Can I get an FBI background check from Spain myself?

Yes. You can have inked fingerprints taken on an FD-258 card at a Spanish police station, post the card with the FBI's applicant form and fee to the FBI's CJIS Division in West Virginia, and request the report yourself. If the document also needs legalising, the apostille is issued by the U.S. Department of State — a federal office, not a Spanish one and not a state Secretary of State — and a sworn Spanish translation must come from a translator on the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores register.

What happens if my fingerprints are rejected by the FBI?

On the mail-in route, a rejection is a restart rather than a correction. You learn about it weeks after posting the card, you are told the impressions could not be used but not what was wrong with them, and the remedy is a new station visit, a new card, a new form and a new fee. Nothing about the second attempt is more likely to classify than the first.

Is it cheaper to do an FBI background check yourself from Spain?

In government fees alone, yes — they are a small fraction of any service price. The comparison changes if a submission fails, because every failed attempt costs the fee, the postage and the station visit again, and adds weeks to a deadline that has not moved.

Doing it yourself

How to get an FBI background check from Spain

You can get an FBI background check from Spain yourself, and this guide walks all five stages in order — plus the one that has no undo.

Every stage links to the agency that publishes its current fee, form and address rather than restating them here, and the page is honest about where doing it alone genuinely beats paying someone — and where it does not.

Written for anyone in Spain who needs an FBI Identity History Summary and is weighing doing the whole thing alone against paying someone to run it.

Start here

When you should do it yourself

We sell this service, so read the rest of the page knowing that. Here is the part we have no interest in telling you, which is why it goes first — the situations where handling it alone is genuinely the better decision.

You have no deadline at all, and a restart would cost you nothing but patience.
You live near one of the few stations with workable hours — Valencia's central Jefatura takes prints every weekday morning without an appointment.
Your document needs no apostille and no sworn translation, which makes the process two steps instead of five.
You have done it before, your prints classified the first time, and you know your ridge detail is strong.
Cost is the binding constraint and time genuinely is not. The government fees are a small fraction of any service price, ours included.

If you recognised yourself in that list, the guide below is all you need from us. The station directory it refers to is published in full, with the Embassy's own hours, and we are not going to hide a public address to make a sale.

The process

Five stages, in order

Fees, forms and addresses change without notice, and a stale number on a page like this one is worse than no number — you would have no way to tell. So each stage ends at the agency that publishes its own.

01
Ask the authority exactly what it will accept
Before anything else, get the requirement in writing from whoever is asking for the document — the consulate, the university, the employer, the regional office. Three details decide the whole route: whether they need the FBI report legalised with a U.S. federal apostille, whether they need a sworn Spanish translation, and whether the report has to have been issued within a recent window.
Nearly every expensive DIY story starts here. Getting the report is the part people plan for; discovering afterwards that it also needed an apostille and a traducción jurada is the part that adds months.
02
Get inked fingerprints on an FD-258 card
The FBI's mail-in route needs a physical fingerprint card. In Spain these are taken at a police station by the Policía Científica — the U.S. Embassy publishes which stations do it, and several open for only an hour or two a week. Take a valid passport, and phone ahead: published hours change without notice.
Ask vaguely and you are routed to extranjería, who take immigration fingerprints. Those are the wrong prints, they look identical to you, and the mistake surfaces at the FBI weeks later.
03
Send the request to the FBI yourself
You post the completed applicant form, the fingerprint card and payment to the FBI's CJIS Division in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The FBI publishes the current form, the fee and the accepted payment methods — check them on the day you send, not from a blog. Payment is the quiet failure point from Spain: the FBI accepts specific instruments, and a personal cheque drawn on a Spanish bank is not one of them.
The mailed route is measured in weeks before you learn anything at all. Fold the card and it cannot be machine-scanned; get the payment instrument wrong and the packet does not process.
FBI — Identity History Summary Checks →
04
Apostille the report — federally, not regionally
An FBI Identity History Summary is a U.S. federal document, so only the U.S. Department of State can apostille it. Not a Spanish office, not a state Secretary of State, not the Embassy in Madrid. You send the original report with the State Department's own request form, the fee and prepaid return postage, and you arrange the return leg back to Spain at your own cost.
Sending a federal document to a state apostille office is one of the most common rejections there is. It does not fail fast — it fails after the postage, in both directions.
U.S. Department of State — Office of Authentications →
05
Have it sworn-translated
Spanish authorities generally want a traducción jurada produced by a translator appointed by the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores. Not any professional translator, and not a certified translation in the American sense — the appointment is what gives the translation legal effect here. The Ministry publishes the register of appointed translators. Translators bill per page, and the apostille is itself a page.
Translate before the apostille is attached and the translation is incomplete, because the apostille is part of the document that has to be translated.
Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores — register of sworn translators →

