Best Background Check Companiesfor Employers in 2026
Five of the eight vendors on most shortlists belong to three companies. Checkr owns GoodHire. First Advantage owns Sterling. Three of the biggest names publish no price at all. Here is what each one actually charges, where the passthrough fees hide, and which vendor fits which kind of hiring.
I went through eight vendors' own pricing pages rather than trusting the review sites, and two things stood out immediately. The first is that Checkr and GoodHire now publish an identical rate card: $29.99, $59.99, and $94.99, with the same searches in each package. That is not a coincidence. Checkr bought GoodHire's parent company in April 2022 for a reported $400 million, and the two brands have converged on one price list while still running separate marketing.
The second is that prices moved this year. When we published our breakdown of Checkr pricing in June, the middle package was $54.99 and the top was $79.99. Today they are $59.99 and $94.99. That is a 9 percent rise on the middle tier and 18.8 percent on the top one, in about two months. Sterling has a customer notice on its own site about a 2 percent increase effective March 1. If your screening budget was set from a comparison post written last year, it is already wrong.
Screening sits at the end of a hiring process, which is why it gets budgeted last and surprises people most. Our breakdown of employment background check cost covers the arithmetic in detail, and pre-employment background checks covers what to screen for in the first place. Before any of that, read the FTC and EEOC joint guidance for employers. The vendor handles the search. You carry the legal obligation.
Eight brand names, six actual companies
Checkr
owns GoodHire
Checkr acquired GoodHire's parent Inflection in April 2022, reported at around $400 million. Both brands still sell separately and publish the same three prices.
First Advantage
owns Sterling
First Advantage closed its $2.2 billion acquisition of Sterling Check on October 31, 2024. Sterling still trades under its own name with the First Advantage suffix.
Independent
owns Turn, Certn, Veremark, HireRight
Four of the eight are still independent. HireRight is the enterprise incumbent among them. The other three are the newer, more specialized options.
Ownership verified against company announcements and investor releases. If your shortlist has both Checkr and GoodHire on it, or both Sterling and First Advantage, you have one fewer real option than you think.
Start here
Your shortlist is shorter than it looks
Background screening consolidated hard over the last four years and most comparison posts never caught up. Checkr acquired Inflection, GoodHire's parent, in April 2022 in a deal reported at roughly $400 million. First Advantage closed its $2.2 billion purchase of Sterling Check on October 31, 2024, after a Department of Justice second request. Both acquired brands still have their own websites, their own sales teams, and their own G2 listings, which is why they keep showing up as separate entries on best-of lists.
This matters practically, not just as trivia. If you run a three-vendor bake-off with Checkr, GoodHire, and Sterling, you are comparing two products from one company against one product from another. The negotiating room you think you have does not exist. Ask each rep directly which platform your account will run on and who owns the entity on the contract.
My honest read on consolidation here: it has been good for the self-serve end and neutral everywhere else. Checkr and GoodHire between them made instant, credit-card screening normal for small employers, which was not true a decade ago. What it has not done is create price competition. The two brands charge the same, and both raised prices this year.
Published rates, cheapest entry package first
| Vendor | Entry package | Top package | Rate published? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turn | from $25 | Quote | Partial |
| Certn | CAD $24.99 | Per search | Yes |
| Checkr | $29.99 | $94.99 | Yes |
| GoodHire | $29.99 | $94.99 | Yes |
| Veremark | $42 per candidate | $183 | Yes |
| Sterling | Quote | Quote | No |
| First Advantage | Quote | Quote | No |
| HireRight | Quote | Quote | No |
Verified on each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026, not on aggregator listings. Certn prices are Canadian dollars. Package prices exclude court, DMV, and verification passthrough fees.
The rate card
Who publishes a price, and who makes you ask
Five of the eight print a rate on their own site. Three do not. That split maps almost exactly onto how each company sells: self-serve vendors need a checkout page, enterprise vendors need a sales call. Neither is wrong, but the cost of the quote-only model falls on you. Two weeks and three calls to learn what a competitor tells you in four seconds, with no way to know whether your number matches your peer's.
Turn is the interesting case. It publishes only its first tier at $25 per check, and then goes further than anyone else by publishing component rates: $3 per county criminal search, $10 per federal district, $20 to $30 for a statewide search, $9 for a motor vehicle record, $10 per verification. That level of detail lets you price a role precisely instead of buying a bundle and hoping. For a company running high-volume hiring, the difference between $3 and $15 a county is the difference between screening everyone and screening finalists only.
