Georgia Public Records Laws: The Georgia Open Records Act Explained

Georgia's Open Records Act, O.C.G.A. 50-18-70 through 50-18-77, runs one of the shortest response clocks in the country: an agency has 3 business days to produce responsive records. It is also explicitly open to requesters who live outside Georgia, a point the 2012 rewrite of the Act settled deliberately.

Information last verified on 2026-08-04. This article has not yet been reviewed by a licensed lawyer.

This page covers Georgia state law only. For records held by a federal agency, see our guide on how to file a FOIA request. To compare Georgia against other states, start at the public records laws by state hub.

The Georgia Open Records Act

The Georgia Open Records Act, codified at O.C.G.A. 50-18-70 through 50-18-77, governs access to records held by state agencies, counties, cities, school districts, boards of education, authorities, and other public agencies, along with private entities performing services on behalf of a public office.

The Act's central command is in O.C.G.A. 50-18-71(a): all public records shall be open for personal inspection and copying, except those which by order of a court of this state or by law are specifically exempted from disclosure. The presumption runs toward disclosure, and the burden of establishing an exemption sits with the agency.

Georgia does not call this law FOIA. It is a state statute and it does not reach federal agencies. A request for federal records goes to the federal agency under 5 U.S.C. 552.

Georgia's Open Records Act has a companion, the Open Meetings Act at O.C.G.A. 50-14-1 and following. Records and meetings are separate statutes with separate remedies, and both are covered in the Attorney General's published guidance on open government.

Out-of-State Requesters Are Covered

This is worth stating plainly because Georgia sits next door to states that handle it differently, and the question comes up constantly.

Georgia's Open Records Act contains no residency requirement. The Attorney General's official guidance on the Act states that the amendments to the law make clear that the right of access extends to individuals outside the state, referring to O.C.G.A. 50-18-71(a).

So a journalist in New York, a researcher in California, or a company in Illinois may file a Georgia open records request on exactly the same terms as an Atlanta resident. That is the opposite of Kentucky, which limits the right of inspection to residents of the Commonwealth, and different again from Idaho, which admits everyone but gives non-residents a slower clock.

Georgia also does not require you to state a purpose for an ordinary request. A separate provision does restrict the use of records obtained for certain commercial solicitation purposes, but that is a limit on downstream use rather than a purpose test on the request itself.

Georgia's 3-Business-Day Deadline

Georgia's timing rule is one of the tightest in the country, and it is structured differently from most states' deadlines.

Under O.C.G.A. 50-18-71(b)(1)(A), agencies shall produce for inspection all records responsive to a request within a reasonable amount of time not to exceed three business days of receipt of a request. Note the verb. This is not merely a deadline to acknowledge, or to decide whether to comply. It is framed around production.

The Act then handles the realistic case where three days is not enough. If responsive records exist but are not available within three business days, the agency must, within that same three-business-day window, provide a written description of the records and a timetable for their inspection and production, and then produce them as soon as practicable.

That second rule is the one to hold an agency to. A Georgia agency that goes silent past day three is out of compliance even if the records genuinely take weeks to gather, because the statute required it to send you a description and a timetable inside the window. When you follow up, ask specifically for the description and timetable the Act requires rather than just asking where your records are. These provisions are current as of August 2026.

Read against Florida and Iowa, both of which have no numeric deadline at all, Georgia's rule is a substantial advantage for requesters.

What Georgia Records Requests Cost

Georgia bills labor and copies separately, and the labor formula is unusually favorable to requesters.

Search, retrieval, and redaction time is charged at the prorated hourly salary of the lowest-paid full-time employee who, in the reasonable discretion of the custodian, has the necessary skill and training to perform the request. The first 15 minutes of that work is free. The lowest-paid-competent-employee rule matters: it means an agency cannot bill a department head's salary or an attorney's rate for work a records clerk could have done.

Copies are capped at 10 cents per page for letter-size or legal-size documents. For records provided on electronic media, the charge is the actual cost of the media.

