If a criminal background check shows something wrong about you, federal law gives you a free, fast way to fix it: send a written dispute to the company that produced the report, and it must investigate and respond within 30 days. That is the short version of how to dispute criminal background check information, and the rest comes down to sending the dispute to the right party, with the right documents, and knowing what to do if the company doesn’t cooperate.
Figure Out What Kind of Error You Have
The evidence you need depends on the error. Background check mistakes tend to fall into a handful of patterns:
- Mixed files, where records belonging to someone with a similar name or date of birth get attached to yours. Common names make this worse.
- Outdated records showing a dismissed charge, expunged conviction, or sealed record that should no longer appear.
- Data entry mistakes, like a transposed digit in a Social Security number or a wrong disposition on your own case.
- Missing disposition information, where an arrest appears with no note that charges were dropped or you were acquitted.
- Identity theft records, where someone used your information while committing a crime and that history now sits on your report.
Naming the error type before you start writing makes the rest of the process faster. A mixed-file dispute lives or dies on identification documents. An outdated-record dispute needs a certified court disposition. An identity theft dispute unlocks a separate remedy that a regular dispute doesn’t.
Get the Report and Collect Your Documents
You need the actual report, not a description of it. If an employer or landlord sent you a pre-adverse action notice, the report should have been attached. If you never received one, request a copy of your file directly from the background check company. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, any company that maintains a file on you must disclose everything in it on request, including its sources and a list of everyone who has pulled the report for employment purposes in the past two years.
Once you have the report, pull together:
- Government-issued identification: driver’s license, passport, or state ID. This is essential for mixed-file cases.
- Certified court records showing the actual disposition, if the report misstates a case outcome or shows something that was dismissed, expunged, or sealed. Contact the clerk of court where the case was handled. Certified copy fees generally run between $3 and $40.
- The adverse action notice, if you got one. It names the background check company and confirms your right to a free copy of the report.
- An identity theft report from IdentityTheft.gov and a local police report, if the record on your file came from someone using your identity.
Send copies. Keep the originals. You may need them later.
Send the Dispute to the Background Check Company
Send your dispute directly to the company that produced the report. Certified mail with return receipt requested gives you the strongest paper trail, because the 30-day investigation clock starts when the company receives your dispute and you want proof of that date. Many companies also take disputes through an online portal, which is faster but harder to document.
Include your full name, current address, date of birth, and the report number if there is one. Then handle each error one at a time. For each, identify the specific item, explain why it is wrong, and state what the record should say. A dispute that reads “the conviction under case number 2019-CR-4521 in Harris County belongs to John A. Smith, DOB 03/15/1982; I am John B. Smith, DOB 09/22/1990, as shown in the attached identification” gets further than “this isn’t mine.”
Attach copies of your ID, the pages of the report with errors marked, and any court records or other supporting evidence. Keep the tone factual.
Dispute With the Source at the Same Time
You can also dispute directly with the entity that supplied the data, and it is worth doing. A “furnisher” of information, meaning the court system, records vendor, or other source that gave the disputed data to the background check company, has its own independent obligation under federal regulations to investigate when it receives a dispute. The furnisher must conduct a reasonable investigation, review the information you provide, finish within the same timeframe a background check company would face, and notify every consumer reporting agency it sent the bad data to if it confirms an error.
The advantage is that a fix at the source flows downstream. The background check company has no firsthand knowledge of court records; the courthouse or records vendor does. If they correct the underlying record, future reports pulling from that source will be clean.
What the Company Must Do, and When
Once the background check company receives your dispute, it has 30 days to investigate. Within five business days it must notify the data source and forward the information you provided. The source then has to verify or correct the disputed item.
Two things can stretch the deadline to 45 days: submitting additional relevant information during the original 30-day window, which gives the company an extra 15 days to fold it in; or filing after receiving a free annual report disclosure, which gives 45 days from the start.
When the investigation is done, the company must send you written results within five business days. If it found an error, your report gets corrected and you get a free updated copy. The notice must also include contact information for any furnisher the company contacted. If you ask, the company has to describe the procedures it used to reach its conclusion, which is useful if you plan to challenge the outcome.
After a correction, you can ask the company to send a notice of the correction to any employer that received the inaccurate report in the past two years, or anyone else who received it in the past year. If you disagree with the outcome, you have the right to add a brief statement to your file explaining your side, and that statement travels with the report going forward.
If the Error Came From Identity Theft
Identity-theft-related errors get a stronger remedy than the standard dispute. You can require the background check company to block the disputed information entirely. To trigger the block, provide the company with proof of your identity, a copy of your identity theft report (the FTC report and police report), identification of the specific information to be blocked, and a statement that the information does not relate to any transaction you were involved in. The company must block the reporting of that information within four business days of receiving your request, and must notify the furnisher that a block has been requested and that an identity theft report has been filed.
A block is more durable than a correction, because blocked information cannot resurface on future reports the way a corrected item sometimes does when the underlying source data isn’t fixed.
Check Whether the Record Should Be There at All
Some items are grounds for dispute simply because federal law says they cannot be reported anymore. Arrest records that did not result in a conviction cannot appear on a background check after seven years from the date of the arrest. The same seven-year limit applies to civil suits, civil judgments, and most other adverse information. Criminal convictions, under federal law, can be reported indefinitely.
There is one exception. If the report is for a job with an annual salary of $75,000 or more, the seven-year restrictions on non-conviction records do not apply.
About a dozen states go further than federal law and cap even conviction reporting. California, New York, Colorado, and several others impose seven-year limits on conviction reporting for most positions. If your report contains an older conviction, whether it can legally be included may depend on where you live and what the position pays.
File a CFPB Complaint If the Company Won’t Cooperate
If the background check company ignores your dispute, misses the 30-day deadline, or reaches a conclusion you believe is wrong, file a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB oversees consumer reporting agencies and handles these complaints under “Credit reports and other personal consumer reports.”
File online at consumerfinance.gov/complaint or call (855) 411-2372 during business hours. Include a clear description of the problem, the dates and details of your dispute, and copies of relevant documents (up to 50 pages). The CFPB forwards the complaint to the company, which generally must respond within 15 days. More complex cases can take up to 60 days, but the company has to tell you its response is in progress.
File the complaint even if you are also thinking about a lawsuit. It creates an official record that you gave the company a reasonable chance to fix the problem, and sometimes it produces a result the dispute letter alone did not.
Suing Under the FCRA
When the administrative process fails, the FCRA lets you sue. You can bring a case in any federal district court regardless of the amount in controversy, or in any other court with jurisdiction.
What you can recover depends on whether the violation was negligent or willful. For negligent violations, you can recover actual damages, such as lost wages from a job you didn’t get, plus attorney’s fees and court costs. For willful violations, you can choose between actual damages or statutory damages of $100 to $1,000, and the court can add punitive damages on top.
The fee-shifting provision is what makes these cases workable when individual damages are small. If you win, the company pays your attorney, which is why many consumer rights lawyers take FCRA cases on contingency.
You have two years from the date you discovered the violation to file, and in no event more than five years after the violation occurred. If a company stonewalled your dispute in early 2024 and you didn’t learn about it until 2025, your two-year clock started in 2025, but it expires no later than early 2029 regardless.