Identity History Summaries
There are two ways to get an FBI background check. Only one of them is open to most people.
You can request it yourself, or have an FBI-approved channeler submit for you. Which one you can actually use is decided by things most people never get told about — where you are standing, how readable your fingerprints are, and whether the report is the finished document or the first step in something longer.
Not a government website. FBIBackgroundCheck.org is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the FBI, the U.S. Department of State, or any government agency, and it cannot process, expedite, or check the status of a request. Nothing here is legal advice. Terms of use
- Sourced
- Every figure here traced to the regulation that sets it
- Both routes
- What each one requires, and where each one fails
- Where you are
- Which route is open to you depends on your location as much as your case
Why the choice is narrower than it looks
Requesting the summary yourself is the cheaper route, and for some people it is plainly the right one. What makes it narrow is that it works only when several separate things are all true at once — readable fingerprints, no fixed date, somewhere nearby that can take prints, and no second document waiting on the first. Any one of those failing is enough, because there is nobody inside that route to notice a problem before it becomes a rejection.
An approved channeler is a private company the FBI has authorised to submit fingerprints electronically on an applicant's behalf. Going that way costs more than the $18 the regulation sets, and what the money buys is narrower than most descriptions of it suggest: someone looks at the submission before it goes in. That matters in proportion to what a rejection would cost you, which is the question people tend to skip.
A rejected submission does not resume where it stopped. It starts again, and the second attempt takes as long as the first.
The primary sources
The fee, the procedure and the way a disputed entry is corrected are fixed by regulation, and the regulation is public. Where this site states a figure, that is where it came from.
fbi.gov — Identity History Summary Checks
Outside links, offered because they are the source. This site has no relationship with the FBI and cannot act on your request.