applicants for the safety of other tenants and surrounding communities (Nelson Mullins). From this view, restoring landlord discretion lets owners make individualized safety judgments rather than defend blanket policies against effects-based liability, and returns screening decisions to the property owners who bear responsibility for tenant safety.

What survived the reversal, in any case, is worth noting: the Fair Housing Act itself did not change, and the rule against policies that unfairly hurt one group still applies under federal case law.

The felony line still matters most for public and assisted housing. Certain serious offenses, listed in federal rules (24 C.F.R. 960.204 and 982.553), are automatic denials, including lifetime sex-offender registration and some drug-related activity. In plain terms: some convictions, usually felonies, shut the door automatically, while misdemeanors more often fall into a discretionary zone where a landlord weighs the nature and timing of the offense.

Voting: A Patchwork, and Two Surprises

Voting is the cleanest illustration of how state geography, not the crime, decides your civic status.

Misdemeanors almost never cost you the vote. Felonies trigger a state-by-state maze.

The National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan organization of state lawmakers, sorts state approaches into four categories, and finds that 23 states restore voting rights automatically upon release from incarceration. Others wait until parole and probation end. A few require extra steps like paying fines or applying to a board.

According to The Sentencing Project’s “Locked Out 2024” report, from an organization that advocates for criminal-justice reform, four million Americans could not vote in 2024 because they lost the right to vote due to a felony conviction, and voting-age Black Americans have lost the vote at more than three times the rate of non-Black Americans. Many states, as the National Conference of State Legislatures documents, treat the loss of voting rights this way, tying restoration to the completion of the terms a court imposed.

Now the two surprises that undercut the tidy rules people assume.

First, some states never fully restore the vote for certain offenses, so you get your rights back when you finish your time is simply false for a lot of people.

Second, a 2024 Ballotpedia analysis found that Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. let people vote while incarcerated. Neither the felony label nor the prison cell stops them from voting there.

Guns: Where a Misdemeanor Can Cost You a Constitutional Right

Most people believe only felonies take away gun rights. That belief is wrong, and the exception has become one of the most litigated questions in constitutional law.

The felony rule is real. Federal firearms law bars possession by any person… who has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year, regardless of the sentence actually served.

But the Lautenberg Amendment, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(9), extends a federal firearms ban to people convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. There is no minimum sentence threshold.

A peer-reviewed review of firearm-rights restoration lists domestic-violence misdemeanors alongside felonies as a distinct “firearms disability”, correcting the idea that only felonies affect gun rights. Congress passed the amendment in 1996 to close exactly that gap, since many abusers were convicted only of misdemeanors.

The Supreme Court recently addressed a neighboring provision, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which disarms people subject to certain domestic-violence restraining orders. The Court held that an individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment, and concluded that Section 922(g)(8) survives a facial challenge. A facial challenge argues a law is invalid in every possible application, so the Court was rejecting the claim that the ban could never be enforced. The lower court’s opposite ruling was overturned.

This case involved a restraining order, not a misdemeanor conviction, but it signals that courts may weigh dangerousness rather than just the felony label. How far that standard extends to felony disarmament generally is still being worked out in lower courts. According to the Supreme Court of the United States, the opinion in United States v. Rahimi, available on its official website, was issued on june 21 2024, as documented in this publication.

Immigration: Forget the State Label Entirely

For a noncitizen, the felony-versus-misdemeanor question is almost the wrong question. Immigration law runs on its own categories.

The one that decides cases is the “aggravated felony,” defined at INA 101(a)(43) as a list of dozens of offense types. The name is misleading. Many aggravated felonies are misdemeanors under state law, and some state felonies are not aggravated felonies at all.

A conviction that fits the category is close to a trapdoor. A defender training manual describes an aggravated felony as bringing “the most severe punishments possible under immigration laws”: you can be deported and blocked from almost any legal way to stay. Reentry after removal for an aggravated felony can carry up to 20 years in federal prison instead of two, according to a cornell.edu summary.

How broad is the category? One defender training manual notes that immigration law treats a person who sold $5 worth of marijuana the same as a drug-trafficking operation leader. Both are drug traffickers for immigration purposes.

Contrast that with a crime involving moral turpitude, which USCIS notes isn’t defined anywhere in the law and is assessed through a categorical inquiry into the offense’s nature and statutory elements, not the specific facts of the case. Those cases often still leave room for waivers and discretion. The practical FAQ, Will I be deported?, has a different answer depending on which category applies. For a crime involving moral turpitude, the honest answer is often maybe, depending on your record and available relief.

Can You Clear It? Sealing, Expungement, and Clean Slate

This is where the felony label does its most lasting work, because it decides whether the record can ever be hidden or erased.

Start with the vocabulary, since sealing and expungement are not the same thing. According to Justia’s explainer, a sealed record still exists in a legal and physical sense, while expungement effectively erases any trace that an arrest or charge ever happened. A sealed file is closed to public view but can be reopened by a court. In California, some juvenile records are sealed automatically at 18 (such as dismissed cases or non-707(b) offenses), while others require a petition, and even sealed records for serious or violent (Welf. & Inst. Code § 707(b)) offenses are not destroyed and can be unsealed if the person is later charged with a felony; nationally, however, only a few states automatically seal juvenile records at 18, and violent or sex offenses are often never sealed (selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/juvenile-justice/seal-record; Georgetown Law Journal, ‘The Juvenile Record Myth’).

Eligibility for sealing or expungement differs substantially between felonies and misdemeanors.

Source: Justia expungement explainer and the National Reentry Resource Center’s collateral-consequences inventory. State rules vary widely.

The procedure rewards patience. You generally file a petition in the court where the case was prosecuted, and each petition usually covers only one case. Once a court grants expungement, procedures vary by state: some require the petitioner to notify agencies holding related records, while others have the court clerk distribute the order automatically.

The newer trend is to skip the petition entirely. Under Clean Slate laws, eligible records seal automatically.

These laws lean toward lower-level offenses. The National Conference of State Legislatures, in its 2024 reentry summary, found that recent legislation focused on expanding eligibility for criminal record sealing and expungement. Serious felonies usually stay outside these schemes, which is why people with felony records often need a pardon, a certificate of rehabilitation (a court order declaring that a person has reformed), or an individually tailored petition instead.

The Bottom Line, and the Part Still in Motion

If your worry is voting or a professional license, a misdemeanor is usually survivable and a felony is the hard case, though the specifics turn entirely on your state.

What makes this genuinely unsettled, rather than merely complicated, is that two of these areas are moving right now.

Gun law is unresolved after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling. Lower courts are still working out how far the government can go in disarming people who are not felons. Housing law just reversed course, with HUD handing discretion back to landlords while the underlying Fair Housing Act stays on the books, which means the next round of litigation will test where the new line actually falls.

The label on your case is not the end of the story. Sometimes, as Askia Johnson learned, it is not even fixed. But the decisions that set it, the prosecutor’s charge, the judge’s sentence, the plea you accept, get made early and fast, often before anyone in the room is thinking about voting booths or rental applications a decade later.

That is the quiet lesson worth carrying. The courtroom moment is brief. The record it creates is not.

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