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.
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"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.
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, 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
We are the records layer, not a consumer reporting agency, and our results are not a consumer report — FCRA process stays 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
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 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.
Is Offendersearch a consumer reporting agency?
No. We are the records layer your product calls, not a CRA, and our results are not a consumer report. FCRA process — permissible purpose, disclosure and authorisation, adverse action, disputes — stays with the operator. Most of our screening customers are precisely that: platforms running their own compliant process who wanted a data layer they could audit.
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.