Lost or forgotten Texas traffic ticket? There is no statewide database. Attorney Phillip W. Goff explains how to find it by where, who, and when it was issued.
People lose tickets. People forget about their ticket entirely and miss court. Tickets get destroyed, mangled, or accidentally thrown into the garbage. Stuff happens. Many thousands of people have pending traffic tickets in Texas and cannot figure out where to find them.
Once it’s forgotten, some people mistakenly think it’s just a ticket, so it’s no big deal. When those people lose their driver licenses, are threatened with losing their driver license coupled with a demand for thousands of dollars, or find out they have an arrest warrant, it becomes a very big deal.
The ticket may be lost to you, but it rarely is lost by the cop who issued you the ticket. It’s almost certainly out there waiting for you. If you don’t start looking, you may have an arrest warrant and not know it, and you may not be able to renew your driver license. That outstanding ticket may not hurt you now, but it probably will hurt later, maybe years later.
There is no single, centralized database containing all of the 6+ million traffic tickets issued each year in Texas. Instead, tickets are spread out within a massive hodgepodge of courts, and each has its own filing system.
Texas has 254 counties and about 1,200 cities and towns. Cities and towns usually have a dedicated “municipal court.” Counties usually have 4 or more Justice Courts, which are usually called “JP courts” or “Justice of the Peace Courts.” This adds up to literally thousands of courts where a ticket may be filed in Texas.
You may be able to find your ticket online at texasfailuretoappear.com, which is run by OmniBase. HOWEVER, that website is NOT the home to all pending tickets. It merely displays cases which constitute a “hold” on a driver license for failure to appear for court or for failing to make a court-ordered payment.
For people with more tickets than they can remember, that website can often be the most important resource to find tickets, because they must resolve every ticket preventing renewal. Other tickets are not as urgent. (For what an OMNI hold does to your license, see our DWLI FAQs.)
If you do NOT find your ticket there, it does NOT mean your ticket is not pending somewhere. Not all courts participate in that website. Even if a court participates, it may not register every outstanding ticket on the website.
If you DO find an entry there, that does not necessarily mean you have found all the possible cases filed against you. Some courts choose to list fewer than all the pending tickets, and some tickets take years to be listed, if they are ever listed. Also, some courts don’t participate at all. Absence from that list is no assurance that pending tickets don’t exist.
If your ticket is not in this database, your search must continue.
Before anything can be done about your ticket, you need to know the name of the court where it’s filed. If you know this, a simple telephone call to the court almost always gets your basic ticket information. You’ll need to identify yourself properly. Your name, date of birth, and driver license number are the primary pieces of information the court will need. Occasionally, more information may be requested by the court.
If you don’t know the name of the court, there’s still hope. The more you can remember about the ticket, and the sooner you start looking for it, the better the likelihood you’ll find it. The three questions below narrow the search quickly: where the ticket was issued, which agency issued it, and when.
Frequently, people cannot remember anything about the ticket, other than they got it long ago somewhere in Texas. Occasionally, how your ticket looked can help. However, tickets are issued in many different ways: old-fashioned carbon paper on various colored paper, fancy hand-held devices which print out tickets which look like narrow receipts (and take the drivers’ pictures), a notepad with nothing more than the agency’s seal, a website address, and a handwritten number, and more. The variety limits the usefulness of this information.
However, if you know enough about a ticket, there is a fairly predictable path to where it was filed.
An increasing number of courts have online search functions for all pending tickets, which can be a big help to find your ticket.
On the other hand, the court which has your ticket may have no online search and create barriers to finding your tickets. Low-tech courts may still use old-fashioned printed tickets stored in cardboard folders or sleeves. Some courts are part-time or close down entirely, while others are consolidated into other courts. Courts even lose, purge, or destroy ticket records or cannot locate records, making old tickets harder to resolve. Worse, those kinds of destroyed records may be needed to resolve a hold on your license.
Regardless of the challenge you face, your search can be narrowed in a few simple ways.
Location is the best way to narrow your search.
If you know the city or county where your ticket was issued, that information significantly limits the number of courts where your ticket could be filed.
Most cities and towns have a “municipal court.” It could be a good starting point.
Most counties have 4 JP courts, known as “Justice” courts, also known as Justice of the Peace courts, or JPs. Counties with large populations have many Justice Courts.
Counties are divided into precincts, and large precincts may have more than one JP.
The city where the JP is located may be enough to determine which JP has your ticket. Online maps provide the geographical lines of precincts, if you need to further narrow your search.
Of course, you could try to call each Justice Court in the county. Depending upon the courts, you may find this process frustrating because many courts are so busy they will not answer the phone at all.
For people who cannot remember where they received their tickets, more information will be needed.
The agency of the officer who issued the ticket typically determines in which court your ticket was filed.
If you know your ticket was issued in the last 24 months by the Texas Highway Patrol, you could find your ticket using the DPS searchable citation database.
Otherwise, when your ticket was issued provides limited help.
IMPORTANT WARNING BEFORE SEARCHING ONLINE: most online search features are set up to collect payments, not to help you find your ticket. Those websites make it very easy to pay or steer you toward paying for the ticket, rather than fighting the ticket. This will hurt you.
Making the payment to “clear” your ticket will result in a conviction which will go on your driving record, never to disappear. It is important to seek a way to avoid a conviction, and that is usually available. Why simply paying a ticket is a mistake is explained on our Traffic Ticket Defense page, and a ticket is a Class C misdemeanor, a criminal charge, not a parking fee.
Most tickets are located quickly and easily by traffic ticket law firms using the same methods disclosed on this page.
For more difficult searches, law firms may involve fruitless online searches, telephone calls, faxes, emails, and letters, just as they would for anyone else. Some people expect extensive searches to be conducted free of charge solely on the possibility the law firm may eventually be hired.
Unfortunately, the mere possibility of being hired on a traffic ticket does not justify the expense of every search. Law firm staff have limited time, and literally millions of tickets are pending in Texas.
We invite you to contact us when you have located your ticket or have enough information to help us immediately locate your ticket online.
We strive to protect our clients’ records and give the best service possible. This firm has extensive experience over decades and thousands of cases, and we look forward to putting it to use for you.
When your traffic ticket is found, you’ll still need help. The worst thing you can do is simply pay that ticket. It will hurt you for years and will never be removed from your record. Contact us to get legal help to avoid that harm. If the ticket was issued in another state, see our page on out-of-state tickets; if your license is already suspended, start with three steps to getting back your driver license.
No. Texas has no single database of pending traffic tickets. Each of the thousands of municipal and Justice of the Peace courts keeps its own records. The OmniBase failure-to-appear site lists only tickets that have already placed a hold on a driver license, and the DPS citation search covers only Highway Patrol tickets from roughly the last 24 months.
Narrow the search by where the ticket was issued, which agency issued it, and when. City police tickets go to that city’s municipal court; sheriff, constable, and state agency tickets go to the county’s Justice Courts. Once you know the court, call it with your name, date of birth, and driver license number. Then get legal help before you pay anything, because paying is a conviction.
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