Veremark is priced on a different axis entirely: $42, $144, or $183 per candidate rather than per search. That reads expensive next to a $29.99 package until you notice what is in it. The Professional tier includes two references, identity, three years of employment history, and a social media check. If you tried to assemble that from a US criminal-first vendor you would be adding four line items. Whether it is good value depends entirely on whether your risk is a conviction or a fabricated CV.
How a $59.99 package becomes a $95 invoice
Package price
$59.99
The number on the pricing page. Covers the vendor's service and its own database searches.
County court access fees
$0 to $95
Set by the court, not the vendor. Some counties charge nothing, some charge more than the package itself.
Motor vehicle record
$9.50 plus state DMV fee
The vendor fee is small. The state fee behind it varies by jurisdiction and is passed straight through.
Verifications
$10 to $12.50 each
Employment and education. Priced per verification, so a candidate with four past employers costs four times one.
Drug panel
$37 to $60
6-panel and 10-panel tests. Collection site fees are sometimes separate again.
Every vendor here works this way. Passthrough fees are not a trick, they are money the vendor collects and forwards. But they are the reason a screening budget built on package prices runs 40 to 70 percent short.
The real invoice
Why the package price is never the number you pay
Every vendor in this comparison charges passthrough fees, and none of them show up at checkout. County courts set their own access fees. Some charge nothing. Some charge enough to exceed the package price on their own. State DMVs charge for driving records. Verification sources sometimes charge to confirm a degree. The vendor collects that money and forwards it, which is legitimate, but it means the listed rate is a floor rather than a price.
Work an example. A delivery company screening a driver on Checkr's $59.99 Essential package adds a motor vehicle record at $9.50 plus the state DMV fee, and the county searches in the package carry court fees. That check lands somewhere around $95. Multiply by 400 hires a year and the gap between the budgeted $24,000 and the actual $38,000 is a headcount you did not plan for. This is the same trap covered in our piece on cost per hire, where screening is one of the most consistently underestimated line items.
The fix is boring and it works. Before you sign, ask the vendor for an invoice sample from a customer with your role mix, not a rate card. Ask specifically what the average all-in cost per report was across your top five hiring counties last quarter. Any vendor that cannot answer that in a week is telling you something about their reporting.
The shortlist
The 8 best background check companies for employers in 2026
The default for anyone who wants a price before a phone call
Basic $29.99, Essential $59.99, Complete $94.99 per report. Add-ons: motor vehicle record $9.50, identity verification $4.99, federal criminal $10, state criminal from $10, employment verification from $12.50, drug screening from $10. Enterprise is quote-only.
Strengths
- Published rates for every package and every common add-on, which almost nobody else in this category does.
- The API and webhook model is the most developer-friendly here, and the integration list covers most mainstream ATS platforms.
- Adverse action workflow is built into the dashboard, including the pre-adverse notice, the waiting period timer, and the final notice.
Tradeoffs
- Prices went up this year. In June 2026 the middle package was $54.99 and the top was $79.99. Today they are $59.99 and $94.99, an 18.8 percent jump on the top tier.
- The listed price is not the invoice. County court access fees and DMV fees ride on top and are not shown at checkout.
- Support for small accounts is documentation-first. If you want a named rep, you are in the enterprise conversation.
Best for: Companies hiring on a steady drip who want to run a check today without a procurement cycle. The API is the real product: if your hiring flow already lives in an applicant tracking system, Checkr is the vendor most likely to have a native integration that fires the check when a candidate hits the offer stage.
Checkr's small-business brand, at Checkr's exact prices
Basic $29.99, Essential $59.99, Complete $94.99 per report. Same three packages, same searches in each, no monthly minimum. Volume pricing splits at roughly 50 checks a year.
Strengths
- The candidate portal is the friendliest in this group. Candidates can see their own report and flag errors before you act on it.
- Built-in FCRA compliance workflow with guided adverse action, aimed at employers with no HR team.
- No monthly fee and no minimum volume, so an employer making four hires a year pays for four reports.
Tradeoffs
- It is the same company as Checkr, so shortlisting both gives you the illusion of a comparison without one.
- Fewer ATS integrations than the Checkr side of the house, and roadmap priority sits with the parent brand.
- Same passthrough fee structure, same gap between the listed price and the invoice.
Best for: Small employers who prefer GoodHire's simpler interface and want candidate-facing polish rather than an API. The product still leads on the candidate experience side, which matters more than people expect when the person you are screening is deciding between two offers.
