How to Do a Background Check on an In-Home Caregiver

If you're hiring privately rather than through an established home care agency (which typically handles this step for you), a thorough background check is not optional — this is someone who will have significant access to your parent and their home, and unsupervised access by a caregiver is one of the risk factors the National Center on Elder Abuse points to when explaining how abuse and neglect happen. A background check won't guarantee a good outcome, but skipping one, or doing a partial one, meaningfully raises the odds of a bad one.

What a Thorough Check Should Include

• A criminal background check, ideally covering multiple states if the candidate has lived in more than one, not just a local or single-state search, since a search limited to your current state can miss a relevant history elsewhere.
• A sex offender registry check.
• Identity verification against a government-issued ID, confirming the person you interviewed is actually the person the other checks are being run on.
• Employment verification — confirming actual dates and roles at previous caregiving jobs, not just taking a resume at face value.
• Reference checks conducted directly by phone, asking specific questions about reliability, how the candidate handled difficult situations, and whether the previous employer would rehire them, rather than accepting a written reference letter alone.
• A driving record check, if the caregiver will be transporting your parent.
• Verification of any required certifications, such as CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant) licensure if the role requires it, checked directly against your state's licensing board database rather than taking the candidate's word for it.
• A credit check, if the caregiver will have any access to financial information or accounts — not always necessary, but worth considering depending on the scope of the role. The CFPB's Managing Someone Else's Money guides are a useful reference for thinking through how much financial access is appropriate to grant a caregiver in the first place.
• A check of your state's adult abuse or vulnerable-person registry, if one exists — some states maintain a registry separate from general criminal records specifically for substantiated caregiving abuse or neglect findings.

How to Actually Run These Checks

Most families don't run each of these separately. Several background-check services specialize in caregiver and household-employee screening specifically, and can bundle most of the items above into a single report — this tends to be more thorough and less error-prone than trying to piece together individual checks yourself, and it's usually worth the modest cost given what's at stake.

State CNA and certification lookups are typically free and take a few minutes on your state licensing board's website — don't skip this step just because it feels redundant with the resume. For reference calls, ask specific, behavior-based questions rather than open-ended ones: "Can you describe a time this caregiver handled a difficult situation with a client?" gets a more useful answer than "Were they good at their job?" Listen for hesitation as much as for the words themselves — a lukewarm "she was fine" from someone who otherwise speaks positively about other former employees is worth following up on directly.

What a Background Check Can't Tell You

A clean background check confirms the absence of a documented history — it doesn't confirm good judgment, patience under stress, or day-to-day reliability, none of which show up in a criminal record. Because of that, most experienced families treat the background check as a starting filter, not the final word, and pair it with:

• A paid trial period before committing to a long-term arrangement, with clear expectations set in advance about what's being evaluated.
• Unannounced visits, especially in the first few weeks, rather than only ever seeing the caregiver during pre-scheduled family visits.
• Regular, private check-ins with your parent about how the arrangement is going — done without the caregiver present, since a parent may not speak freely otherwise.
• Awareness of your state's laws on recording if you're considering a camera in the home — consent requirements vary significantly by state, so this is worth confirming before installing anything, not after.

AARP's caregiving resources cover this kind of ongoing-monitoring approach in more depth if you want additional guidance beyond the initial hiring decision.

Red Flags Worth Taking Seriously

A candidate who resists any part of a standard background check, or who has gaps in employment history they can't explain clearly, deserves real scrutiny before moving forward — trust your discomfort here rather than talking yourself out of it because the interview otherwise went well. A few other patterns worth paying attention to:

• Urgency to start immediately, before checks are complete, especially if paired with pressure about how "hard it is to find good help right now."
• Vague or shifting answers about previous employers, or an inability to provide a working phone number for a reference.
• Reluctance to have a family member present or drop by unannounced early in the arrangement, once the role has started.

None of these alone is proof of a problem, but a candidate who trips more than one of them is worth pausing on, even under time pressure to fill the role.