Ship employee background checks in a week
Criminal records across more than a thousand county, state and federal jurisdictions and 58 US sex offender registries, behind one API call. Integrate once, price per check, and put the year you would have spent on jurisdiction plumbing into your product instead.
Building screening into a product? See the employment background check API for HR and ATS platforms, or the background check API.
No card, no sales call. $0.15 a call, $0.11 past 2,000 a month.
curl -sS https://api.offendersearch.app/v1/criminal/search \
-H "X-API-Key: $OFFENDERSEARCH_KEY" \
-G --data-urlencode "name=Jordan Reyes" \
--data-urlencode "dob=1988-03-02"Making a hiring decision? Use an FCRA workflow.
FCRA workflows are built primarily for tenant screening and hiring decisions. If a result will help decide whether to hire someone, the check has to run as an FCRA-regulated consumer report, with a permissible purpose, consent, accuracy controls and a dispute path for the person. Our standard search and API are not a consumer report. FCRA workflows run through FCRA Partner Access, for background check companies and screening platforms under a written FCRA agreement.
FCRA pricing is quoted per partner, so contact us for pricing.
What you would otherwise be building
US criminal records are published by more than a thousand separate authorities, in as many formats, changing independently. That work is the product for us and a distraction for you.
One integration, not fifty-two
Every state publishes differently, and the ones that publish the most change the most. You integrate once against a single schema and we absorb that churn — 1,375 county jail rosters, 53 statewide prison systems, 24 court sources and 28 warrant systems behind one call.
One schema across five record types
A jail booking, a prison term, a court case and a warrant are four different shapes at source. They arrive as one record with a kind discriminator, so your adjudication logic is written once instead of per jurisdiction.
Coverage you can query, not guess
GET /v1/criminal/sources returns every jurisdiction, live or pending, with scope and last-update age. Your product can show customers exactly what a check reached — and your roadmap can watch coverage grow without a single email.
An audit trail by default
Every record carries the jurisdiction that holds it and a citation; every response reports how many jurisdictions were searched. That is the artifact your enterprise customers ask for in security review, and you get it without building it.
A result your HR team can read
Through the API or the dashboard, a registry hit comes back as a scored record — photograph, offense and tier, the registry it came from, and what it matched on — not raw text to interpret.
Jordan A. Sample
Review · match 0.98- Date of birth
- 1984-03-11
- Sex
- Male
- Offense
- Registrable offense · Tier II
- Last known address
- Springfield, IL 62704
- Registry
- Illinois Sex Offender Registry
- Matched on
- last name, first name, date of birth
Sample result — fictional data. Every real result links to the official registry record so you can verify it at the source, and carries the match score and the fields it matched on.
No code? An HR team screens a hiring list from the dashboard or uploads it with CSV batch screening. This is a registry layer, not a consumer report. For the hiring decision itself, screening companies use FCRA Partner Access.
Priced to resell
Screening products charge $15–$50 a check. Your data cost per check at volume is a rounding error against that, and it is the same price whether you call once or batch fifty thousand.
| Checks / month | Your cost | Per check |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $150.00 | $0.1500 |
| 10,000 | $1,180.00 | $0.1180 |
| 100,000 | $11,080.00 | $0.1108 |
No setup fee, no per-seat licence, no monthly minimum on search, no annual contract. Full pricing.
Why the county layer is the whole game
30 of 52 US jurisdictions publish no statewide court source at all. A screening product that only reaches statewide systems is thin in most of the country — which is why we carry 1,375 county jurisdictions underneath them.
1,375
county jurisdictions in the roster — the layer most vendors skip, and where most US criminal matters actually begin.
51
states with a live statewide prison system, for the post-conviction picture on a single call.
58
US sex offender registries on the same key — the check most screening flows need alongside criminal.
Per-state detail: what each state publishes.
You run the process; we make it defensible
On the standard API we are the records layer, and results are not a consumer report. For FCRA-regulated screening, FCRA Partner Access adds the regulated controls; disclosure and adverse action stay with you. What we give you is the thing that makes that process survive scrutiny: every record typed by kind, attributed to a named jurisdiction, and returned with a citation, plus a per-response count of what was searched.
