The Delaware Sex Offender Central Registry exists because Title 11, sections 4120 and 4121 of the Delaware Code require the Delaware State Police to maintain a registry of sex offenders available to the public over the internet; the State Bureau of Identification is the sub unit of the State Police that provides the service, with technical help from the Department of Technology and Information, and it answers at the Sex Offender Central Registry, P.O. Box 430, Dover, DE 19903 and (302) 739-5882. Two limits are stated on the front page. Only people convicted of the sex offenses Delaware law specifies register, so a person arrested but not convicted does not appear; and the website includes only those registered sex offenders the courts have classified as moderate risk or high risk, while offenders classified as low risk are not displayed on the public site at all. The bureau updates the information regularly, but it comes from the offenders themselves as the law requires, so a record believed to be wrong goes to the bureau through any of its contacts, and a tip about a particular offender may be passed to the appropriate agency for investigation. Positive identification of a person believed to be a sex offender cannot be established unless the offender's fingerprints are compared with the prints taken at arrest or incarceration, which is what the bureau's separate criminal history service under Title 11, chapter 85 is for.
The site is built around places as much as names. Its offender search takes a last and first name, a house number, a street prefix, name and type, a development, a county, a city, a ZIP code, a workplace, the state of conviction or an online identifier, with a box to exclude offenders living in Department of Correction facilities; a neighborhood search puts offenders on a map that is rebuilt nightly from the day's registrations, so an address may take up to 24 hours to appear and an address the system cannot geocode never appears, which is why the bureau points anyone wanting complete results back to the offender search; and separate tabs list homeless offenders and wanted offenders. Because automated tools scraping offender data overload the servers, the site asks a visitor to prove they are not an automated tool and then allows ten pages of results or ten offender records before asking again. An email subscription runs through the Delaware Information Subscription Service, where an account holder subscribes to the Sex Offender Notification Subscription for changes and additions to the registry. The police department or State Police troop for any Delaware address is on the Delaware county pages.
- Search: the Sex Offender Central Registry by name, street, development, county, city, ZIP code, workplace, conviction state or online identifier, with a nightly updated neighborhood map and lists of homeless and wanted offenders.
- Who appears: only the offenders the courts classified as moderate risk, Tier 2, or high risk, Tier 3; low risk Tier 1 offenders register but are not displayed on the public website.
- Registration: a form filed with the Sex Offender Registry at the State Bureau of Identification giving every alias, the date of birth, the license or identification card, telephone numbers, Social Security number, every residence, the employer, the school, every vehicle, all email addresses and internet identifiers, a copy of the passport, the immigration status and copies of professional licenses.
- Duration: Tier 1 offenders register for 15 years and verify every year, Tier 2 offenders for 25 years verifying every six months and Tier 3 offenders for life verifying every 90 days, with a $30 annual fee; a Tier 1 petition to the Superior Court opens after ten years of treatment and a clean record.
Written by SearchSystems.net from Delaware's own systems: the Delaware Sex Offender Central Registry, the Delaware State Police criminal background check page, Title 11, chapter 41, subchapter III of the Delaware Code, sections 4120 and 4121 on sex offender registration, verification, tiers and duration, each read on October 14, 2026 by the SearchSystems editorial team.
The offenses that require registration
Under Delaware law a sex offender is anyone convicted of, or of an attempt to commit, any of the offenses the registry lists: indecent exposure in the first degree; incest; unlawful sexual contact in the third, second and first degrees; rape in the fourth, third, second and first degrees; sexual extortion; bestiality; continuous sexual abuse of a child; a dangerous crime against a child; female genital mutilation; dealing in children; sexual exploitation of a child; unlawfully dealing in child pornography and possession of child pornography; sexual solicitation of a child; violation of privacy, where it involves recordings, photographs, films or videotapes of another person dressing or undressing or with the genitals, buttocks or breasts exposed, without consent, in a place where people normally disrobe such as a fitting room, dressing room, locker room or bathroom, or the secret recording of another person through clothing to view the body or the undergarments; promoting prostitution in the second degree where the person advances or profits from the prostitution of someone under 18 and in the first degree where that person is under 16; obscenity, where the person sells, delivers or provides obscene material to someone under 18; kidnapping in the second and first degrees where the crime was committed to inflict physical injury on the victim or to violate or abuse the victim sexually; and trafficking of persons under the listed subsection.
Convicted carries more than its ordinary meaning here: it includes adjudications of delinquency and people who plead guilty or are found guilty but mentally ill or not guilty by reason of insanity. A person convicted in another state, in federal court, in a United States territory or under a foreign government of an offense that is the same as or equivalent to a Delaware registrable offense must register here too.
What the registration form asks
A registrant completes a registration form and files it with the Sex Offender Registry at the State Bureau of Identification, giving all names and aliases ever used, the date of birth, the driver license or state issued identification card, the telephone numbers including home and cellular, the Social Security number, the residential address or addresses, the employer's name, address and telephone number, the school's name, address and telephone number, the vehicle information for every vehicle owned or operated with the year, make, model, color and plate number, all email addresses and internet identifiers, a copy of the passport, the immigration status and copies of any professional licenses.
