Tenant background checks often include a credit check. The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that the landlord get your written permission to run a credit check on you. He usually has you sign a form with your application. If you paid an application fee or deposit, that may be used to pay for your background check.

You can perform a free background check.
Like many answers, it all depends on the details:
What information do you want?
How much work are you willing to do to get it?
How fast do you want it?

If you are willing to do some work yourself, you can perform a background check on someone for free.

Criminal Background Check:
Criminal records are kept by the Clerk of Courts in each courthouse. Every city, town, county, state, and the federal government have their own courthouses. We know there are 50 states, 3000 counties, and over 30,000 cities, towns, or townships in the USA. That is a lot of courthouses, and most of them do not share their information. However, it is all public information, and you are allowed to review it.

If you know where the subject person has lived and traveled, then you know which courthouse records to check.

Do-it-Yourself Free Background check issues:
a)One problem is finding out your subject-persons lifetime travel history. He could have committed a crime anywhere he has ever been.
b)2nd problem is the amount of work you must do to check every courthouse in those locations.
c)3rd problem is that you could miss important records if you miss any of the locations that your subject-person has been to.
d)4th problem is cost. If the courthouse has digitized their records and published them on a website, then you can often review them for free. But if you must travel to the courthouse, that requires your time and travel costs. Finally, if you get copy of the record, some courthouses charge $1 per page. Wow! That can be expensive.
e)So a do-it-yourself background check may cost you a significant amount of money if you want to perform a complete background check.

Other Records:
You will probably want to check out some other records on you subject-person.
Do your want to know about:
Marriages and Divorces
Bankruptcies
Tax liens
Civil law suits
Professional licenses
Corporate ownership
Property ownership.

All of that information is public, and you can review it. But, you have the same issues that you had with the Criminal Records. The information is not all in one place. You have to find out where it is, and you may have to travel to those locations.

Information Aggregators
On the internet, some companies specialize in collecting all of this public information, putting it in their database, and making it available for instant access. For example, Illinois Youth Soccer (http://www.iysa.org) has a Risk Management publication that refers to http://backgroundsearch.com .
You can review some of this information for free and get the results immediately on the internet.

How to Perform a Do-It-Yourself Free Background Search & Check:

Step #1 – At an information aggregator, like BackgroundSearch.com , you can put in your subject-person’s name and find every city that he lived-in. That website provides this information for free. You can enter as many names as you like, as many times as you like. Now you know which courthouse records to review.

Step #2 – At the same website, you can find a list of the Criminal Record Offices of every city, county, and state in the USA, along with their website (as reported to the U.S. government.).

Step #3.- Go to the courthouse website, or to the courthouse (if they do not have a website), and review their public records.

Step #4 – Back at BackgroundSearch.com, you can find the Record Offices for Vital Records (Marriage, Divorce, Births, Deaths). Repeat step #3 for Vital Records and any other type of records that you need.

Purchasing a Background Check:
If you want to get a complete report, instantly, you can purchase a comprehensive background check from BackgroundSearch.com (or other information aggregators). Every company (without exception) will charge you something for a complete background check. The companies have to cover their costs to gather all of the public information, put it in a database, keep it up to date every day about everyone, and make it available to you on the internet for instant access.

Sex Offenders:
The U.S. government does keep a list of all convicted sex offenders in one place. You can find it here: http://www.nsopr.gov/
Source(s):

Good luck with your background check.