The cheapest published rate, and the only real component menu
Essential from $25 per check for 1 to 25 checks a month. Growth and Enterprise are custom. Component rates published: county criminal $3 per county, federal district $10, statewide criminal $20 to $30, motor vehicle record $9, education or employment verification $10 each, 6-panel drug test $49.95, continuous monitoring $2 to $3.
Strengths
- Publishes à la carte component rates, so you can build a package that matches the role instead of buying searches you do not need.
- $3 per county criminal search is the lowest published county rate I have found, and county searches are the part that drives cost at volume.
- Continuous monitoring at $2 to $3 makes ongoing screening affordable for contractor pools, which is normally an enterprise-only line item.
Tradeoffs
- Only the first tier has a published price. Above 25 checks a month you are in a quote, which is exactly where its target customer sits.
- Canadian and international packages have no published rates at all.
- Smaller compliance and support organization than the incumbents, which some legal teams will flag in vendor review.
Best for: High-volume and gig-style hiring where you screen hundreds of people who may never start. Turn is built for marketplaces and staffing operations where cost per check is the metric that decides whether screening is viable at all.
Best published rate card for Canadian hiring
In CAD: basic Canadian criminal record check $24.99, enhanced $29.99, Quebec SOQUIJ check $39.99, identity verification $4.99, employment or education verification $29.99 each, credit report $12.99, driver's abstract $35.99, social media check $59.99, digital reference $4.49, phone reference $39.99.
Strengths
- The most granular published rate card in this comparison, priced per search rather than per bundle.
- Digital reference checks at $4.49 are cheap enough to run on every candidate rather than only finalists.
- Handles the Quebec SOQUIJ requirement natively, which US-first vendors usually route through a partner.
Tradeoffs
- Prices are in Canadian dollars, so the comparison against US vendors moves with the exchange rate.
- US coverage is real but it is not the home market, and the US rate card is not published the same way.
- Some verification services carry pass-through access fees that are not in the listed price.
Best for: Employers hiring in Canada, or US companies with a Canadian entity who keep discovering that their US vendor treats Canada as an afterthought. Certn prices Canadian searches like a home market rather than an international surcharge.
Priced per candidate, built for verification rather than criminal records
Essential $42 per candidate covering two references and an identity check. Professional $144 adds employment history and a social media check. Executive $183 adds academic and global sanctions checks. Individual checks from $14 for a character reference, from $20 for employment verification, from $23 for global sanctions. Over 50 candidates a year moves to a quote.
Strengths
- Prices the whole candidate, not the search, which makes budgeting for executive hiring far more predictable.
- Reference and employment verification are the core product rather than a bolt-on, and the quality shows in completion rates.
- Global sanctions and adverse media screening included at the Executive tier, which enterprise vendors treat as a separate SKU.
Tradeoffs
- Expensive for volume hiring. At $42 minimum per candidate, screening 300 applicants for hourly roles is not the use case.
- US county criminal coverage is thinner than the American incumbents, which matters if that is your main risk.
- The Executive package at $183 is more than double Checkr's top tier, so the value has to come from the verification depth.
Best for: International hiring and senior roles where the risk is a fabricated employment history rather than a criminal record. If you are screening a VP whose last three jobs were in three countries, this is the shape of vendor that handles it.
Deep coverage, no published price, and one owner fewer than you think
Quote-only. Sterling publishes no per-check rates. It does publish a customer notice about a 2 percent price increase effective March 1, which is more pricing transparency than most quote-only vendors offer. First Advantage completed its $2.2 billion acquisition of Sterling on October 31, 2024.
Strengths
- Coverage breadth is genuinely wider than any self-serve vendor, including healthcare credentialing and international searches in over 240 countries and territories.
- Enterprise support model with named account teams and a real implementation process rather than a help center.
- Drug testing and occupational health run under the same contract, which self-serve vendors subcontract.
Tradeoffs
- No published pricing, so you cannot sanity check the quote against anything before the call.
- Now part of First Advantage, so shortlisting both is another duplicate. Ask directly which platform your account will actually run on.
- Annual commitments with volume tiers, which is expensive for employers whose hiring is lumpy.
Best for: Regulated industries and large multi-site employers where the requirement is drug testing programs, occupational health, credentialing, and international coverage under one contract, and where a dedicated implementation team is worth more than a published rate.
The largest player after the Sterling deal
Quote-only across all products. No package rates published. Pricing is built per contract from volume, search mix, and geography.