Section 4120 sets when the form is filled in. An offender finishing a Level IV or Level V sentence registers during the sentence, no more than 90 days and no less than 45 days before release, discharge or parole, with the custodial agency collecting the information; an offender sentenced to home confinement, to probation at Level III or below or to a fine alone is registered by the sentencing court no later than sentencing; and a person convicted in another state, a territory, federal or military court or a foreign country of an equivalent offense registers at a designated Delaware State Police facility within three business days of the conviction when already a permanent or temporary resident, or within three business days of becoming one, a temporary resident meaning anyone employed in Delaware for more than seven days or more than 30 days in a year or enrolled full or part time at any school or college.
The form is signed by the offender and a witness and reaches the Superintendent of the State Police within three business days, and the superintendent tells the chief law enforcement officer over the offender's residence, workplace and school. A registrant who changes a name, a residence address or a place of employment or study reregisters in person with the State Police within three business days, with proof of the new residence, where a residence means any property the person owns, leases or uses as a home, vacations at for more than two weeks in a year or stays at as an overnight guest for more than two weeks in a year, every such address being registered at once; a student tells the school principal of the registration at enrollment.
The tiers, and who assigns them
Delaware tiers are a court matter rather than a police one. Every out of state offender is assigned a tier by the Superior Court after the Attorney General's office moves for one, and every in state offender who does not already have a tier, which the registry explains is mainly people whose crimes occurred before 1997, is sent a letter with a presumptive tier assigned, after which the offender may seek a Board of Parole review or leave the presumptive tier in place without review.
Tier 1 offenders are classified as low risk, Tier 2 offenders as moderate risk and Tier 3 offenders as high risk, and that classification decides what the public sees, since the website shows the moderate and high risk offenders and leaves the low risk ones off.
Fifteen years, twenty-five years or life, and the verification calendar
Section 4121(e) fixes the term by tier. A Tier 3 offender registers for life, and so does a Tier 1 or Tier 2 offender with a prior conviction for one of the offenses the section lists; a Tier 2 offender otherwise registers for 25 years and a Tier 1 offender for 15 years, counted from release from Level V custody or from the effective date of a sentence served at Level IV or below, with any later period of Level V custody left out of the count.
Section 4120(g) sets the matching verification calendar: a Tier 3 offender appears in person at locations the Superintendent of the State Police designates to verify every item of registry information every 90 days for life, a Tier 2 offender every six months and a Tier 1 offender every twelve months unless relieved of the duty, each paying an annual administrative fee of $30 collected by January 31 at the time of verification; a homeless offender verifies in person more often, every week at Tier 3, every 30 days at Tier 2 and every 90 days at Tier 1.
The route to relief or redesignation is always a petition to the Superior Court under section 4121(e)(2): a Tier 1 offender may petition for relief after ten years with a state approved treatment program completed and no conviction other than a motor vehicle offense in that time, a Tier 2 offender may petition for redesignation to Tier 1 after the same ten years, with treatment completed and no such conviction, only if the victim was not a child under 18, and a Tier 3 offender may petition for redesignation to Tier 2 once 25 years have passed since the last day of any Level IV or Level V sentence, or since sentencing when none was imposed, with treatment completed and no conviction other than a motor vehicle offense, the 25 years starting over after any later conviction or supervision violation; a redesignated Tier 3 offender nonetheless keeps registering and verifying every 90 days for life, and no relief from designation is open to a Tier 2 or Tier 3 offender whose victim was under 12 unless the offender was also under 18 at the time.
Two further rules sit in the same section: on a finding of probable cause that a registrant has failed to comply with section 4120 the person is redesignated to Tier 3 until compliance is restored, and every Tier 3 offender on probation at any level wears a GPS locator ankle bracelet at the probationer's own expense, a cost not charged to an adjudicated juvenile. The bureau maintains the record but does not set or change a tier.
Correcting a record, and identifying a person
The bureau asks anyone who believes information in the registry is incorrect to use any of the contacts at the foot of the site, and runs a tip form where a message is enough, though an email address and other contact details help when the tip concerns a particular offender, because the tip may be passed to the appropriate law enforcement agency for follow up investigation and that is how the site is kept accurate. Knowingly providing false information, and using the information to commit a criminal act against another person, are both prosecutable, and using it to threaten, intimidate or harass a registrant or the registrant's family, or otherwise misusing it, may bring criminal prosecution or civil liability.
Where identity itself is the question, only fingerprints settle it, and the bureau releases criminal history record information under Title 11, chapter 85 on receipt of the subject's fingerprints and the fee the Superintendent sets, a service the State Police background check page describes, with enrollment centers in Dover and Georgetown, partner locations statewide and a certified Delaware criminal history costing $72 and a combined state and federal history $85.
Reading a Delaware result
A record on the central registry is a Tier 2 or Tier 3 offender, moderate or high risk in the court's classification, verifying in person every six months or every 90 days and registered for 25 years or for life; a Tier 1 offender is registered for 15 years, verifies yearly and is never shown, so the website's silence proves only that the person is not moderate or high risk. An address missing from the map may simply be one the system could not geocode, and a registration made today may take up to 24 hours to appear there, which is why the offender search is the complete list.
The State Bureau of Identification in Dover holds the registration forms, the verification record and the $30 fee account, the Superior Court assigns the tier and hears every petition for relief or redesignation, and the Board of Parole reviews a presumptive tier when an older in state registrant asks for it.
Questions about the Delaware sex offender registry
Related Delaware records
Delaware's other public records guides on this site are the Delaware arrest records guide for what a booking makes public, the Delaware inmate search guide for the Department of Correction, the Delaware background check guide for the State Bureau of Identification criminal history service, and the Delaware county pages for every police department and State Police troop.