The Work Number: What It Holds About You

There is a file about your employment history that you have probably never read, that your last three employers may have contributed to, and that a lender or a new employer can pull in seconds.

What it actually is

The Work Number is a commercial employment and income verification service. Employers, or more often their payroll providers, send records into it automatically: who worked there, in what role, over what dates, and what they were paid.

Anyone who needs to verify your employment then queries the database instead of phoning your old HR department. Mortgage lenders, landlords, background check companies, benefit administrators and prospective employers all use services of this kind, which is why verification that used to take a week now takes minutes.

The practical consequence: what the database says about you is what gets verified, and you are the only person in the chain with an incentive to check it.

Why it matters when you change jobs

Verification is where offers wobble, and it wobbles over small discrepancies rather than lies.

You put “Senior Analyst” on your CV because that is what everyone called you. The payroll record says “Analyst II”, because that was the job code. You said you left in March, the record says April, because your final pay ran into the next month. Neither is dishonest. Both can look like a discrepancy to a background screener working from a checklist.

The fix is to know what the record says before you write your dates, not after a screener flags them. This is also why using the exact contractual job title on a CV, with a plain-language explanation alongside if it is obscure, causes fewer problems than the informal title.

You have a right to see it

This is the part most people do not realise. A service that supplies reports about you for employment, credit or housing decisions is operating as a consumer reporting agency, and that puts it under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which the FTC maintains in its legal library.

Two rights follow, and both are useful.

• Access. You can request a copy of your own file from the agency that holds it.
• Dispute. If something in it is inaccurate, you can dispute it and the agency has an obligation to investigate rather than simply repeat what its data source said. The FTC’s consumer guidance on disputing errors on your reports describes the process, which is the same shape for employment data as for credit data: dispute in writing, keep copies, and expect an investigation rather than an instant correction.

Request your file through the provider’s own consumer channel rather than a third-party site. Because these access routes change and are sometimes behind a verification step, it is worth searching for the provider’s current employee or consumer portal rather than relying on a link in an article.

What an employer is required to do

Employers cannot simply pull a report and quietly move on. The FTC’s guidance on using consumer reports sets out obligations that work in your favour: they must tell you they intend to run a report, get your written authorisation, and if they plan to reject you because of something in it, give you notice and a copy of the report before finalising the decision.

That pre-adverse-action step is the window in which an error can be corrected. It only helps if you read what they send you instead of assuming the offer is gone.

The five errors worth looking for

In rough order of how much damage they do in hiring.

What to check	Why it matters
Employment dates	The most common discrepancy flag on a background check
Job title	Payroll job codes rarely match the title you were known by
Missing employer	A gap in the record can read as a gap in your history
Duplicated records	Payroll system migrations can split one job into two
Income figures	Matters for lending, and for any employer asking about pay history

Check these against your own payslips and offer letters. Keep those documents when you leave a job, because they are the evidence you need if you ever have to dispute something.

What to do about it now

Three things, none of which take long.

Request your own file and read it. Note any mismatch between it and your CV, and fix the CV to match the contractual reality rather than the informal version. And keep your final payslip and offer letter from every role, since the application tracker is a reasonable place to note dates and titles as you go rather than reconstructing them years later.

Related

For the wider exit process where these records get created, see how to quit a job and quitting job tips. For how titles work on a CV, see the job titles guide, and for what a screener looks for in your document, see the resume checker.

Read your own file, match your dates to it, keep your payslips. You can check your resume against the record.