Strengths
- Scale and international footprint are the strongest in this comparison, and the Sterling acquisition widened both.
- Handles complex programs like continuous monitoring, re-screening cycles, and industry-specific credentialing at volume.
- Mature integration library for enterprise HR systems rather than startup-focused APIs.
Tradeoffs
- Nothing is published, so every number you see for First Advantage in a comparison post came from a customer or a sales call.
- Implementation timelines run in weeks, not minutes. This is not the vendor for a company that needs a check run tomorrow.
- Overkill and over-priced for anyone hiring fewer than a few hundred people a year.
Best for: Global enterprises running thousands of checks a year across multiple countries and business units, where the procurement question is one master agreement rather than the price of a single report.
Broad coverage with the least transparent pricing on this list
Quote-only. No published package rates. Costs are assembled from per-search fees plus court and DMV passthroughs, and effective per-report costs commonly land in the $30 to $100 range depending on the search mix.
Strengths
- Strong regulated-industry coverage, especially transportation and DOT requirements that self-serve vendors do not handle well.
- Global reach with in-country capability rather than pure subcontracting in major markets.
- Program management for re-screening and continuous monitoring at enterprise scale.
Tradeoffs
- The least price transparency of the eight. Even the search-level structure is opaque until you are in a quote.
- Contract terms tend to include annual minimums that hurt when hiring slows.
- Interface and reporting feel dated next to the self-serve vendors, which your recruiters will mention.
Best for: Large employers in transportation, healthcare, and financial services with regulated screening requirements, particularly anyone who needs DOT-compliant driver screening under one contract.
Rates reflect figures published by each vendor as of August 2026, verified on their own sites rather than aggregator listings. Sterling, First Advantage, and HireRight publish no per-check pricing, so any range shown for them comes from third-party reporting. Confirm your own quote before signing.
Compliance
The part that gets employers sued is not the vendor
Every vendor here is a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and every one of them will hand you a compliance workflow. None of that transfers the liability. You are the user of the report, and the FCRA obligations land on you.
The sequence has four steps and employers skip the third one constantly. Get written consent in a standalone document, not buried in the application. If the report makes you reconsider, send a pre-adverse action notice with a copy of the report and the Summary of Rights attached. Then wait a reasonable period so the candidate can dispute an error, because the most common cause of a bad report is a mismatched identity rather than a real record. Only then send the final adverse action notice. The waiting period is where class actions come from, and a vendor dashboard that lets you click through it in one sitting is a liability, not a feature.
Layered on top of the FCRA are the EEOC's guidance on arrest and conviction records, which says a blanket exclusion for any criminal record is likely to have a disparate impact. The expected practice is an individualized assessment weighing the nature of the offense, the time elapsed, and its relationship to the job. Add state ban-the-box rules that govern when you may ask, and the timing of your check becomes part of your hiring process design rather than an administrative afterthought.
Under 50 hires a year, no HR team
GoodHire or Checkr. Same price, so choose on interface. GoodHire's candidate portal handles the awkward part of the process for you. Checkr wins if you want the check to fire automatically from your ATS.
High-volume or gig hiring
Turn. At $25 a check and $3 per county search, screening 500 applicants a year costs a fraction of what the package vendors charge. Continuous monitoring at $2 to $3 is the other reason marketplaces pick it.
Regulated industry or DOT drivers
HireRight, Sterling, or First Advantage. Drug program management, occupational health, and DOT compliance are not things a self-serve vendor does well. Pay for the quote-only contract here and negotiate hard.
Executive or cross-border hiring
Veremark for verification depth, Certn if the role is Canadian. When the risk is an invented job title rather than a conviction, reference and employment verification is the product you are buying.
Match by situation
Which vendor fits your hiring
The best predictor is not company size. It is what you are screening for and how many people you screen who never start. A logistics company screening 600 drivers a year and a fintech screening 30 engineers have almost nothing in common as buyers, even at the same headcount.
If cost per check drives the decision, Turn is the answer and the component pricing is why. If depth of verification drives it, Veremark. If the requirement is drug programs, occupational health, or DOT compliance, you are in the enterprise quote world whether you like it or not, and HireRight pricing is worth reading before that call. For most companies making a few dozen hires a year, Checkr or GoodHire is the right answer and the choice between them is about interface preference, not economics.
Before you sign
Seven questions for any screening vendor
Ask these on the call and get the answers in writing. Each one has caught a buyer I know.
What was the average all-in cost per report last quarter for customers with my role mix and my hiring counties?
