"Reasonable time" is not a number written into the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It means the candidate gets a real, fair chance to respond before you finalize a rejection over something in their background check. Most employers use five business days as their internal standard, but that's a practice, not a statute.
I spent over a decade on the operations side of a background screening company, and this is one of the parts employers get wrong the most. Not because they're careless. Because "reasonable" sounds like it should be a fixed number, and it isn't. Let's walk through what it actually means, and what a defensible timeline looks like.
The FCRA requires a two-step process before you can turn someone down because of a background check. First, a pre-adverse action notice with a copy of the report. Then a wait. Then, if you're still moving on without them, a final notice.
What the law says about that wait is just this: give the candidate a reasonable amount of time to respond. It does not say five days, or seven, or ten. It leaves that word, reasonable, doing a lot of work.
That's on purpose. A law written for every employer in every industry can't hand you one number that fits a fast food shift lead and a hospital's credentialing office equally well. It leaves room, and expects you to fill that room with judgment, not the shortest wait you can get away with.
It's a habit, not a rule. It spread because it's held up as reasonable in most ordinary situations, and because it gives employers something concrete to plan around instead of guessing every time.
I've written up the full two-step notice process, with a template for both letters, in a separate article. Go there for the mechanics. This piece is about the judgment call underneath that habit, the part a template can't answer for you. Five business days is a starting point, not a finish line.
Nobody sits down with a stopwatch and a single rule. When a company's timeline gets scrutinized, the question is generally whether the candidate had a genuine, practical opportunity to respond, not just a technical one. A few things tend to matter:
None of that comes from a specific ruling I'm going to point you to, and I'm not going to pretend it does. It's the general shape of how this standard tends to get applied in practice. Verify anything specific to your situation with a lawyer, not an article.
Employers treat the waiting period as a formality to get through, not a real chance for the candidate to respond. That's the whole ballgame, and it's where the trouble starts.
I've seen a final notice go out on day four of a five-day plan because a manager wanted the seat filled before the weekend. I've seen one go out the same afternoon a candidate called in with new information, before anyone actually read what the candidate said.
Same mistake, different clothes. The wait exists to be used, not watched. Finalizing early because the calendar is inconvenient isn't a reasonable process. It's a rushed one, and it reads that way if anyone ever looks closely.
Pick a number, five business days is fine, write it into your process, and apply it the same way every time. Consistency is most of what "reasonable" buys you. A window that changes candidate to candidate is much harder to defend than a shorter one applied evenly.
Start the count from when the candidate could plausibly have received the notice, not from when you hit send. Document the date you sent it, by a method you can actually prove, so you're not reconstructing a timeline from memory later.
If the candidate disputes something on the report itself, that's a separate track with its own clock, the FCRA Section 611 reinvestigation, which typically runs closer to 30 days and is handled by your background check company, not you. I walked through that whole process, including what your job is while it's running, in a dedicated article on it. Don't finalize a rejection while that reinvestigation is genuinely still open, even if your original five-day window has technically passed.
| Clock | What starts it | Roughly how long | Who's driving it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reasonable time before finalizing | You send the pre-adverse action notice | Commonly around 5 business days, not a fixed number | You, the employer |
| FCRA Section 611 reinvestigation | The candidate files a dispute with the CRA | Commonly cited around 30 days, sometimes plus 15 | Your background check company |
Employers mix these two up constantly, and it's an easy mix-up to make. One is your waiting period before you're allowed to act. The other is your provider's legal deadline once a dispute is actually filed. They can overlap. They are not the same clock, and finalizing under the first one while the second one is running is exactly the situation that gets employers in trouble.
That part's not optional. If a dispute is open, the reinvestigation has to finish before you close the loop, no matter how patient you've already been.