DBS check: the level for your role and what it really costs

Disclosure Cost puts the level a role can get, the fee in force since 5 October 2026 and the cost added by an intermediary in the same calculation. The DBS fee is fixed by regulation; the admin fee is not. An enhanced check bought through an umbrella body therefore costs £41 plus whatever that body charges, and VAT on its part if it is registered for VAT. Type the admin fee you were quoted into the finder and the total appears, line by line, with the subscription to the Update Service if you want it.

Four levels, and who decides which one you get

A criminal record check in England and Wales comes at four levels. The higher the level, the more it shows and the fewer roles can ask for it. Nobody can choose a level freely: the law lists the roles that may ask for each one, and the organisation recruiting you must stay within that list. The DBS eligibility guidance, last updated on 1 September 2026, describes those roles in nine documents.

• Basic (£20): unspent convictions and conditional cautions only. Any employer can ask for one, for any job, and you can request it yourself. See the basic check page.
• Standard (£20): spent and unspent convictions, cautions, reprimands and final warnings, minus those removed by the filtering rules. It is reserved for listed professions and licences: solicitors, accountants, security licences, prison staff. The finder has 10 of them; the standard check page explains the list.
• Enhanced (£41): what a standard check shows, plus information a local police force thinks relevant to the role. It covers work with children or adults that does not meet the conditions of regulated activity, and some licences such as gambling.
• Enhanced with barred lists (£41): the same, plus a search of the children's list, the adults' list or both. Only regulated activity can ask for it. In the finder, 11 roles reach the children's list and 7 the adults' list; the barred list page sets out the conditions.

Two tests do most of the sorting for work with children: what you do (teaching, care, supervision, advice, driving) and how often (more than three days in any 30, or overnight between 2am and 6am). With adults, once is enough: a single episode of personal care or health care is regulated activity. The level finder by role and the question-by-question eligibility page walk through both tests.

What the 5 October 2026 fee cut changed

DBS announced on 9 September 2026 that its fees would fall, and the Police Act 1997 (Criminal Records) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 gave the cut legal effect from 5 October 2026. The enhanced check dropped by £8.50, the largest reduction, because DBS sets each fee at the cost of delivering it and is funded by those fees alone. Basic and standard checks fell by £1.50 and the Update Service by £1 a year. The previous fees, in force since 2 December 2024, came from SI 2024/1111.

The fee that applies is the one in force on the day DBS receives the application, not the day the employer started the process. Some council, school and umbrella body pages still showed £49.50 for an enhanced check weeks after the cut. If you were quoted the old fee for an application sent after 5 October 2026, ask the intermediary to correct it. The calculator below shows the difference on one check or on a whole year of checks.

How long checks take at the moment

DBS publishes each quarter the share of certificates sent within its targets: 2 days for a basic check, 3 days for a standard one and 14 days for an enhanced one, with target shares of 85% for basic and standard and 80% for enhanced. From April 2026 to June 2026, 1,815,928 certificates were sent. 73.7% of enhanced checks met the 14 days target, below the 80% goal, while 88.2% of basic checks met theirs.

The slow part of an enhanced check is the police. Every force that covers an address you gave for the last years may be asked whether it holds relevant information. In the DBS police performance report for July 2026, relayed by Care England (an unofficial relay, not a government publication), forces took 26 days on average to reply, and 11 were named as behind their target, among them Hampshire and Isle of Wight, Thames Valley, Sussex. The average enhanced check still took 13.1 days from start to finish that month, because most applicants are cleared without a police reply. The waiting time page lists every delayed force.

Disclosure Scotland completed 152,622 applications from April to June 2026 in 3.5 days on average, 99.5% of them within 14 days. AccessNI reported averages of 3 days for basic and 5 days for enhanced checks in the week of 19 October 2026.

The Update Service: when £15 a year saves money

The DBS Update Service keeps a standard or enhanced certificate live. You subscribe within 30 days of the certificate date, or with the application reference while the check is running, and any employer you authorise can then check online, for free and at once, whether anything has changed since. It pays off as soon as it replaces one new check: a single enhanced check costs £41 before any admin fee, against £15 for a year of subscription. It does not help if the next role needs a different level or workforce, or if the new employer insists on a fresh certificate. In June 2026, 2,889,110 subscriptions were active and 62,407 paid ones were added. The Update Service page compares the two routes over several years.

Umbrella bodies, admin fees and VAT

An organisation that asks for fewer than 100 standard or enhanced checks a year must go through an umbrella body, a company or charity registered with DBS to send applications. Self-employed people and personal employees go through one too. Each umbrella body sets its own fee for checking identity and handling the form, and the DBS announcement of the fee cut states that DBS is not involved in setting or regulating these charges. The GOV.UK list of bodies is the find a DBS umbrella body service.

The statutory fee is passed on at cost. Under HMRC VAT Notice 700, section 25, a sum paid to a third party as the client's agent can be treated as a disbursement outside VAT when its conditions are met, while the intermediary's own charge for its service follows its VAT status. A VAT-registered umbrella body therefore adds 20% to its admin fee, not to the DBS fee. Quotes are sometimes shown before VAT: the finder has a setting for that case, and the umbrella body page explains what the admin fee pays for.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Since 1 April 2025 Disclosure Scotland issues a Level 1 disclosure, the basic check, for £25, and a Level 2 disclosure for £25 in place of the standard and enhanced checks. Regulated work with children or protected adults goes through the PVG scheme: £59 to join, £18 for an existing member taking another role of the same type, free for volunteers in a qualifying organisation, and free from 1 August 2026 to 31 July 2027 for new workers in commissioned social care. Membership became time limited to five years from 1 April 2026. See the PVG scheme page.

In Northern Ireland, AccessNI charges £16 for a basic check, £16 for a standard one and £32 for an enhanced one, free for qualifying volunteers. The four-nation comparison shows the same role in each system.

What this site is, and what it is not

Disclosure Cost is published by Radif Partners, an independent company. It is not DBS, Disclosure Scotland, AccessNI or an umbrella body. It cannot apply for a check, track one or speed one up, and it never asks for your name, date of birth or address. Every fee is read from the regulation or the official fee page, every wait from the published data, with its date; the method page lists each source and what is left out. The level shown for a role is the one the guidance allows: the recruiting organisation decides, and a role can always ask for less.