What it is
First Advantage is the largest employment background screening company by volume, and since October 2024 it is also two companies under one ticker. It closed its $2.2B cash-and-stock acquisition of Sterling Check that month, and the combined business now reports about 80,000 customers, more than 200 million screens a year across 200+ countries, and a proprietary database of over 1 billion records, including 135 million verified work and education histories. It trades publicly on NASDAQ as FA, which makes it the only one of the three big enterprise screeners whose numbers you can read every quarter.
The catalog is the full screening stack: criminal searches at county, state, federal and international level; employment, education and license verification; drug and health screening; motor vehicle records; I-9 and E-Verify; post-hire monitoring; and RightID, a document, biometric and liveness identity check that management now calls the “tip of the spear” in enterprise deals.
The question it answers: can one vendor screen a high-volume, multi-country workforce inside Workday or SuccessFactors, and still be financially stable in five years? For a large employer that is the decision. For a 50-person company it is overkill.
What changed after Sterling
The merger is not finished. First Advantage had actioned $63M of annual run-rate cost savings by June 30, 2026, near the top of its $65-80M target, and says all Sterling integration work will be done by December 31, 2026. Former Sterling customers were told they would stay on the platform they use, with “no immediate plans” to consolidate. In practice that means two platforms, two support organisations and one cost-cutting programme.
The business is growing anyway. Q2 2026 revenue was $448.8M, up 15% year over year, and full-year guidance was raised to $1.67-1.71B. Twenty enterprise deals of at least $500K annual contract value were booked in the quarter. Net debt is 3.7x adjusted EBITDA after $165.5M of voluntary debt prepayments since the deal closed.
The company also exits lines it does not want. It closed its Resident Screening (tenant screening) business on June 30, 2026, after a two-month transition window, sending customers to TransUnion SmartMove. Employment screening is the core, and nothing suggests it is at risk, but the episode shows how much notice a non-core product line gets.
Pricing
Enterprise pricing is quote-only, with annual commitments, per-country add-ons and pass-through court and drug-lab fees. First Advantage publishes no rate card. Vendr’s anonymized contract data for HireRight, the closest peer, puts criminal-plus-identity packages at roughly $30-65 per screen and full packages at $60-150+, with international components adding $50-300+ per country. Use those as a check on a quote, not as a budget.
A small-business tier at smb.fadv.com is pay-as-you-go with no setup fee and no minimum volume, but prices only show after you create an account. Third-party listings cite entry packages from about $29 per check. For comparison, Checkr publishes $29.99, $59.99 and $94.99 per report, and HireRight’s BackgroundChecks.com starts at $24.99.
Best for
Talent acquisition operations and HR compliance leaders at employers with roughly 1,000+ hires a year, often in transportation and logistics, retail, manufacturing, healthcare or staffing, who need one screening contract across the US and several other countries, embedded in Workday (First Advantage is a Workday Platinum Innovation Partner), SAP SuccessFactors or Oracle. Also a fit when identity fraud in remote hiring is a board-level worry and you want identity verification and the background check under one vendor.
It is the wrong pick for a US-only startup hiring a few hundred people a year. Checkr’s published prices and API are a better fit there.
Versus the alternatives
HireRight is the direct substitute in a global RFP and the other enterprise incumbent. Pick First Advantage for the larger network, public reporting and Workday depth. Pick HireRight when Latin America coverage (it bought BGC Brasil in 2025) or its UKG and Tenstreet integrations decide the workflow. Neither publishes enterprise prices, so put both in the RFP.
Checkr is the API-first challenger with published rates. Pick Checkr when hiring is mostly US, volume is high and automated adjudication matters more than multi-country coverage.
Certn is the fastest-growing entrant in the segment, focused on international screening at mid-market scale. Pick Certn when you hire across Canada, the UK and Australia and enterprise minimums at First Advantage or HireRight do not fit.
If none of them fit, check the screening policy before switching vendor. A package that runs every search on every role is slow and expensive at every provider.
Watch-outs
- Two platforms during a cost-cutting integration. Sterling-heritage accounts still run on their original stack, and the cost-savings programme ends December 31, 2026. Guard: write into the contract that any platform migration is at First Advantage’s cost, with at least 12 months’ notice, no re-implementation fees for your ATS or HCM integration, and the current turnaround SLAs carried over.
- Non-core products can disappear on short notice. Resident Screening customers got about 60 days to move. Guard: add termination-assistance and data-export clauses (report archive and adjudication history in a usable format, 90+ days after exit) to any contract that includes add-on products beyond core employment screening.
- Accuracy disputes are the category’s legal exposure, and First Advantage is not exempt. It settled FCRA class actions over background checks run without proper authorisation (final approval December 2021), and consumer-law firms advertise dispute services aimed at it by name. Guard: require county-level confirmation before adverse action, audit your disclosure and authorisation forms yearly, and put a dispute-resolution SLA shorter than the FCRA’s 30-day window in the contract.
- The automation claim is US-only. First Advantage says 90% of its US criminal searches finish within one day; international verifications run on local timelines. Guard: set per-country turnaround SLAs with service credits, and start screening at conditional offer so start dates reflect real verification times.
- Identity checks add friction. Biometric and liveness steps catch the proxy candidates described in AI interview fraud, but each step costs completion. Guard: apply RightID to remote and high-risk roles first and track the candidate experience drop-off before rolling it out everywhere.