Sterling Background Check Pricing in 2026You are buying First Advantage now
Almost every article ranking for this search quotes tidy Sterling price tiers. Go to sterlingcheck.com and you will find something the aggregators missed: the company stopped selling under its own name. The searches still exist. The vendor on your invoice is different, and so is the conversation you need to have.
What happened to the vendor you are pricing
Deal announced
February 2024First Advantage agrees to buy Sterling Check Corp. for $2.2 billion in cash and stock.
Acquisition closes
October 31, 2024Sterling becomes an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary and is reported as its own segment.
Billing migrates
2025Customer invoices start arriving from fadv.com addresses. Retention holds near 96 percent.
The brand retires
Todaysterlingcheck.com no longer sells. It routes new buyers to First Advantage.
Deal terms from First Advantage's closing announcement. Brand status read from sterlingcheck.com on September 18, 2026.
The search has a new answer
First Advantage closed its acquisition of Sterling Check Corp. on October 31, 2024. The price was $2.2 billion including assumed debt, paid as roughly $1.2 billion in cash plus 27.15 million shares. Sterling became a wholly owned subsidiary and, for a while, its own reportable segment. Two of the five largest background screening companies in the United States became one.
The brand held on through 2025 while the platforms merged. It is gone now. Sterling's homepage today reads "Sterling Background Check Solutions is now First Advantage" and offers three paths: new customers contact First Advantage, existing customers log in, candidates go to the candidate portal. There is no pricing page, no package list, no quote form of its own. The same pattern we found pricing HireRight applies with a twist: there, one parent runs two brands on purpose. Here, one brand absorbed the other and the aggregators never updated.
That matters for your budget in a specific way. Screening spend is one of the few hiring line items that scales linearly with headcount, and the Professional Background Screening Association puts the share of US employers screening full-time hires around 90 percent. First Advantage now runs more than 200 million screens a year across 200-plus countries for over 80,000 customers, including about two-thirds of the Fortune 100. You are negotiating with the largest buyer of court records in the market.
For the process side of screening, start with our guides to pre-employment background checks and ban the box laws. This post is the money question: what a Sterling check costs now, which door you should walk through, and the line items that turn a $30 package into a $140 invoice.
Where the money goes
Three doors, three very different prices
"Sterling pricing" is not one number because Sterling was not one product. What used to be a single vendor now splits across three buying motions inside First Advantage, and which one you land in determines your rate more than any negotiation will.
The three ways to buy the same searches
First Advantage enterprise
Mid-market and up, or anyone with an existing Sterling contract
Quote only
First Advantage small business
Low-volume US employers who want to order and go
No published rate
Sterling Volunteers
Nonprofits, youth programs, faith groups, schools
$19 to $39
Terms read from First Advantage and Sterling Volunteers product pages on September 18, 2026. Volunteer pricing is for volunteer screening and is not transferable to employment screening.
Most people searching for this land in door one by default, because that is where the sales line goes. If you are running fewer than a hundred checks a year, that is the wrong door, and nobody at the vendor is going to redirect you.
A verified contract rate
$20.73 per check, and why you cannot have it
Public institutions have to publish what they pay, which makes them the best pricing source in this category. The University of Washington runs its criminal conviction history checks through Sterling and publishes the rate on its HR site: $20.73 plus tax per check, with a separate $11.00 plus tax state patrol check billed alongside it for Washington candidates.
The detail nobody else caught
The same university page tells departments that invoices now arrive from an fadv.com billing address, sent on the tenth business day of the month for the prior month's checks. That is the migration showing up in a real customer's accounts payable, not a press release.
Read that $20.73 carefully before you anchor on it. It buys a criminal conviction history check on a large public university's volume with a standardized package and predictable annual throughput. No verifications, no motor vehicle record, no drug screen. The state check is a separate line. It is a floor for a narrow search at institutional scale, not a market rate.
Sterling's own client FAQ gives the range the company is willing to say out loud: a background check can run from under $50 to several hundred dollars depending on how broad the screening is. That is honest and useless in equal measure, which is roughly where this category sits. For the wider market picture, our breakdown of employment background check costs covers what the other vendors charge for the same searches.
The published list
Sterling Volunteers still prints its prices
One corner of the old Sterling business never stopped publishing. Sterling Volunteers, which screens volunteers for nonprofits, youth programs, schools, and faith organizations, sells from a list:
Advanced Criminal Locator
SSN trace, Department of Justice national sex offender registry search, OFAC watchlist, and a validated nationwide criminal search.
Complete Criminal Locator
Everything in Advanced, plus Locator Select, which widens the jurisdictions searched for the deepest available result.
Account setup
One-time cost to open an organizational account. Programs can pay per screen or push the cost to volunteers.
Fast Pass
Lets a screened individual share a completed check with another organization or department.
Nonprofit coalitions and purchasing groups negotiate 20 percent or more off those rates, and some programs report checks as low as $8 to $10 under partnership pricing. Turnaround holds up: most searches come back in 24 to 72 hours, with delays when a record turns up or the person has lived in several jurisdictions.
