Publisher pricing: about $20 to $60 a pull
Truework publishes its prices, which is rare in this category: $54.95 for an employment-only report, $59.95 if you need income confirmed too, and $19.95 for a re-verification. That's pay-as-you-go with no account minimum, so a single verification genuinely costs what the page says.
Argyle sits at the lower end — it doesn't publish a rate card (usage-based, quoted per deployment), but reported per-verification costs run from low single digits up to around $10, a fraction of what the legacy verification-of-employment bureaus charge. The tradeoff is that it's an API-first product built for teams with engineering resources, not a dashboard you log into for a one-off check.
Why The Work Number is a different animal entirely
The Work Number, Equifax's employment and income database, has two sides and two prices. If your payroll provider already contributes your employees' data to it (many do automatically), Equifax offers that contribution side at no additional cost to you as the employer — it just means verification requests about your people get answered by the database instead of landing on your HR desk. If you're on the other side, verifying a new hire's claimed prior income, access is FCRA-gated, credentialed, and priced per verification — usually reached through a screening partner rather than a self-serve login, and in line with the other bureaus above.
The two-sided cost
Free vs. per-pull
Contributing your own employees' payroll data to the incumbent database costs nothing. Pulling someone else's data to verify a new hire is what actually costs money, and the price depends on who you go through.
What drives the price within a single vendor
Employment-only (confirming they worked there, when, and at what title) is cheaper than employment-plus-income, since income confirmation touches payroll data the source system may guard more closely. Re-verification — confirming the same thing again later, common for ongoing eligibility checks — runs cheaper than a first-time pull since less new work is involved. And volume matters: enterprise tiers at Truework and elsewhere offer discounts up to 30% off per-verification once you're running real numbers, which doesn't help a business verifying two or three hires a month but matters if verification is a routine part of your hiring pipeline.
The free alternative, and why it's slower
Calling a former employer's HR department directly and asking them to confirm dates and title costs nothing but staff time. It's also slower, inconsistent (some employers will only confirm dates, some won't respond at all, some route you into an automated system like The Work Number anyway), and leaves no audit trail the way a paid verification report does. For a single hire it's a reasonable default. Past a handful a month, the paid options start paying for themselves in staff hours saved.
Where to compare vendors
The fuller lineup, including pricing model and coverage notes for each, is at best income & employment verification software and the income & employment verification category. If you specifically need to confirm someone is legally authorized to work, rather than what they earn or where they worked before, that's a different question — see how to verify employment eligibility.