You can run a free government background check on yourself using a handful of official sources, with only one small fee involved. The FBI’s Identity History Summary, the closest thing to an official federal criminal record, costs $18. Everything else — federal court filings through PACER, the national sex offender registry, state court portals, and your own military service record from the National Archives — is free or effectively free for personal use.
The catch is that no single source shows everything. Each database only knows what’s been reported to it, so a thorough self-check means pulling from several places. Here’s how to do it.
Get Your FBI Identity History Summary
The Identity History Summary pulls from the FBI’s fingerprint-based criminal history database and returns every federal arrest, charge, and disposition tied to your prints. This is the record employers, licensing boards, and immigration agencies typically rely on, so it’s the first thing to check about yourself.
You need three things to apply: the FBI’s request form, a completed Standard Fingerprint Form (FD-258), and $18. The FBI provides blank FD-258 cards at no cost, but a fingerprint card has to be rolled by a law enforcement agency or certified technician, who may charge their own service fee.1Federal Bureau of Investigation. Standard Fingerprint Form FD-258 The FBI accepts certified checks, money orders, and credit cards for the processing fee.2Federal Bureau of Investigation. Identity History Summary Request Form
Submit your request either through the FBI’s Electronic Departmental Order (EDO) portal or by mail to the FBI CJIS Division, 1000 Custer Hollow Road, Clarksburg, West Virginia 26306.2Federal Bureau of Investigation. Identity History Summary Request Form The electronic route is faster. Requests are processed in the order they arrive, and there’s no expedited option.3Federal Bureau of Investigation. Identity History Summary Checks Frequently Asked Questions If nothing matches your prints, the FBI sends a letter confirming no record was found.
Fixing Errors on Your Summary
If the summary contains mistakes, you can challenge it at no cost. Your challenge should identify what’s wrong and include supporting documents like court dispositions or expungement orders. File it through the EDO portal or by mail to the Criminal History Analysis Team at the same Clarksburg address. The FBI averages about 45 days to process a challenge.3Federal Bureau of Investigation. Identity History Summary Checks Frequently Asked Questions
Corrections can add final dispositions, record expungements or pardons, change conviction levels, or restore rights. Nonfederal arrests that appear on your FBI record usually have to be corrected through your state’s identification bureau first, since states control their own arrest data and expungement laws. Federal arrest data can only be removed at the request of the submitting agency or by federal court order.
Check Federal Court Filings on PACER
The Public Access to Court Electronic Records system covers federal district courts, bankruptcy courts, and appellate courts nationwide.4PACER: Federal Court Records. Search by National Index If you’ve been named in a federal lawsuit, filed for bankruptcy, or been charged with a federal crime, the docket lives here.
PACER charges $0.10 per page, capped at $3.00 per document.5PACER: Federal Court Records. PACER Pricing: How Fees Work What makes it effectively free for personal use: if your total charges stay at or below $30 in a calendar quarter, the fees are waived entirely.6PACER: Federal Court Records. Public Access to Court Electronic Records That’s enough room to pull several full case dockets without paying anything. Court opinions are always free, and public terminals inside federal courthouses give you free access on-site.
PACER is particularly useful for checking your own bankruptcy history. Bankruptcies drop off credit reports after ten years but stay in PACER indefinitely, so this is the place to confirm exactly what’s on the federal record.
Search State and Local Court Records
State criminal cases, civil lawsuits, and traffic offenses don’t show up in federal databases. For those, you need state or local court systems. Most courthouses offer public access terminals where you can search criminal and civil dockets, view filings, and read judgments at no charge. Many states also run online portals that let you search by name from home.
Quality varies a lot. Some states maintain full statewide databases; others make you search county by county. A handful of states offer free name-based criminal history checks through their law enforcement agencies, though these return less detail than a fingerprint check. Where states do charge for a name-based criminal history, fees run from nothing up to roughly $95.
Viewing dockets online is generally free, but certified copies cost extra. Administrative fees for certified documents commonly fall between $5 and $25 per record. If an employer or licensing board wants certified copies, factor that in.
Look Yourself Up on the National Sex Offender Registry
The Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website, run by the Department of Justice, aggregates registration data from all fifty states, U.S. territories, and participating tribes into one searchable database.7Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website. Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website It’s completely free and requires no account. Results typically include photographs, physical descriptions, conviction details, last known addresses, and registration status. If you want to confirm what a curious employer or landlord would see when they search your name, this is where they’d look.
Request Your Military Service Record
The National Archives and Records Administration holds military personnel files and can verify service history at no charge. Submit Standard Form 180 (SF-180) by mail or fax to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.8National Archives. Request Military Service Records The Archives specifically warns that private companies advertising DD Form 214 research services are charging for something the government does for free.
As the veteran, you can generally get your full record from non-archival files at no cost. Include as much identifying information as possible on the SF-180: full name used during service, branch, dates of service, service number, and Social Security number if known.9National Archives. Access to Official Military Personnel Files for the General Public Files become fully open to the general public 62 years after separation, subject only to a copying fee.8National Archives. Request Military Service Records
Your Rights If an Employer Is Screening You
A common reason to check yourself is that someone else is about to. The Fair Credit Reporting Act sets rules an employer has to follow. Before pulling your background report, they must give you a standalone written disclosure and get your written consent. That disclosure has to be its own document, not buried inside a job application or handbook.10Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681b – Permissible Purposes of Consumer Reports
If the employer decides not to hire you based on the report, they have to send you a copy of it plus a written summary of your FCRA rights before taking that adverse action.10Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681b – Permissible Purposes of Consumer Reports That pre-adverse action notice is your window to spot errors before the decision becomes final. It’s often the moment people realize they need to pull their own government records to compare.
After an adverse action, you have 60 days to request a free copy of the consumer report from the reporting agency.11Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681j – Charges for Certain Disclosures Separately, you can pull your credit reports weekly at no cost from AnnualCreditReport.com through all three major bureaus.12Federal Trade Commission. Free Credit Reports Some employers include credit checks in their screening, so reviewing yours in advance is worth the few minutes.
What These Free Checks Won’t Catch
Each government source only knows its own database. The FBI Identity History Summary only includes arrests where fingerprints were submitted to the bureau. State court records only cover that state. PACER only covers federal courts. The sex offender site only covers registered offenders. None of these systems automatically talks to the others.
Private screening companies charge for the convenience of aggregating records across jurisdictions, but the underlying data comes from the same government sources. Running your own checks across the free tools above gives you a surprisingly complete picture for the price of the FBI’s $18 fee.
Government databases also contain errors. Arrest records may lack final dispositions, dismissed charges can linger, and common names produce false matches. If you’re checking your own record ahead of a job or license application, start early enough to challenge any mistakes through the processes above.