Run a background check on yourself.

Short answer. No single service shows everything an employer or a landlord might see.

What we show is the public-record side: the picture a stranger assembles from your name.

The rest — criminal history, credit, driving, screening files — you request yourself, free or nearly free, from the bodies that hold it. This page sorts out which is which.

Start with what a stranger sees

Most people who check themselves are not worried about a court file. They are worried about the profile that appears next to their name.

Current and former addresses. Relatives. An age range. Sometimes a phone number they stopped using years ago.

That material is compiled from public records and commercial checks, and it is the part of your footprint visible without anyone's permission.

Checking it is free here, and it is the fastest way to learn whether the worry is real. A thin, accurate listing usually ends the question.

A wrong one — a namesake's case attached to your name, an address you never lived at — is the thing worth acting on.

What we cannot show is anything a private holder keeps: your credit file, a screening company's report, the state's criminal-history record. Those are yours to request, and the routes below are the real ones.

The five records you can request about yourself

Your credit reports. Federal law gives you free access through AnnualCreditReport.com, the only site the three nationwide bureaus authorise for it. Weekly free reports have been available there since the pandemic-era expansion was made permanent.

Read the addresses and employers listed as closely as the accounts — identity problems surface there first.

Your FBI Identity History Summary. The federal rap sheet, requested from the FBI with fingerprints, for a fee. It shows arrests and dispositions reported to the FBI.

Get it before a licence application or an immigration step, not after one.

Your state criminal-history record. Most states run a record review through the state police or bureau of identification, usually fingerprint-based and inexpensive.

It matters because state and federal records do not always agree, and the state review is where an unreported disposition gets corrected.

Your driving record. The state DMV sells you your own abstract. If a job involves driving, this is what the employer's vendor will pull.

Your files at specialty consumer reporting agencies. This is the one people miss.

Beyond the three credit bureaus, dozens of companies hold consumer files: employment screening, tenant screening, insurance claims, check writing, gaming, medical information.

Each must give you your own file on request, and the CFPB publishes a list of them. If a job or a rental fell through and you never learned why, the answer usually sits in one of those files.

How to read what comes back

Separate the dated from the undated.

Court filings, property records and licences carry their own dates and jurisdictions; each can be checked at the record.

Compiled fields — relatives, associates, "possible" addresses — carry no dates at all. They are inferences built from shared addresses over time, and they are the fields most likely to be wrong about you.

Check the identity anchors before the content. Two people with your name and a similar age is the normal case, not the exception.

Ask what ties a record to you specifically: a date of birth, a documented address history, a case number you can open yourself. If nothing does, the record belongs to a hypothesis.

And notice what is missing. A search of a county that publishes nothing looks exactly like a search that found nothing. We mark which of those happened; most compiled reports do not.

Fixing what is wrong

The route depends on who holds the error.

A consumer reporting agency must investigate your dispute and correct or delete what it cannot verify. That right covers credit bureaus and screening companies alike.

A court record is corrected at the court, and only the court can seal or expunge it.

A people-search listing is not a consumer report and has no dispute process. What it has is an opt-out.

If an employer or landlord turned you down after a report, they owe you a copy and a summary of your rights, and the agency that produced it owes you a free copy on request. Ask for it — that is the document to dispute.

Reducing what is published

People-search listings are removable, imperfectly.

Most operators publish an opt-out, several brands share upstream checks, and records get re-ingested, so one pass is not permanent.

Work from the checks that feed the others rather than alphabetically, then re-check periodically. The removal guide sets out that order, and our own opt-out covers removal from Recordwell.

Two adjacent checks belong here. Whether your email appears in a known breach, because exposed passwords are what turn a listing into a problem.

And a credit freeze — free, reversible, and the single control that stops new accounts being opened in your name.

A rhythm that survives real life

Quarterly, do the visible side: re-run your name, see whether removed listings came back, check a breach database.

Annually, go deeper: pull your credit reports, request the specialty files that apply to you, read your own driving record if you drive for work.

Before something specific — a job, a rental, a licence, a custody matter — pull the authoritative record early rather than trusting a compiled summary.

Finding an unreported disposition two weeks before a decision is inconvenient. Finding it during the decision is expensive.

Start with what strangers can see; it costs nothing and tells you whether the rest is urgent. A name search shows the candidates who share your name, and court records explain what filings do and do not establish.