Criminal courts in England and Wales must now make a formal, public finding whenever an offence involved domestic abuse, creating a marker that will follow the offender through police, prison and probation systems.
The duty took effect on Monday under section 6 of the Sentencing Act 2026. When a court is passing sentence and concludes that the offence involved domestic abuse carried out by the offender, the judge must say so in open court. The same mechanism applies in the service justice system.
Domestic abuse was already capable of aggravating an offence and affecting sentence. What changes is the record. Until now, offences such as assault, stalking or criminal damage could be dealt with as domestic-abuse cases without a single, consistent result code identifying that feature after conviction. The new finding creates one.
That record is designed to be visible across the institutions responsible for managing risk. Police may use it when assessing later incidents; probation and prisons can see it when planning supervision, release and safeguarding; and the justice system will gain more reliable data about repeat offending. The finding does not create a separate offence, and it does not displace the sentencing guidelines that judges must already apply.
The statutory test adopts the definition in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, covering abusive behaviour between people who are personally connected. Its operation is confined to the criminal jurisdiction and occurs at sentencing, after guilt has been established by conviction or plea.
The measure’s practical value will depend on consistent use. A marker is only as useful as the judgment that produces it and the systems that carry it forward. But the law closes a longstanding gap between what a sentencing court knows about the context of an offence and what the wider justice system can reliably retrieve later.