- Adjudicate conviction and arrest differently, by design, using
kind - Show a customer or a regulator exactly which jurisdictions a check reached
- Re-verify any record at its source months later from the citation
- Enterprise security review answered by Trust & HIPAA, BAA available
Further reading
Independent comparisons of the tools in this category — including where other vendors are the better answer.
The best sex offender APIs in 2026, compared
Five ways to search US registries programmatically, measured on coverage you can enumerate, provenance, match quality and price.
The best criminal record search APIs in 2026
Jail bookings, prison custody, court cases and warrants are four different systems. Which API you want depends on which one your question needs.
The best background check APIs in 2026
Five brands, three companies: the consolidation nobody mentions, each vendor’s real published price, and the only per-call API on the list.
How to build a sex offender map with MapLibre
A developer tutorial with full code: clusters, pins, names and a record panel, built in free test mode.
More in our comparisons and research.
What shows up on a criminal check, by the numbers
In a random sample of 66,154 US criminal records on our index, 50% are state prison (department of corrections) records and 49% are court cases.
41% of those records include charge detail. Among them, the most common charges are theft, larceny and stolen property (14%), drug possession (13%) and assault, battery and threats (10%).
Where a record states the level of the charge (9% of records), 60% are felonies and 34% misdemeanors.
93% of court cases on our index do not state an outcome. Among those that do, 43% ended in a conviction, guilty plea or adjudication, 14% were dismissed or found not guilty, and 43% are still open.
A jail booking records an arrest and the charges at booking. It is not a conviction.
- Theft, larceny and stolen property14%
- Drug possession13%
- Assault, battery and threats10%
- Burglary and breaking & entering9%
- Fraud, forgery and identity theft8%
- Drug sale, distribution or manufacture8%
- Traffic offenses (not DUI)7%
- Other or unclear7%
- DUI / DWI6%
- Public order, trespass and property damage6%
- State prison (department of corrections) records50%
- Court cases49%
- County jail bookings1%
- Convicted, pleaded guilty or adjudicated3%
- Dismissed, not guilty or acquitted1%
- Open or pending3%
- No outcome stated (including cases marked closed without a disposition)93%
Based on a random sample of 66,154 records on our index (2026-10-08). Categories are our grouping of the charge text each court, jail or agency publishes; a record can include charges in several categories. Percentages are rounded. See criminal charge types and what shows up on a background check.
Employment screening questions
What does it take to ship screening on this?
One endpoint and one key. If you already call our registry search, criminal is the same credential and the same response shape — most teams are returning real results the same day and spend their remaining effort on adjudication rules, not on plumbing. There is no onboarding call, no minimum on search and no contract before you can try it.
How does pricing work at volume?
Every call is $0.15, and every call past 2,000 in a calendar month is $0.11. At 10,000 checks a month that is $1,180.00 — about 11.8 cents a check — with no platform fee, per-seat licence or annual commitment underneath it. A batch is billed per row, so bulk screening costs the same per person as a single lookup.
Can we run large volumes in one request?
Yes. POST a batch and each row is billed as one call; rows that error come back with a reason and are not billed. Teams running periodic re-screening of an existing population generally use batch rather than looping the single-search endpoint.
Can Offendersearch be used for FCRA employment screening?
Yes, through FCRA Partner Access. Standard results are not a consumer report; regulated screening runs as FCRA orders for approved consumer reporting agencies and screening platforms, under a written FCRA agreement — one order covers a registry search, a criminal search or both. It requires a permissible purpose and an exact date-of-birth match, re-checks every record live before it is furnished, keeps an evidence record per order, and gives the candidate a portal to see and dispute what was furnished. Disclosure, authorization and adverse action stay with you and your client.
How do we handle arrest records responsibly?
Use the kind field. Jail records are arrest-stage; court records carry the disposition. Because every record is typed and cited, your adjudication rules can treat a conviction differently from a booking by design rather than by hoping the vendor sorted it out — which is exactly what a regulator or a plaintiff will ask you to demonstrate.
What about the sex offender registry?
It is the same key and the same account — 58 US registries, continuously updated, with photographs, aliases and the official record citation. Most screening products run both in the same flow.