What shows up on an employment background check (and what doesn't)?

An employment background check is a consumer report that an employer buys from a third party screening company, and what it contains depends on the package that employer ordered.[1][2] There is no single national file that gets pulled on everyone. A typical pre-hire package searches criminal court records in the counties and states tied to your address history, verifies the employers and dates on your resume, confirms a degree or a professional license, and runs a Social Security number trace to find the names and addresses associated with your number.[2][14] Employers hiring for roles that involve money, driving, or safety often add a credit report, a motor vehicle record, or a drug and alcohol screen on top of that.[4][14]

The law that governs the process

The Fair Credit Reporting Act applies any time an employer uses a company in the business of compiling background information, which covers essentially every commercial screening vendor.[1][2] Before ordering the report, the employer must tell you in writing, in a standalone document that is not part of the job application, that it may use a consumer report for employment decisions, and it must get your written permission.[1] The employer also has to certify to the screening company that it followed those steps and will not misuse the information under federal or state equal opportunity law.[1]

What happens if something in the report costs you the job

Before rejecting you, the employer has to give you a copy of the report it relied on plus a copy of A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which exists so you can read the file and flag errors while the decision is still open.[1][14] After the decision, you get a second notice naming the screening company, stating that the company did not make the decision and cannot explain it, and describing your right to dispute the accuracy of the information and to request a free copy of your report within 60 days.[1] Those two notices are the practical reason to read the report line by line instead of assuming the employer already checked it.

Where the boundaries come from

More than one body of law shapes the contents. The FCRA sets reporting time limits and procedural duties for the screening company,[3] while federal antidiscrimination law enforced by the EEOC governs how an employer may use what it learns.[2] State and local statutes sit on top of both and are often stricter, deciding whether a credit report, an arrest record, or a salary history question is permitted at all.[9][10][13] None of this is legal advice.

Criminal history on an employment report comes out of court records, and the search is only as complete as the jurisdictions the employer paid to check.[2][14] Most packages pair a search of the county and state courts tied to your address history with a scan of a commercial multistate database, then confirm any database hit at the courthouse before reporting it, because that database is only an aggregation of records individual states and counties chose to publish.

Convictions and arrests are treated differently

A conviction carries no federal reporting deadline. The FCRA's catchall for stale adverse information expressly excludes records of criminal convictions, so a conviction from twenty years ago can still be reported under federal law.[3] Records of arrest sit under the seven year bar instead, and the EEOC has long held that the fact of an arrest does not establish that criminal conduct occurred, which makes an exclusion based on an arrest alone hard to defend as job related and consistent with business necessity.[3][6] An employer may still act on the conduct underlying an arrest when that conduct makes someone unfit for the specific position.[6]

Where state law is stricter

California's Investigative Consumer Reporting Agencies Act bars reporting any arrest, indictment, misdemeanor complaint, or conviction that is more than seven years old measured from the date of disposition, release, or parole, and it carries no $75,000 salary exception at all.[9] The same statute requires a screening agency to verify any public record item for accuracy within the 30 days before the report goes out, and it forbids continued reporting once the agency learns that a full pardon was granted or that an arrest produced no conviction.[9] Several other states apply their own seven year caps, which is why the same candidate can generate two different reports depending on where the job sits.

When the employer is allowed to ask

Ban the box and fair chance rules control timing rather than content. 37 states, the District of Columbia, and more than 150 cities and counties have adopted a fair chance policy, and 15 states extend the conviction-question ban to private employers, which in practice moves the criminal history inquiry off the application and later into the process.[11] At the federal level, the Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act of 2019 prohibits federal agencies and contractors acting on their behalf from requesting criminal history before a conditional offer, with exceptions for positions requiring eligibility for access to classified information and for sensitive national security or federal law enforcement duties.[12] The Office of Personnel Management rules implementing it sit at 5 CFR Part 920.[12]

Verification checks go to the source rather than reading what you wrote on the resume.[2][14] An employment verification contacts each former employer or a payroll database to confirm job titles and start and end dates. Many large employers answer with dates and title only as a matter of policy, which is why a verification often comes back thinner than candidates expect and why a discrepancy in a title is more likely to stall an offer than a weak reference. Education verification goes to the registrar or a clearinghouse for the degree, the field, and the completion date. Professional license verification goes to the issuing board and returns current status along with any public discipline.[14]

What a verification does not settle

A verification confirms that you held the role, not how well you performed in it. Conversations about performance are a separate product, and when a screening firm gathers information through personal interviews about someone's character, general reputation, personal characteristics, or lifestyle, the FCRA reclassifies that report as an investigative consumer report and adds a disclosure step: you must be told you have the right to a description of the nature and scope of the investigation.[1][2]

Identity and address history

Most packages open with a Social Security number trace that returns the names and addresses associated with your number. The trace is not itself a finding of fraud; it tells the screening firm which counties to search and which former names to search under. Mismatches at this stage are a common source of records that belong to someone else, so the pre-adverse-action copy of the report is worth checking against your own address history.[1]

Each of these is a separate product with its own rules, and none of them rides along automatically with a criminal search.[4][14]

An employment credit report is not the credit report a lender sees

Employers who pull credit receive a modified file. The version prepared for employment purposes leaves out your credit score, your date of birth, and your income, while showing identifying information, account balances, payment history, accounts in collections, and bankruptcies.[5] The pull is recorded as a soft inquiry and does not affect your score.[5] Access is restricted by state as well: California permits an employer credit report only for a defined list of positions, including managerial roles, sworn peace officers, jobs with signature or money-transfer authority over company accounts, jobs with regular access to $10,000 or more in cash during the workday, and jobs with access to trade secrets.[10] About ten states and several large cities apply comparable restrictions.[5]

Driving records

A motor vehicle record comes from the state licensing agency rather than from the credit file, and employers order it for roles that involve operating a vehicle.[14] It reports license status, class and endorsements, and moving violations according to the retention rules of the issuing state, which vary and are not set by the FCRA's seven year clock.

