Work · guide

What shows up on a background check, and what you are owed

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 8 min read

The interesting half of what shows up on a background check is not the list. The list is five items long and published by the Federal Trade Commission. The half worth reading is what the employer has to do around it — before they order the report, and again before they use it against you.

Four of those are the expected ones. The fifth is public social media activities, named by a federal agency in the same breath as employment history and criminal records. The word doing the work is public: this is not a claim about private accounts or messages, it is the observation that what is open to everybody is open to an employer too — which is the argument for setting a Facebook profile to private, or for locking it in one move where that option is offered.

There is one detail in the permission rule that is more useful than the permission itself. The employer must tell you they could use the information to make decisions about hiring, promoting or firing you — and the FTC specifies the form: “They must give you this information in writing in a standalone document.” Not a clause inside the application form: a document of its own, which is a much harder thing to sign without reading.

Then the part that matters when something goes wrong, and the FTC sets it out step by step. Before an employer decides against you because of the report, they “must give you a copy of the report and a ‘summary of rights’ that tells you about your rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act”. Not afterwards, and not on request. Before.

The second of those four is the one to hold on to when you are angry, because it tells you the shape of the problem. The reporting company assembled the information and did not make the decision; the employer made the decision and did not assemble the information. Complaining to either about the other half is a conversation that cannot go anywhere. Errors go to the company; the hiring decision belongs to the employer, and the FTC’s wording separates them deliberately.

The fourth is the one with a clock on it, and the clock is short. Sixty days from the employer’s decision, and the extra report is free. Note where that sits in the list: being told about the deadline is itself one of the four things you are owed. If nobody mentioned it, that is not a detail you missed — it is a step that was required.

The FTC also gives an instruction that is easy to skip once a correction is made. If the reporting company revises your report, “review the report to make sure the mistakes are gone”, then “ask the background reporting company to send a copy of the corrected report to the employer and tell the employer about the mistake.” A corrected file helps nobody if the person who read the wrong version never learns it was wrong.

A second agency has a paragraph in this, and it is the one that matters if you decide to question a decision months after it was taken. In the guidance the FTC publishes jointly with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the employer is given a retention duty: “Any personnel or employment records you make or keep (including all application forms, regardless of whether the applicant was hired, and other records related to hiring) must be preserved for one year after the records were made, or after a personnel action was taken, whichever comes later.” The rule is addressed to employers, but read from your side it is a window: for a year after a decision, the paperwork behind it is supposed to still exist.

Where these rules apply. Everything quoted on this guide is United States law — the Fair Credit Reporting Act — as set out by the Federal Trade Commission for consumers. Other countries protect this differently, sometimes more strictly, and a page written about one jurisdiction is not evidence about another.

The guides below take it four ways: the five categories, the permission and the standalone document, what happens if the report costs you the job, and the checking worth doing before you apply to anybody.

Not covered here. It will not tell you how to keep something off a report. The guides here are about what is checked, what you must be told, and how to correct what is wrong.

It will not treat the permission form as a formality. The FTC requires it to be a standalone document, and that requirement exists so it is read.

And it will not present United States law as universal. What is quoted here is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and the guide says so rather than leaving you to assume. What holds instead is simple: the four disclosures after an adverse decision and the sixty-day window are the Federal Trade Commission’s, with the retention rule from the joint FTC and EEOC guidance.