Contractor-Paid Background Checks: A Practical Option for Small Businesses

For a small business that works with independent contractors, background screening costs can add up. Some business owners have told us they want to initiate and manage a screening while allowing the contractor to pay for it directly. That is an option SafestHires offers.

This payment distinction matters most when a company screens many contractors, has seasonal onboarding, or needs a consistent process for contractors who work on short assignments. The organization still chooses the appropriate screening package and manages its hiring or engagement decision. The question is who pays for the screening within the workflow.

How SafestHires Handles Contractor Payment

With SafestHires, an organization can initiate a background check for an independent contractor and select a contractor-pay arrangement. The contractor pays the screening cost as part of that process, while the organization remains the party requesting the employment-purpose screening and receiving the report for its authorized decision.

This gives the business a way to set its screening requirements without automatically paying for each check. It also gives the contractor a clear payment step rather than requiring the business to collect reimbursement separately. Ask SafestHires to confirm the available setup, payment timing, and eligible screening products for your particular account.

Charges that remain with the business

There are a couple of caveats. If a courthouse charges an access fee, that fee is passed to the small business because it is incurred after SafestHires has charged the contractor for the background check. We cannot return to the contractor's card to apply an additional charge a second time.

The same applies when a possible database record must be verified through a courthouse search. The courthouse search and any applicable court access fee fall to the small business. Even with these later charges, the majority of the screening cost can be passed to the contractor.

Start the Order From Your Own Platform

Some companies that want contractors to pay for their own background checks also want the contractor to start the order from inside their own platform. SafestHires can accommodate this, and no webhook is required — you simply write directly to our platform using our API. Our Order Entry XML manual explains how.

For postback data on an order placed through an integration, the preferred option is to use the postBackInfo block when you submit the order. There you specify where you want the postback delivered and which postback types you want to receive. All of this is detailed in the Order Entry XML manual, in the section titled '3.5 The postBackInfo Block.'

To post completed results back into your own platform, use our XML Results manual — "Receiving Results via XML." It documents the result payload your team receives (order and subject details, the link to the completed report, and a section for each screening product returned), delivery over HTTPS or SFTP, how to pull the results for a specific order, and the short response your server sends back so we know the results were accepted.

What Checkr Publicly Documents

Checkr's partner documentation describes customers creating a Checkr account and supplying a credit or debit card or an ACH payment method. It says customers are charged for the checks they run. Its hosted candidate invitation flow describes the candidate entering personal information, reviewing disclosures and rights, and authorizing the check. The documented invitation flow does not describe a step in which that candidate pays Checkr for the organization's order.

That is consistent with what small business owners have reported to SafestHires: they have not found a contractor-pay option in the Checkr workflow they use. It does not establish that Checkr lacks every possible custom arrangement, partner integration, or separately negotiated solution. Checkr would need to confirm the availability of such an option for a particular customer.

According to one small business owner at Mother's Helper, a concierge service that helps local families with childcare, light housekeeping, and organization, Checkr told her it could not accommodate her request for a contractor-pay option.

Choosing the Right Workflow

If your business wants to initiate a check, control the screening requirements, and let an independent contractor pay most of the cost, ask SafestHires about its contractor-pay option. If you are comparing providers, ask each one this exact question: ‘Can our organization initiate an employment-purpose background check, have the contractor pay the screening provider directly during the process, and receive the completed report in our business account?’

Confirm that your proposed payment policy is appropriate for the work and jurisdictions involved before putting it into use. A payment feature does not, by itself, determine whether a particular fee arrangement is permitted under applicable law or contract terms.

Talk with SafestHires about setting up contractor-paid screening for your business, or review the contractor-paid background check guide for occupation-specific examples.

Source and Scope Note

Reviewed September 24, 2026. Checkr's public partner documentation describes customer-account payment and a candidate invitation without a payment step. Public documentation cannot rule out an unpublished or custom Checkr solution. This comparison concerns the documented organization-initiated workflow.