The Work Number (Equifax)

The Work Number is Equifax's employment and income database, and it's the incumbent nobody in this category can ignore: nearly 5 million employers contribute payroll data to it, directly or through their payroll provider, covering more than 800 million employment records. When a lender, landlord, or background-check company verifies someone's income or employment in the US, this is very often the source they hit first.

It touches you as an employer in two directions. If your payroll provider already contributes to The Work Number (many do, automatically), your employees' verification requests get answered by the database instead of landing on someone's HR desk, and Equifax offers that data-contribution side at no additional cost to the employer. If you're on the other side, verifying a new hire's claimed prior income or employment, The Work Number is the largest single source, but access is credentialed and FCRA-gated, priced per verification, and usually reached through a screening partner rather than a self-serve login.

The honest fit: this isn't a self-serve SMB gadget and it isn't our pick, it's the default of record, useful to understand precisely because you'll run into it. As an employer, know whether your payroll data is already in it, because that shapes how verification requests about your people get handled. As a verifier of new hires, it's the broadest coverage there is, but Truework is the more SMB-friendly front door and often pulls from sources like this one anyway. Coverage is US.