GoodHire

What it is

GoodHire is a self-serve employment background check service for small businesses. You create an account, choose a package, email the candidate a consent link, and get results in a web dashboard. You don’t need a sales call or a contract. The site claims more than 100,000 employers.

It has been owned by Checkr since April 2022, when Checkr bought GoodHire’s parent company, Inflection, in a deal reported at about $400M. (That Inflection is the background-check company, not Inflection AI.) The brand still sells separately, and the logo now reads “GoodHire, A Checkr Company.” The help center already lives on help.checkr.com.

The question this page answers is the one a 20-person company actually has: what is the cheapest compliant background check when you don’t want an enterprise contract? The honest answer in 2026 is that GoodHire is no longer the cheap option. It is the easy one.

Pricing reality

GoodHire publishes per-check rates, each labeled “starting from”:

• Basic — $29.99/check. SSN trace, national criminal search, sex offender registry, global watchlist.
• Essential — $59.99/check. Adds identity verification and unlimited county criminal searches.
• Complete — $94.99/check. Adds unlimited state criminal and federal criminal searches.

That ladder is identical to Checkr’s own, package for package and cent for cent. It also moved recently: Essential was $54.99 and Complete $89.99 until both went up in July 2026, according to costbench’s pricing snapshots. Accounts running fewer than 50 checks a year sign up and start immediately. Above 50, GoodHire quotes custom packages from more than 100 screening options.

Two costs sit outside the sticker price. First, “additional third-party fees may apply”: county court fees and state DMV fees are passed through, and a New Jersey MVR costs $15 at the state level against $5 in Ohio. Second, Inc. and costbench both report a one-time $49.99 account setup fee that the pricing page itself doesn’t show. At five hires a year, that fee alone adds $10 to each check in year one.

What you get for the price

The value is the compliance scaffolding a company without an HR team would otherwise get wrong:

• Adverse action workflow. GoodHire tracks pre-adverse and final notices and their waiting periods. It also factors in more than 180 state, county and local ban-the-box laws based on where you and the candidate are located. You still send each notice yourself, with timestamps kept as an audit trail.
• Comments for context. Candidates can annotate their own results. That gives you the input for an individualized assessment, which the EEOC encourages and many fair-chance laws require.
• Speed on the simple cases. The vendor says 90% of nationwide criminal checks return in under a minute and most MVRs in a few hours. It also claims a 0.085% dispute rate. Both are vendor figures.
• Reviews. GoodHire holds 4.6/5 across 280 reviews on G2, with ease of use as the recurring strength.

International coverage is narrower than the headline. GoodHire verifies employment and education across 223 countries, but an international criminal search covers only the country where the candidate currently lives. Third-party reviews also report that screening candidates who live outside the US requires a sales-assisted account.

Best for

Founders, office managers and first HR hires at US companies making roughly 5–50 hires a year. The fit is office, retail or light-industrial roles that need a defensible, FCRA-compliant check without anyone learning adjudication software. The scoped use case: a candidate accepts an offer, the hiring manager orders Essential from the dashboard, and the adverse action timer handles the legal sequencing if something comes back.

It is the wrong pick for high-volume hourly hiring, for teams that need checks to fire automatically from an ATS at scale, or for anyone hiring outside the US.

Versus the alternatives

Checkr sells the same packages at the same prices, so the choice is about platform, not price. Pick Checkr when volume crosses a few hundred checks a year, or when you need Assess to auto-adjudicate clean reports, continuous criminal monitoring at $1.70 per person per month, or deep ATS triggering. Pick GoodHire when the person ordering checks is not a recruiter and wants the simplest checkout.

First Advantage is the share leader after absorbing Sterling, and HireRight is the other incumbent. Neither is built for a self-serve SMB buyer. HireRight’s own self-serve brand, BackgroundChecks.com, starts at $24.99, which undercuts GoodHire Basic. Pick First Advantage or HireRight when a parent company or client contract mandates one global vendor.

Certn is the fastest-growing entrant and the price challenger: US Core Criminal at $13.99 and OneID identity verification at $3.50. Pick Certn when cost per check is the constraint or when Canadian and international hiring is in scope. Expect the blended cost to approach GoodHire’s once county searches are added.

If none fit, you probably need a written hiring policy more than a vendor. Most small businesses overspend by ordering Complete for roles where Basic plus one county search is what their policy actually requires.

Watch-outs

• “Small-business pricing” is now Checkr’s pricing. The price gap that once justified GoodHire for small budgets is gone. Guard: price your actual package on GoodHire, Checkr and Certn side by side, including county fees, before signing up. Choose on workflow, since the rates no longer separate GoodHire and Checkr.
• Real cost per check exceeds the sticker. The setup fee and pass-through fees don’t appear on the pricing page. Guard: ask support in writing whether the $49.99 setup fee applies to your account. Then compute blended cost from your first five invoices, not from the package price. Track it against your cost per hire.
• The brand’s long-term future is unclear. Checkr has said since 2022 that it is “evaluating” both product portfolios, and support has already moved under Checkr. Guard: keep the setup shallow, with no custom API builds and stored reports exported to your HRIS. A forced migration then costs an afternoon, not a project.
• The workflow doesn’t make you compliant by itself. The adverse action timer sequences notices, but the hiring decision and the individualized assessment remain yours. Guard: have employment counsel review the notice templates once. Then read every candidate comment before a final adverse action, and protect the candidate experience at that step.