Overview
A national criminal database search queries a large commercial database of criminal records gathered from sources across the country. It returns results in seconds, costs a fraction of a court search, and covers ground no address based search would reach.
It is also the most misunderstood component in screening, and the misunderstanding runs in a specific direction. People assume it is the most complete search available. It is the least reliable one, and its value comes from being used as a starting point rather than an answer.
Nothing here argues against using it. A well run screening program uses it on nearly every check. The point is that what it produces is a lead requiring confirmation, not a finding ready to act on.
There Is No Single National Database
No unified national criminal database exists for employment screening. The phrase describes a category of commercial product, not a specific one. Screening companies build or license their own compilations from whatever sources they can obtain, so 2 vendors running a national database search on the same person can return different results, and both can be accurate descriptions of what their own database holds.
This follows directly from how criminal records work in the United States. Records are created and held by thousands of separate courts and agencies, each with its own rules about what it publishes and to whom. No authority collects all of it into one place and opens it to employers.
What a commercial database contains is therefore a question about that vendor’s sourcing rather than a question about the country’s criminal records. Coverage is a business fact, not a legal one, and it differs from provider to provider.
What About the FBI
The federal government does maintain national criminal history systems, which is the source of much of the confusion. Those systems exist for law enforcement and for background checks specifically authorized by law, and they are not available to employers for ordinary hiring.
Where an employer does reach federal criminal history, it is because a statute permits it for that category of work, typically positions involving children, vulnerable adults, security, or certain licensed occupations. Access in those cases generally runs through fingerprint submission via an authorized channel rather than a name search. Our page on Live Scan covers how that process works.
So the comprehensive national search most people picture does exist. It is simply not the product being sold when a screening company offers a national criminal database search, and the 2 should not be confused.
Where the Data Comes From
A commercial database is assembled from records the vendor has been able to obtain, which commonly includes:
- State repository data, where a state makes bulk criminal history available for commercial use.
- Department of corrections records, covering people who were incarcerated or supervised.
- Court records, from courts that publish data in a form that can be collected at scale.
- Sex offender registries, which are public in every state.
- Government watchlists and sanctions lists.
The mix matters more than the list. A state that sells bulk repository data contributes heavily. A state that does not may be represented only by its corrections records, which means the database holds people who went to prison there and nobody else. Another may contribute almost nothing at all.
Coverage is therefore uneven by geography and by record type, and the unevenness follows what was obtainable rather than any deliberate design.
The Two Ways It Fails
Database searches fail in both directions, and the 2 failures need to be understood separately because they call for different responses.
| Missing records | A jurisdiction contributes nothing, contributes only part of its records, or has not sent an update in months. The search returns nothing, and a record exists. |
| Wrong records | Matching is done on name and whatever identifiers the source provided, which are often thin. A common name attracts records belonging to other people. The search returns a record, and it is not the applicant’s. |
The first failure means a clear result proves less than it appears to. A clean national database search does not establish that a person has no criminal record. It establishes that this vendor’s compilation holds nothing matching, which is a much narrower statement.
The second failure means a hit is a question rather than an answer. Acting on an unverified database record is how the wrong person gets denied a job, and it is the single most common source of serious errors in background screening.
Records That Should Be Gone
A database is a snapshot of information copied at a point in time. When a court later changes or removes a record, nothing automatically pushes that change out to every company holding a copy.
The consequence appears most often with cleared records. A conviction that a court has sealed or expunged can continue to appear in a commercial database, sometimes long after the court itself shows nothing. It can also happen with dispositions, where a database holds a charge recorded before the case concluded and never received the outcome.
How sealing and expungement work, and what an individual can do when a cleared record surfaces, is covered on our County Criminal Search page.
What a Result Contains
Database records are usually thinner than court records, because a database holds what its source provided rather than a case file.
| Name and identifiers | Whatever the contributing source supplied, which may be a name alone or may include a date of birth. |
| Jurisdiction | The state and often the county or agency the record came from. |
| Charge | The offense as recorded, sometimes in the source’s own abbreviated terms. |
| Dates | Offense, arrest, or filing dates, depending on the source. |
| Disposition | Frequently absent, which is one of the main reasons a hit requires confirmation. |
| Source | Which contributing source the entry came from, where the vendor discloses it. |
What the Search Is Actually For
Used correctly, a national database search answers one question: where should we look?
A criminal background check is otherwise scoped by address history, which decides which counties get searched. That works well, but it has a structural gap, because a case is filed where the offense occurred rather than where the person lived. Somebody who worked, studied, or traveled in a county they never lived in can have a record no address based search would find.
A database search covers the whole country at once, so it can surface exactly that record. The screening company then goes to the court that holds the case and confirms what the database suggested.
That sequence is the whole method. The database casts the net, the county search establishes the facts.
Each search supplies what the other lacks, which is why the pairing works and why either one alone leaves a gap. A county search cannot look somewhere nobody pointed it. A database search on its own confirms nothing it finds and says nothing about what it missed, so a result from it, clear or otherwise, is not a statement about a person’s criminal record. It is a statement about what one company’s compilation happened to contain on the day it was queried.
What It Does Not Cover
- Jurisdictions that do not contribute. The defining limitation, and it is invisible from the result.
- Recent activity in many places, since updates arrive on the contributing source’s schedule.
- Federal cases, reliably. Some databases include federal data and some carry little, so a federal criminal search is ordered separately.
- Case detail. A database entry is a summary, not a case file.
- Records outside the United States, which require international screening.
Reporting Limits and the FCRA
A national database search conducted for employment purposes is a consumer report. Written disclosure and authorization are required before it is requested, and the individual may dispute anything incorrect. Our FCRA Overview covers those requirements in full.
Federal law adds a requirement that lands squarely on this search. When a screening company reports a court record that could cost someone a job, it has to do one of 2 things:
- Tell the individual that the record is being reported, at the same time it goes to the employer, or
- Confirm the record is complete and current before reporting it.
Most screening companies take the second route, and that choice is what produces the practice described earlier on this page. A database entry showing a charge with no outcome is not complete. One the court has since cleared is not current. Checking the record at the court is how a screening company satisfies the requirement, which is why a database hit is confirmed before it reaches an employer rather than reported as found.
The usual timing rules also apply. Non-conviction information is generally restricted once it passes 7 years, while convictions carry no federal time limit, and several states impose tighter restrictions of their own. Our State Laws Overview covers how the states differ.
Where a record contributes to a decision not to hire, the required notice steps apply. Given how often database records are incomplete or misattributed, this is the stage at which most of those errors get caught. See The Adverse Action Process.