The real range: $14 to $90 a check
Certn starts lowest, at $13.99 per check pay-as-you-go, no account minimum. Checkr opens around $29.99. GoodHire, which is Checkr's self-serve storefront under different packaging, publishes three tiers on its site: $29.99, $54.99, and $89.99. HireRight's enterprise contracts run $40–$150+ per check once you're negotiating volume, but its self-serve arm sells instant packages from roughly $37 to $77. Sterling doesn't publish a number at all — quote-only, typically starting under $50 and climbing past $200 for deep multi-country screens.
None of those five numbers describe the same product, which is the actual reason the range is so wide. A background check isn't one thing you buy at one price. It's a stack of separate searches bundled into a package, and the cheap end of that stack is doing a lot less than people assume.
What the $29.99 tier actually includes
At the bottom of every vendor's pricing page sits some version of the same package: a Social Security number trace, a search of a national criminal database, and a sex offender registry check. That's it. No individual county courthouse gets touched.
The problem is that there is no single national criminal database that's actually complete.The “national” search is an aggregation of whatever county and state records various data brokers have licensed or scraped, and coverage has real gaps, particularly in counties that don't report electronically. A conviction can sit in a courthouse file and simply never surface in the database search. That's not a vendor being sloppy, it's the structural limit of database-only screening, and every vendor in this category has some version of a disclaimer saying so in their terms.
What the cheap tier misses
County records
The instant, database-only package at the bottom of every vendor's pricing page skips individual county courthouse searches — the source most likely to actually hold a real conviction. GoodHire's own editorial team calls its equivalent tier “genuinely not enough for hiring decisions.”
The middle tier is where the real check starts: GoodHire's $54.99 Essential adds a 7-year county criminal search plus federal records, which is the level that actually goes and looks at courthouse filings rather than a database someone compiled. Treat that middle tier, not the bottom one, as the real starting price for a check you'd want to hang a hiring decision on.
What pushes the price past $90
Two additions account for most of the jump into HireRight and Sterling territory:
- Employment and education verification.Confirming someone actually worked where they say they worked, and has the degree they claim, requires contacting the prior employer or school directly — a manual step that costs real labor on the vendor's side. GoodHire's top $89.99 Complete tier adds exactly this. For payroll fraud specifically, this is the tier that matters most: it's what catches someone applying under a fabricated work history rather than a fabricated identity.
- County court pass-through fees.Some jurisdictions charge a per-search retrieval fee that the background check vendor passes straight to you, on top of the package price. This runs $5–$25+ per county in fee-heavy states, and it's the line item that makes an otherwise-predictable check total surprise people.
International or multi-country coverage is the other lever, and it's the reason Sterling and HireRight's enterprise pricing climbs into the hundreds — a screen that touches records systems in several countries costs meaningfully more to run than a single US county search.
Turnaround changes the price too
Instant database checks that clear in minutes are cheap because there's no human labor behind them. County courthouse searches take longer — see how long a background check actually takes — and that added turnaround is part of what you're paying for in the mid and top tiers, not just the extra data sources.
Picking a tier without overpaying
For most small businesses hiring a handful of people a month, the practical answer is: skip the bottom tier entirely, since it's priced close enough to the middle one that the coverage gap isn't worth the savings. Add employment verification only for roles where a fabricated work history is the actual risk — anyone touching payroll, banking, or client funds. See the full lineup at the best background check software for small business, or compare vendors directly: GoodHire, Checkr, Certn, HireRight, and Sterling.
And whichever tier you land on, running the check is only half the job — what actually shows up on the report determines whether that money bought you anything useful.