Nanny Background Check: A Complete Guide for Parents Who Want Peace of Mind
Evelyn Sanderson - December 26, 2025
Choosing the right nanny is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make as a parent. You’re trusting the safety and well-being of your child, along with access to your house and personal life (to some extent), to someone who may be a complete stranger.
This makes a nanny background check incredibly important for every parent. A simple interview and a few casual references simply won’t do. A strong connection and positive references can foster a false sense of security if you’re not careful.
In this guide, we’re going to walk you through the process of running a background check on your nanny, explaining why you need to go beyond the basics, and give you all the information you need to vet your next caregiver with confidence.
The Basics of a Nanny Background Check
A true background check will look at three main areas to verify the person’s identity, show past behavior, and evaluate responsibility. Missing any one of these areas can cause important information to go unchecked, including any red flags. Be aware that under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you must use an FCRA-verified background check service to screen any potential employee, including nannies.
The whole process can take anywhere between a few minutes to a few days, depending on the depth you go to.
Identity Verification
First, you need to make sure the nanny’s identity matches what they’ve claimed. Through an ID verification check, you’ll be able to see any aliases or previous names as well. To do this, you’ll need to run a Social Security number (SSN) trace on the applicant by working with the Social Security Administration, credit bureaus, or background check agencies.
The SSN trace will show you the number’s issuance date and state, and more importantly, a historical list of all names and addresses that the number has been linked to. This address history is particularly important for the next part of the background check.
If the SSN trace isn’t enough, you might also need to run an address history check, which makes sure you don’t miss any jurisdictions where the nanny has lived.
Criminal History Check
A criminal record search has long been the gold standard for vetting someone. However, since there’s no single, centralized national criminal database, you’ll need to go through a thorough, sometimes tedious search to get all the information you need. A layered approach, where you look at criminal records in different levels of courts, will protect you from any blind spots.
A non-negotiable step in the case of hiring a nanny is to check the National Sex Offender Registry. The applicant’s name will be screened against all 50 states to see if any matches come up. Next, you’ll do a multistate database search to check for crimes in a state you wouldn’t otherwise expect.
The most important part of the criminal history check, however, is going through county-level criminal court records. This is where you’ll get the most accurate and up-to-date information.
Most criminal records are filed and maintained at the local county courthouse, so you need to physically or digitally search every county that the nanny has lived in for at least the past seven years. You’ll know which counties to search from using the SSN trace (or address history check) from earlier. Lastly, it’s useful to give federal criminal records a look as well.
Though these are less common than state or county offenses, certain crimes like kidnapping, bank fraud, or large-scale drug trafficking are decided in district-level courts, whose records won’t be found at the county level.
Motor Vehicle Records (MVR) Check
If your nanny’s ever going to be responsible for transporting your children (for example, to school or to daycare and back), this is essential. An MVR check will show you the nanny’s driving history from the state that issued their license.
Information you can expect to find includes major violations like DUIs or reckless driving, whether the license is suspended or revoked, if they have a lot of speeding tickets, and past accidents. A clean driving record would show that they’re responsible and have good judgment behind the wheel.
Nanny Background Check: Beyond the Basics
The checks we talked about above are important for the baseline factors like safety and identity, but you may need to go a bit further than that to get a fuller profile of your nanny. In the following checks, you’ll get a better idea of what the applicant’s character, professionalism, and truthfulness are like.
Employment and Education Verification
Looking at the nanny’s employment and education history is more about confirming their honesty than about finding any criminal records. It’ll help make sure they actually have the experience they claim, and their references are accurate.
To verify this information, get in contact with previous employers and verify job titles, dates of employment, and reasons for separation. Subsequently, do the same with the educational institutes to see if their degrees or certifications are legitimate. If you find any discrepancies like falsified dates or nonexistent degrees, consider these to be major red flags about their integrity.
Civil Court Records
If you’re willing to go the extra mile, civil court records are your next step. We covered county court records earlier in the criminal history search, but those won’t show you any records about disputes between private parties, which are resolved in civil courts.
Checking these records will show you information about the nanny’s financial reliability and how they’ve behaved in professional settings in the past. Any lawsuits regarding unpaid debts, professional misconduct, restraining orders, or disputes over child custody/neglect can be seen in these records.
While none of these are criminal offenses, as a parent, you probably still want to know about them before trusting them with your kids.
Drug Screening
If your nanny is going to be driving the kids or working unsupervised, a drug screening might be the way to go. This is an optional step, but it is becoming more and more common to use a standard urinalysis to detect the presence of illegal substances.
Though you’ll need full consent from the nanny to run this test and be compliant with laws (more on that later), it’ll provide you with the peace of mind that the nanny isn’t using anything that could impair their judgment on the job.
Why You Should Avoid Using a Background Lookup Tool
Running a background check can be intimidating, and if you’re a working parent, you likely don’t have the time to spare for a thorough search of everything outlined above. That’s where background lookup tools can seem like a lifesaver.
However, it’s important to keep in mind the legal limit of these tools. Background lookup tools simply pull data from aggregated public records, which means they’re not considered official Consumer Reporting Agencies (CRAs) under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
For a hiring decision, it’s mandatory to use an FCRA-compliant screening service to make sure the data is verified, accurate, and legally permissible for making employment decisions. Since anything you find on a people search lookup can influence whether or not the nanny is still in the running to work with your family, it’s best to just start with an FCRA-compliant screening service.
Other Ethics and Laws to Keep in Mind
First and foremost, before running a background check, you’ll need explicit consent from the nanny to proceed. According to legal requirements, the consent must be clear and separate from the nanny application itself. This protects not just you, but also the candidate by making sure they’re fully aware of what’s being looked up and why.
Any information that you do find must be used in accordance with the requirements of the FCRA. If you’re considering not hiring the person based on the report, you’ll need to follow the adverse action process.
Lastly, to avoid any inadvertent discrimination, it’s a good idea to give the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws a thorough read as well.
Learning About Your Nanny’s Background
After you’ve reviewed the results, combine what you’ve learned with your own judgment. Ask yourself whether this person truly feels safe and trustworthy to have around your children.
Red flags are usually easy to identify, but are there any gray flags that could be an issue but seem fine on the surface? A background check is important, but it shouldn’t replace your judgment. Look carefully at the nanny’s profile, evaluate every detail, and if you’re in doubt, always err on the side of caution.