Georgia has no blanket public-interest fee waiver of the kind the federal FOIA provides. Readers frequently assume one exists. There is, however, an important limit from Georgia case law cited in the Attorney General's guidance: no fee may be charged for mere inspection of records that are routinely subject to public inspection, such as deeds, ordinances, and zoning maps.

Two further limits are worth knowing because agencies do not always volunteer them. Under O.C.G.A. 50-18-71(c)(1), the charge for search, retrieval, or redaction cannot exceed the prorated hourly salary of the lowest-paid full-time employee who has the necessary skill and training to do the work, so an agency cannot bill you at an attorney's rate for tasks a lower-paid records clerk could perform. And where records are produced electronically, O.C.G.A. 50-18-71(c)(2) limits the agency's charge to the actual cost of the media on which the records are produced, which means an emailed PDF, involving no physical media, should not carry paper-copy pricing.

The Act also requires an agency to provide copies by the most economical means available, and it is the agency's burden to demonstrate that a charge meets that standard.

There is a duty running the other way too, and it is the one agencies most often skip. Where the estimated cost of search, retrieval, redaction, and production exceeds $25, the agency must notify you of that estimate within 3 business days, and it may defer any further work until you agree to pay. The Georgia Department of Public Safety's published charging policy follows exactly that structure, deferring production tasks until the requester agrees to the estimate and requiring prepayment on larger ones. So a surprise invoice at the end is not how this is meant to work. If a request is substantial and no estimate arrives inside three business days, ask for it by name.

That gives you three practical cost levers. Ask to inspect rather than to receive copies when you only need to review material. Ask for electronic delivery. And keep the request narrow enough to stay near the free first 15 minutes of labor, since requesting a specific document by name and date almost always beats requesting a category. Ask for a cost estimate up front on anything substantial.

How to File a Georgia Open Records Request

Georgia has no central portal. Requests go to the agency's designated open records officer, if it has designated one, or to the custodian.

1. Identify the agency. County, city, sheriff's office, school district, and state agency records are held separately.
2. Check whether the agency has designated an open records officer. Georgia agencies may designate one and publish the contact, and requests sent to that person start the clock cleanly.
3. Put the request in writing. This is not a style preference in Georgia. O.C.G.A. 50-18-71(b)(3) makes the enforcement provisions of O.C.G.A. 50-18-73 and 50-18-74 available only for written requests, so an oral request that an agency ignores leaves you with no civil action, no attorney fees, and no penalty exposure. Oral requests are allowed; they are simply unenforceable.
4. Describe the records specifically. Precision drives both speed and cost here, since labor is billed by the hour beyond the first 15 minutes.
5. Ask for an estimate before work begins.
6. Diary the third business day. If nothing arrives, follow up citing O.C.G.A. 50-18-71(b)(1)(A) and ask for the written description and timetable the Act requires.

Our free FOIA request generator produces a Georgia-specific request letter citing the Open Records Act. Nothing entered into it is stored or transmitted.

Exemptions Under the Georgia Open Records Act

Georgia's exemptions live mainly in O.C.G.A. 50-18-72, which enumerates a long list of records not subject to disclosure. The list includes records of pending investigations and prosecutions, certain law enforcement records, medical records, individual personnel evaluations, trade secrets, records that would disclose the identity of confidential sources, certain security plans and infrastructure records, and materials made confidential by other state or federal law.

Two Georgia-specific features are worth knowing. The pending-investigation exemption has a built-in carve-out: initial police arrest reports and initial incident reports remain public even while an investigation is ongoing. That is a meaningful right, and it is the answer when an agency tries to withhold the basic incident paperwork on the theory that the case is open.

And, as everywhere, exemptions apply to information rather than to whole files. An agency must redact exempt material and produce the rest, and it must identify the statutory basis for each redaction.

Police Records and Body Camera Footage

Georgia's Open Records Act does not contain a body-camera-specific access scheme equivalent to Kansas's K.S.A. 45-254 or Kentucky's KRS 61.168. There is no statutory list of who may view footage and no dedicated footage timeline. Recordings are handled through the general law enforcement analysis under O.C.G.A. 50-18-72(a)(4), the pending investigation or prosecution exemption.