Stage two happens at a police station, and the one sentence that decides whether the trip was worth making is on the station directory — along with every location the U.S. Embassy lists and the hours it publishes for them.

The part most guides leave out

Ink and mail has no undo

Everything above assumes it works the first time. The reason to think carefully about this route is not that it is slow — you already priced that. It is that it has no failure branch. There is no step to redo, no one to appeal to, and no diagnosis of what went wrong.

A rejected card is not a correction. It is a restart.
If the impressions cannot be classified, there is no step to redo — you go back to the beginning. New station visit, new card, new form, new fee, new postage across the Atlantic, and the clock starts from zero on a deadline that did not move.
You do not find out for weeks.
On the postal route, the gap between making a mistake and learning about it is the entire processing window. Whatever was wrong with the card was wrong on the day it was rolled — you just spend a month and a half not knowing.
You are not told what went wrong.
A rejection tells you the submission could not be used. It does not tell you which fingers, or that your hands were dry, or that the ink was too heavy. Without that, the second attempt is not a fix — it is the same attempt again, hoping.
Nothing makes attempt two more likely to work.
Some people simply have faint or worn ridge detail, and ink on card is the least forgiving way to capture it. Those are the people who end up rejected two and three times, and the postal route offers them no alternative path — only the same envelope again.
The apostille cannot rescue any of it.
Legalisation attaches to a report that already exists. Every failure upstream is a failure of the apostille too, and if you eventually get a replacement report issued, its apostille is a fresh application — the earlier one does not transfer.
There is no one to escalate to.
This is the part people underestimate. Doing it yourself means every one of these outcomes is yours to absorb — no account, no case, no one who is on the hook for getting you a usable document in the end.

The alternative

Not faster. Recoverable.

Our route fails differently, and the mechanism is boring rather than magical: digital capture moves the moment of judgement from six weeks after the fact to while you are still in the room, where a bad impression costs thirty seconds instead of a restart.

Quality is judged while you are still in the room
Digital capture shows the technician each impression as it is taken. A finger that did not read is re-taken immediately. On the ink route that same judgement is made by an agency, in another country, about six weeks later.
Nothing crosses the Atlantic on paper
The submission is electronic, so there is no card to fold, lose, delay in customs or damage in transit — and no international postage on the outbound leg.
A failure is our problem to solve, not yours to restart
If the FBI cannot use what we sent, we re-capture and resubmit. You are not sent back to the first step of a five-step process you have already paid for once.
The document arrives in the form Spain asks for
On the Complete package the report does not stop at English PDF. It goes through the federal apostille and a sworn Spanish translation and reaches you as a finished set.

What we commit to

We do not consider the job finished when we have posted something. If a submission we make comes back unclassifiable, we re-capture your prints and submit again — and on the Complete package we carry the report through the U.S. federal apostille and the sworn Spanish translation, so what you are left holding is a document a Spanish authority can actually act on. That is the difference the DIY route cannot offer you: not speed, recourse.

Complete FBI Package — €675. A finished, apostilled, sworn-translated file — the form Spanish authorities ask for. Our technicians reach Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia; everywhere else in Spain there is a mail-in route where you get inked prints locally and we run the rest.

Official sources

Fees, forms, accepted payment methods and mailing addresses are published by the agencies themselves and change without notice. Check them on the day you send, not from a summary — including this one.

Police-station addresses and hours are transcribed from official U.S. Embassy sources on 2026-08-07 and listed in full.

Private service provider. Not affiliated with the FBI or any government agency.