Drug screening and medical questions

A drug and alcohol screen is a separate collection and laboratory process with its own consent form, so a result does not appear inside the credit or court sections of a report.[14] Medical information is the most restricted category of all. An employer may not ask medical questions or require a medical examination before making a conditional job offer, and except in rare circumstances it may not seek genetic information, which includes family medical history, under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.[2]

Credit scores, sealed and expunged records, most adverse items older than seven years, salary history across much of the country, and anything medical or genetic are the main omissions.

Your credit score

Employers do not see it. The file prepared for employment purposes omits the score along with your date of birth and your income, so a hiring manager can see that an account went to collections but cannot see a three digit number summarizing your credit.[5]

Sealed and expunged records

Courts that seal or expunge a record remove it from public access, so a court records search should not return it. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said in a January 2024 advisory opinion that a screening agency reporting expunged, sealed, or otherwise legally restricted records was not using reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy, then withdrew that opinion along with 66 other guidance documents applicable as of May 12, 2025.[8] The accuracy duty written into the FCRA itself did not change, so the practical effect is that this kind of error now gets resolved through disputes and private litigation instead of through published bureau guidance.

Most old adverse items

Bankruptcies come off after ten years. Civil suits, civil judgments, records of arrest, paid tax liens, collection accounts, and any other adverse item come off after seven, with criminal convictions carved out of that last category.[3]

Salary history across much of the country

22 states plus the District of Columbia and 24 localities prohibit employers from asking applicants about pay history, and Virginia's statewide law takes effect July 1, 2026.[13] Several of those laws go further than the question itself and bar an employer from relying on prior pay to set a new salary even when the applicant volunteers the number, which is the rule in California.[13]

Protected characteristics

A compliant report does not identify race, religion, marital status, or family medical history, and using background information of any kind to treat applicants differently on those bases violates federal antidiscrimination law regardless of how the employer obtained it. The same rule reaches the decision to run a check at all, because screening only some applicants based on race or national origin is itself evidence of discrimination.[2]

Seven years is the federal default for most adverse information, ten years for bankruptcies, and no limit at all for criminal convictions.[3]

The seven year rule

Section 605 of the FCRA prohibits a consumer reporting agency from including bankruptcies older than ten years; civil suits, civil judgments, and records of arrest older than seven years or the governing statute of limitations, whichever period is longer; paid tax liens more than seven years past payment; collection accounts older than seven years; and any other adverse item older than seven years apart from records of convictions of crimes.[3]

The $75,000 salary exception

Those limits do not apply when the report is used in connection with employment at an annual salary that equals, or may reasonably be expected to equal, $75,000 or more.[3] The threshold has never been indexed for inflation, so it now covers a large share of professional roles, and a candidate for a $90,000 job can see a ten year old civil judgment on the report where a candidate for a $60,000 job would not.

State law can shorten the window

California drops the salary exception entirely for investigative consumer reports. The only exemptions there are life insurance underwriting involving $250,000 or more and employers that a government regulatory agency explicitly requires to check for the otherwise restricted records.[9] California also added medical debt to its list of items that may never be reported, effective January 1, 2025.[9] Because state rules stack on top of the federal ones, a lookback period that is correct in Texas can be wrong in California for the same candidate and the same job.

It is not a search of one national database

No comprehensive national criminal database exists for private employers to query. Commercial multistate products are aggregations of whatever records individual states and counties make available, which is why a hit still has to be confirmed at the courthouse and why a gap in coverage can produce a clean report that is not actually clean.[14]

It is not an FBI record check or a suitability determination

Fingerprint based federal checks and suitability determinations run on a separate track, generally for government positions, licensed occupations, and roles that require access to classified information.[6][12] A commercial pre-employment report does not reach those systems.

It is not a performance review

Verification establishes dates, titles, degrees, and license status.[14] Any judgment about how you did the work comes from references, and a reference product built on personal interviews is an investigative consumer report carrying extra disclosure duties.[1]

It is not a fixed set of rules

Two federal changes are recent enough that a lot of the published advice on this topic is now out of date. The CFPB withdrew both its January 2024 background screening advisory opinion and Circular 2024-06 on background dossiers and algorithmic worker scores, applicable as of May 12, 2025.[8] In June 2026 the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion to the EEOC concluding that the agency's disparate impact guidelines are unconstitutional, which changes federal enforcement posture toward criminal history screens; the EEOC's 2012 enforcement guidance remains posted and private plaintiffs can still bring Title VII claims in court.[6][7] State and local fair chance and salary history laws are untouched by either change.[11][13]

It is not legal advice

Requirements differ by state, city, industry, and job. Treat the federal rules described here as the floor, then check the law of the jurisdiction where the job sits before you build a screening policy or challenge a report.