The Attorney General's published guide for Georgia law enforcement states the position directly, and it is more useful than most states' guidance because it admits what is unsettled. Police in-car camera and body camera recordings in closed cases are subject to the Act's disclosure requirements. Georgia appellate courts have not determined whether such recordings are open records before a case is closed.

So there are really two situations. If the case is closed, the recording is a disclosable record and an agency that refuses is on weak ground. If the case is open, the answer is genuinely unresolved in Georgia law, and an agency asserting the pending-investigation exemption is making an argument no Georgia appellate court has yet accepted or rejected. Knowing that the question is open is what lets you push back on a denial that is presented as settled.

Two other law enforcement rules pair with this. Initial incident and police arrest reports are subject to disclosure regardless of whether they are part of an active investigation, and so is any report labeled supplemental or narrative that functions as the initial report. Those documents typically give you the date, time, location, officers involved, and incident numbers needed to make a precise later request for footage. Separately, reports relating to investigations of family violence are not released under the Act unless an arrest has been made in the incident.

Because access to footage in an open case is unsettled, request it in writing immediately and ask the agency to preserve the recording pending your request. Retention of the file is what determines whether the legal question ever gets to matter.

For 911 audio and dispatch records, which are analyzed separately from body camera footage, see our page on whether 911 calls are public records.

Appealing a Denial in Georgia

Georgia gives you a mediation option and a courthouse. It does not give you a binding administrative appeal.

Attorney General Mediation

The Attorney General's Office operates an informal Open Government Mediation Program that attempts to resolve disputes without litigation. Three limits are important and are frequently misunderstood:

• It is informal rather than adjudicative. The office describes it as a mediation, which means it works toward a resolution the parties accept rather than an order the agency must follow.
• The Attorney General's office is not acting as your counsel. Mediating a dispute is a different role from representing a party to it.
• Its practical focus has been disputes with local governments. Confirm with the office whether your particular dispute falls inside the program's current scope before you rely on it.

Within those limits, mediation is worth trying. It costs nothing, it is fast compared to litigation, and a call from the Attorney General's office resolves a large share of local disputes that a private letter would not.

Civil Action

Under O.C.G.A. 50-18-73, any person, firm, corporation, or other entity may bring a civil action in superior court to enforce the Act, and the Attorney General may also bring an action in his or her discretion. The court can order the agency to produce the records and can award attorney fees and litigation costs.

Georgia backs this with penalties, and O.C.G.A. 50-18-74 runs them on two tracks that are easy to blur together.

A knowing and willful violation is criminal. It is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 for a first violation. A negligent violation is not criminal at all; it carries a civil penalty of up to $1,000 for a first violation. On either track, an additional violation committed within 12 months from the date the first penalty or fine was imposed carries up to $2,500. The Attorney General may bring civil or criminal enforcement action.

That 12-month clock is worth reading precisely. It does not run from the date of the first violation. It runs from the date the first penalty or fine was imposed, which is a later and often much later date.

The penalty structure is a lever in correspondence, not just in court. An agency's counsel understands that a documented pattern of ignored requests inside a 12-month window escalates the exposure per violation.

Records the Open Records Act Does Not Reach

Birth, death, and marriage certificates are vital records held by the Georgia Department of Public Health's State Office of Vital Records, under a separate statutory scheme with eligibility limits on who may obtain a certified copy. They are not open records requests. Our Georgia death records guide covers who qualifies.

Deeds and land records are held by the clerk of superior court in each county, covered in our Georgia property records guide. Court case files and warrants are court records rather than agency records; see Georgia warrant search.

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Disclaimer

This article provides general legal information about the Georgia Open Records Act as of August 2026. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Statutes, fee rules, and agency procedures change. If a public records dispute affects your legal rights, consult an attorney licensed in Georgia about your specific situation.

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Last updated: 2026-08-04.