How Much Does a Background Check Cost for Employers?

What you are paying for

Every employment background check bill has the same three layers. The first two are public: an agency publishes its fee, and a court publishes what it charges to read its records. The third is the screening firm's own price, and that one lives on each firm's website, changes without notice and depends on your volume. We do not reprint it; we price the parts that stay true.

Knowing the public layer does two things for a 5-to-200-person employer. It tells you the floor under any quote for a given search, and it lets you read a quote line by line: a “state fee” that is far above the agency's own fee is a margin, not a pass-through.

Criminal record fees, read from the agencies

Each state fee buys that state's repository and nothing else. Pennsylvania's State Police say their check covers Pennsylvania law enforcement records only, not federal records. Covering a candidate who has lived in three states takes a search in each of them, and each search carries its own fee.

The FBI fee is different in kind. Under the FBI's regulation, the subject of the record asks for it, with proof of identity and fingerprints (28 CFR 16.32), and the fee written into the regulation is $18. The FBI may revise that fee, so check its site before you rely on the number. If you ask a candidate to obtain their own summary, settle up front who pays the fee.

PACER charges are pennies per page, and a search is charged even when it finds nothing. An account that runs up $30 or less in a quarter has its fees waived, so a firm passing PACER charges to you should show them per search.

Driving record fees

Two PennDOT pages read the same day differ by a dollar: the mail-in form (September 2025 edition) says $15 per record, the online business service $14, its fee since July 1, 2023. So ask your screening firm which channel it used, and check that the line on your invoice is the fee it paid, not a rounded-up one.

New York's page prices the driver's own abstract; it also says employers can get commercial driver abstracts for enrolled drivers through its License Event Notification Service, without listing a fee there. For the consent a driving record needs and when it is a consumer report, see MVR checks for employers.

What drives the total

A package bundles searches at one price; single searches are priced one by one. A package is worth it when every search in it fits the role. Paying for an education verification on a warehouse picker, or a credit report where your state limits employer credit checks, is money spent on a search you should not run. Build the scope from the job first, then see which package matches it.

Turnaround and price pull against each other. Washington's online WATCH check returns results immediately, by the State Patrol's own account; a search that needs someone to pull a court file takes longer. Our guide to how long a background check takes goes search by search. Drug tests are their own budget line, with collection and lab costs; see drug testing for employers.

Checks and steps that cost nothing

E-Verify itself is free; vendors and employer agents may charge for running it for you, which is a service fee, not a government one. Volunteer programs should check their own state for a free or reduced fee; the volunteer screening planner sets which searches a role needs.

A worked example: the public-fee floor for one hire

A 40-person Pennsylvania landscaping firm hires a crew lead who will drive a company pickup. She lives in Pennsylvania now and lived in Colorado until two years ago. The role calls for a criminal check in both states and a driving record. Here are the public fees alone.

Whatever firm you pick, its service charge sits on top of that floor. When two quotes for “the same check” differ, line them up against this table: one may cover only the current state, or skip the driving record, or treat the Colorado search as optional.

How to ask for an itemised quote

Vendor pricing is published on each vendor's own site and it changes; that is why this page carries no vendor prices. What you can control is the shape of the quote. Send every firm the same request, with the same role and the same places to search, and ask for these lines:

Then compare like with like. The firms in our background checks for small business comparison and the wider employer services comparison are set against the FCRA steps rather than price, and the PBSA-accredited screeners directory lists firms whose processes an outside auditor has checked.

Where a cheap check gets expensive

The search fee is the small number. The large one is what follows a check run without the FCRA steps: a disclosure that was not on its own page, or a rejection sent without the report and the Summary of Rights.

Those steps cost nothing but care. The FCRA background check rules for employers walk through them in order, and the disclosure form builder produces the stand-alone page for free.

Quick reference

Questions employers ask