How Long Does a Background Check Take

There are many instances that call the need for a background check. For example, you might want to know more about the criminal history of a suspicious neighbor that moved next door.

Or perhaps your child is going out with someone and you want to know all there is to know about the person. People are not always what they claim to be.

Situations like these make people wish that they could do a background check on someone too. However, they give up thinking that it is something too complicated or will take too long.

This is why I have created this guide to let you know how easy it is to do a background check. All it takes is a few minutes of your life and you are good.

How Long Does it take to get a Background Check

The time taken to do a background check depends on how you are doing it. Yes, you read it right. There is more than one way to do a background check. While these ways are different, they give the same results. Although, the time and effort taken is different.

Ways to do a Background Check

Basically, you can do a background check through two ways (not counting physically going to the public records office and wasting your time). These include:

1. Using Official Websites of the state:

Many states offer the possibility of doing a background check on anyone online. There are many background check laws in place that govern what records they would share and with whom.

However, using this method has a lot of drawbacks. Firstly, it only provides you with the state wide results of any person. You cannot know about their activities outside the state.

Further, you need the consent of a person in order to search for them. Generally, you are required to fill a form and provide their fingerprints or other vital information.

Additionally, the state official sources do not provide complete information about a person on a single platform. For criminal records, you have to visit the police department’s website of that state. For vital records, you will have to visit their department of health’s website.

Generally, people who follow the official way request the records via mail or through the phone as well. The copies of the information they require is then mailed to them.

Time Taken for Background Check

If you are following the official method to check someone’s background, it will generally take you around three to five days to get the information in your mail.

When I say three days, I mean three business days. Therefore, if a long weekend holiday is coming up, time taken can be longer.

Other factors can also delay the time that it takes to complete the background check. Therefore, if you are using this method, I would suggest you to not hold your breath waiting.

Delays in Background Check Time

There can often be delays in doing a background check through these channels. As I mentioned, these methods require you to submit forms and fingerprints of the person you wish to search.

Therefore, checking for the information and confirming the authenticity of the forms can take some time. Further, many times collecting the information can also take some time due to delays in the verification process.

2. Using Instant Checkmate:

Instant Checkmate is a third party background check service. It is specially designed to provide you background checks quickly.

It is linked to various official public records all around the country. When you run any search through Instant Checkmate, it looks for the search term through billions of entries in these databases.

Therefore, you get very accurate search results when using Instant Checkmate. Further, since the background check is done through national records, this makes the person’s activities outside the state available as well.

This is a considerable advantage as compared to official sources to check background. In official sources, only statewide information is available.

It offers to search through a variety of ways which are:

Search by Name:

You can search for anyone using Instant Checkmate’s name search. You need to enter the first name and last name of the person. You can narrow the searches by entering their city as well.

Search by Phone Number:

You can use Instant Checkmate’s reverse phone number search to look for the identity of any unidentified number. This feature particularly comes in handy when trying to find the identity of missed callers.

Search by address:

If you are suspicious about a new neighbor that moved next door, you can do a search by address to find out all about their background.

Search by email:

To know the most about a person, you just need to go through their social media profiles. But how will you find someone’s social media profiles? Simple, use Instant Checkmate’s email search.

Let us take a look at the time taken to do a background search via Instant Checkmate:

Time Taken for Instant Checkmate Background Check

For doing a background check through Instant Checkmate, all you have to do is enter a query in its search box and hit on ‘Search’.

This starts the Instant Checkmate algorithms to find all the information regarding the person in its billions of entries. It analyzes through all aspects, like social media, criminal records, credit history, etc.

In total, the time taken is about four minutes. Yes, you read that correctly. Within four minutes you can get the entire background history of a person your screen.

Not to forget that the search results through this method are nationwide. Even though the official methods take days to complete the background check, only state wise search results are provided.

Therefore, there is hardly any comparison between the two. It is always wiser to choose Instant Checkmate over the official sources.

Delays in Background Check Time

When you are using Instant Checkmate, there is hardly any chance that a delay might occur. Instant Checkmate has a huge database always ready for you to search for any person.

Therefore, if there is any delay when using Instant Checkmate, it is only possible if there is some problem on your end (like a poor internet connection maybe?).

Final Notes

As you can see, the time taken to do a background check greatly varies on the road you choose to conduct it. Using the official sources can take up to days, while you can get the same information through Instant Checkmate in just a few minutes.