Two warnings. Volunteer screening is a different regulatory and pricing product than employment screening, so these numbers do not transfer to a hiring contract. And the $250 setup fee is real money if you screen twenty volunteers a year, which pushes your effective per-check cost past $50 in year one. Run that math before you compare against a competitor with no setup fee.
The competitive set
Everyone else in this market publishes a number
This is the part that should bother First Advantage. Its three closest competitors for small and mid-market employment screening all put prices on a public page, and it does not, including on a self-serve product explicitly built for buyers who will not sit through a sales cycle.
Who shows you a price before you talk to sales
Vendor
Entry
Top tier
How you find out
Rates verified against each vendor's live pricing page on September 18, 2026. Checkr moved its middle and top tiers up during 2026, so older comparison articles quoting $54.99 and $79.99 are stale.
First Advantage does run a small business product, and the terms are genuinely good: free account, no setup fee, no minimum screening volume, no long-term contract, and you can start ordering without an implementation project. That is a better structure than most enterprise screening paper. It just will not tell you what a report costs until you are inside.
My view, having priced most of this category: withholding a number on a product designed for self-service buyers is a decision, not an oversight. It works when the buyer has no alternative. In screening, they have several, and all of them answer the question on the first page. If you want the alternatives side by side, we compared them in the best background check companies for employers and in Checkr alternatives.
Where the invoice grows
The package price is the small number
Every large screener prices the same way: a base fee per package, plus add-ons for each extra component, plus third-party fees passed through. Sterling, First Advantage, HireRight, Checkr, and GoodHire all work like this. When a quote comes in higher than you expected, the package rate is almost never the reason.
How $30 becomes $140 without anyone lying to you
One candidate, one invoice
Base package
SSN trace, national database, watchlist
County criminal searches
One per county in a seven-year address history
Court access fees
Roughly 1 in 20 counties charges one, and it varies
Employment verification
Billed per prior employer contacted
Education verification
Per institution, plus registrar fees where they exist
Motor vehicle record
State DMV fee passed through
Illustrative build for a US professional hire using published market rates. Your quoted package rate is the smallest variable here.
Court access fees deserve their own paragraph, because they are the line most buyers argue about after the fact. They are genuine third-party costs: some counties charge a few dollars for electronic record access, others charge $40 or more for a clerk-assisted search. Only about one in twenty US counties charges anything at all, so the real risk is not the average, it is concentration. If your candidates cluster in a handful of fee-charging jurisdictions, your blended cost per report moves significantly and your vendor's quoted package rate never changes.
Checkr states on its pricing page that access fees are passed through at cost with no markup. Get the same sentence in your First Advantage contract. The difference between pass-through at cost and pass-through with a margin is invisible on an invoice and meaningful across a year.
The other cost nobody itemizes is time. First Advantage completes 90 percent of US criminal and public record searches within one business day, which sounds fast until you notice that employment and education verifications run three to five business days, and a medical review officer adds two to three more after the test result. A signed offer sitting in limbo for a week is one of the quieter reasons candidates go quiet, and it costs far more than the report. Build it into your time to hire math rather than treating it as a rounding error.
My read
Should you stay on Sterling paper?
If you are already a Sterling customer, the case for staying is stronger than the internet suggests. First Advantage reported gross retention around 96 percent in 2025 and told investors that Sterling customer retention improved in the quarters after close. Vendors that reprice aggressively after an acquisition do not post numbers like that. Your rates most likely carried over, and switching screeners means re-papering FCRA disclosures, retraining recruiters, and rebuilding an ATS integration for a discount you have not confirmed exists.
The renewal is the moment to pay attention. First Advantage guided to $50 million to $70 million in run-rate synergies from the deal. Synergies are a cost-side promise made to shareholders, and none of that money is contractually owed to you. Ask for a per-search rate card rather than a package price, because packages get quietly reconfigured between terms and a bundle that loses one county search is a price increase wearing a different name.
If you are shopping fresh and you are small, I would not start here. A published price you can act on today is worth more than a negotiated rate you have to earn through two sales calls, and the gap between them at low volume is usually a few dollars a report. Consolidation has made this market less transparent at exactly the size of company that can least afford to spend a week on procurement.
If you are enterprise, or regulated, or hiring across borders, the calculus flips. Two hundred million screens a year across 200-plus countries buys real coverage, and the compliance tooling around adverse action is where large employers actually get hurt. Read the EEOC guidance on background checks before you decide that screening is a procurement decision rather than a legal one.
Buyer checklist
Eight questions before you sign
None of these come up unless you raise them, and every one of them moves the number on your invoice.
Give me the per-search rate card, not the package price. Packages get reconfigured at renewal.
Are court and DMV access fees passed through at cost or marked up? Put the answer in the contract.
What is the average court fee across the counties my candidates actually live in?
Is there an annual minimum, a monthly platform fee, or a setup charge on this account?