Which searches do you run yourself and which do you subcontract to a third-party researcher?
What is your median turnaround for a county criminal search, and what is the 90th percentile?
What is your dispute rate, and how long does a candidate dispute take to resolve end to end?
Does the contract carry an annual minimum, and what happens to it if my hiring drops by half?
Can the adverse action workflow enforce a waiting period, or can a recruiter click straight through it?
Which applicant tracking systems do you integrate with natively, and does the integration write results back to the candidate record?
The turnaround question deserves the 90th percentile, not the median. Vendors quote medians because database searches return in minutes and drag the average down. What actually costs you offers is the one candidate in ten stuck for five days behind a county clerk while your competitor closes them. Our notes on reducing time to hire cover where screening sits in the wider timeline, and reference checks covers the part most vendors do worst.
The gap nobody covers
Screening is a fifteen-minute decision at the end of a six-week process
Here is what I think gets missed in every one of these comparisons, including the ones written by the vendors. A background check is the last gate in your hiring process and almost never the one that changes an outcome. Pass rates are high. The report confirms what you already believed. Meanwhile the decisions that actually determine whether the hire works out happened weeks earlier, in resume screening and structured interviews, and those are the stages most teams run on instinct.
Spending three weeks negotiating $8 off a per-check rate while your interview process has no scorecard is a strange allocation of attention. Pick a vendor that integrates with the system your recruiters already use, confirm the FCRA workflow cannot be clicked through, and move on. Our guide to ATS integrations covers what a good screening integration looks like, and structured interviews covers the stage where the real signal lives.
To be clear about scope: Prepzo is not a background check company and will not run a county criminal search for you. It is an AI-native applicant tracking system that handles resume screening, structured AI interviews, and the candidate pipeline, with unlimited users on every plan. Screening plugs in at the end. If you are here because your hiring process feels expensive, check what you are spending per hire on the first six weeks before you optimize the last fifteen minutes.
The background check confirms your decision. Prepzo helps you make it.
AI resume screening, structured interviews, and one pipeline your hiring managers will actually open. Unlimited users on every plan, with a 14-day free trial.
Try Prepzo freeFrequently Asked Questions
What is the cheapest background check company for employers?
On published rates, Turn is the lowest entry point at $25 per check for employers running 1 to 25 checks a month, and its component pricing goes lower still: $3 per county criminal search and $10 per federal district. Checkr and GoodHire both start at $29.99 for a basic package. Anything below about $20 per report is either a single database search with no county-level verification or a consumer product that is not FCRA-compliant for hiring use.
Are Checkr and GoodHire the same company?
Yes. Checkr acquired GoodHire's parent company Inflection in April 2022 in a deal reported at roughly $400 million. Both brands still run separate websites and separate sales motions, and as of August 2026 they publish an identical rate card: $29.99, $59.99, and $94.99 for the three self-serve packages, with the same searches in each. Picking between them on price is not a decision.
Why do most background check companies hide their pricing?
Because their business is volume contracts, not credit cards. Sterling, First Advantage, HireRight, Accurate, and Cisive all sell through sales teams on annual commitments, so the rate depends on your volume, your mix of searches, and how hard you negotiate. The self-serve vendors publish rates because they need a checkout page. Neither model is inherently better, but quote-only vendors cost you two weeks of calls to learn what a published vendor tells you instantly.
How long does an employment background check take?
A national database and SSN trace package usually clears in a few hours. County criminal searches are the bottleneck, because some courts still require a physical clerk to pull a file, and those can run three to five business days. Education and employment verifications depend on how fast a school registrar or a former employer answers, which is why they are the searches most likely to leave a candidate waiting a week.
What does a background check actually cost once fees are added?
Budget 40 to 70 percent above the package price. The listed rate covers the vendor's service, not the passthrough fees charged by courts, DMVs, and verification sources. County court access fees range from zero to roughly $95 depending on the jurisdiction, motor vehicle records carry state DMV fees, and a drug panel adds $37 to $60. A $59.99 package on a driving role lands closer to $95 all in.
What are the FCRA steps employers have to follow?
Get standalone written consent from the candidate before ordering the report. If something in the report makes you reconsider the hire, send a pre-adverse action notice with a copy of the report and the Summary of Rights, wait a reasonable period so the candidate can dispute an error, then send a final adverse action notice if you still decline. The FTC and EEOC treat this as a sequence, and skipping the waiting period is the most common way employers end up in a class action.
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