What happens to the fee if a candidate withdraws after the report is ordered?
What is the median turnaround for verifications by state, not the instant database portion?
Is adverse action processing included, or billed per letter?
Does my ATS integration carry a separate fee, and does it write results back automatically?
Question one is the one that pays for itself. A package price tells you what this year costs. A per-search rate card tells you what every year costs, and it makes the next renewal a comparison rather than a negotiation. If screening is a meaningful line in your budget, feed the annual total into your cost per hire model and check it against what a bad hire costs. A $90 report that catches one falsified credential pays for a lot of reports that find nothing.
Everything before the background check, in one system
Prepzo runs sourcing, AI screening, structured interviews, and offers inside one hiring system, so a verification that takes five days is the only thing left waiting. Unlimited users on every plan.
Try Prepzo freeFrequently Asked Questions
How much does a Sterling background check cost?
Sterling has never published a rate card, and the company that owns it now does not publish one either. Sterling's own client FAQ puts the range at under $50 to several hundred dollars per check depending on scope. The most useful real number I found is a public university contract: the University of Washington pays $20.73 plus tax per criminal conviction history check, with a separate $11.00 state patrol check billed alongside it. That is a negotiated institutional rate on high, predictable volume. A small employer running twenty checks a year will not see anything close to it.
Is Sterling still a separate background check company?
No. First Advantage completed its acquisition of Sterling Check Corp. on October 31, 2024, in a deal valued at $2.2 billion including assumed debt. Sterling's website now states plainly that Sterling Background Check Solutions is now First Advantage and directs new buyers to contact First Advantage instead. You can still order the same searches, but you are contracting with, and getting invoiced by, First Advantage.
Did Sterling pricing change after the First Advantage acquisition?
First Advantage told investors it expected $50 million to $70 million in run-rate synergies from the combination, which is a cost target rather than a price cut, and none of it is promised to customers. What I can verify is that existing rates largely carried over through the migration: First Advantage reported gross retention around 96 percent in 2025 and said Sterling customer retention improved in the quarters after close. Mass repricing tends to show up as churn, and that did not happen. Expect your renewal, not the acquisition, to be where rates move.
Is there a published Sterling price list anywhere?
One, and it is the volunteer product. Sterling Volunteers publishes package pricing: the Advanced Criminal Locator search runs $19 per screening and the Complete Criminal Locator search runs $39, with a $250 account setup cost and a $4 Fast Pass fee if someone wants to share a completed check with another organization. Nonprofit partner programs sometimes discount those further. Those numbers are real, but they apply to volunteer screening, not to employment screening, and you should not quote them back to a First Advantage sales rep as a benchmark.
What does Sterling include in a standard background check?
A typical package starts with an SSN trace to surface aliases and address history, then layers on a national criminal database search, a sex offender registry check, and global watchlist or sanctions screening. County court searches, federal criminal searches, employment and education verification, credit reports, motor vehicle records, and drug screening are all priced separately. The base package is rarely the expensive part. The searches you bolt onto it are.
How long does a Sterling background check take?
First Advantage says 90 percent of its US criminal and public record searches finish within one business day. Verifications are the slow half: education, employment, credential, and reference checks typically take three to five business days, and a medical review officer result adds another two to three days after the initial test. Plan start dates against the verification timeline, not the instant database result, because the gap between an accepted offer and a cleared report is where candidates get nervous.
Is First Advantage cheaper than Checkr for a small business?
For genuinely small volume, probably not, and the reason is friction rather than rate. Checkr publishes $29.99, $59.99, and $94.99 per report and takes a credit card. First Advantage offers a small business product with no setup fee, no minimum volume, and no long-term contract, which is a good structure, but it still does not publish a per-check price, so you cannot compare without a conversation. My honest read is that below about a hundred checks a year, a published price you can act on today beats a negotiated one you have to earn.
What should I ask before signing a First Advantage or Sterling contract?
Get the per-search rate card in the contract rather than a package price, because packages get quietly reconfigured at renewal. Ask whether court and DMV access fees are passed through at cost or marked up, and get that answer in writing. Confirm whether there is an annual minimum, what happens to the fee when a candidate withdraws after a report is ordered, whether adverse action processing is included, and whether your ATS integration carries a separate charge. Then ask for median turnaround by state for the counties your candidates actually live in.
Resources & Further Reading
Related Guides
- HireRight Pricing Breakdown
The other enterprise screener, and the price list it hides
- Checkr Pricing Per Report
The published rate card to benchmark any quote against
- GoodHire Pricing
Per-report tiers for low-volume employers
- Pre-Employment Background Checks
What to run, in what order, and what to skip
External Sources
- First Advantage: Sterling Acquisition Close
Deal value, consideration, and synergy guidance
- University of Washington: Background Check Costs
A published institutional per-check contract rate
- Sterling Volunteers: Package FAQ
What each volunteer package actually contains
- FTC: Using Consumer Reports
The FCRA disclosure and adverse action sequence
