Request your free Employment Data Report at employees.theworknumber.com; it lists every company that pulled your file in the past two years. Save a copy first. Freeze the file for free online or at 1-800-367-2884, since an Equifax credit freeze doesn’t cover it. Dispute errors through The Work Number’s online process, and Equifax must reinvestigate within 30 days.
If you’ve held a W-2 job in the last decade, Equifax probably has a copy of your paychecks. It keeps them in a database and sells the information through a service called The Work Number. Your past employers, every check down to the dollar, your hours, your start and end dates, and the reason you left each job is for sale to lenders, landlords, and employers.
You can look for free once a year, and you can lock it. The fastest protection is a freeze. It’s free, you can place it online or by phone, and it blocks many of the verifiers who would otherwise pull your pay history. Lift it when you apply for something like an apartment or a job, and put it back afterward.
Having your information deleted from The Work Number is harder. Federal law requires Equifax to remove information only when the information is wrong or can’t be verified. So your best options are to freeze the file, read your file annually, fix what’s wrong, and watch who looks.
The Work Number is Equifax’s copy of your payroll
The Work Number is an employment and income verification database run by Equifax Workforce Solutions. Employers and payroll companies send it their payroll files, and Equifax sells verifications to lenders, landlords, employers, and government agencies. Equifax reported about 209 million active and 813 million total employment records at the end of 2025, sent in by more than 4 million organizations.
A Reddit user who pulled their own report recently described 74 pages covering 13 years: every paycheck, gross and net, hours worked, start and end dates, withholdings, benefits, and a termination reason for each job. Lenders pay for that data, and it’s not cheap. A 2024 lawsuit filed by two mortgage lenders alleges that Equifax raised the price of a single verification from $17.85 in 2012 to $66.45. But your own copy is free (once per year).
Pull your report first, and save it
Request your Employment Data Report at employees.theworknumber.com or by calling 866-604-6570. It’s free once a year, and Equifax must deliver it within 15 days. The report shows your employment and income history and lists every company that pulled your file in the past two years.
Download it and save it to a personal email or personal cloud account before you change anything. If there’s a problem in the file, you will need this file to prove the state of your information before you flagged the issue.
Freeze the file for free
Place a freeze online at employees.theworknumber.com, by phone at 1-800-367-2884, or by sending Equifax’s freeze placement form to TW*******@*****ax.com. Lift it the same way. Equifax says a freeze means many verifiers will be unable to view your data.
A credit freeze at Equifax does not freeze your Work Number file. They are separate databases, and each needs its own freeze.
With a freeze in place, a mortgage, lease, job offer, or benefits application may take longer, because you’ll have to supply pay stubs and employment records yourself. If you’re applying for something, you can lift the freeze for the application and put it back when it closes.
The opt-out link does less than it sounds like
The Work Number’s site has a “Your Privacy Choices” link that accepts requests to opt out of the sale or sharing of your data. Use it. But most of what The Work Number does is regulated as consumer reporting under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and state privacy opt-outs generally don’t change that. Verifications you’ve consented to, like in the fine print of a loan, lease, or job application, will keep happening. The freeze is the control that actually stops them.
Dispute anything that’s wrong
Dispute inaccurate information through The Work Number’s online dispute process. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, Equifax must reinvestigate within 30 days, at no cost to you, and must delete or correct information that turns out to be inaccurate, incomplete, or unverifiable (15 U.S.C. § 1681i). Your employer, as the source of the data, has its own duty to investigate once Equifax notifies it of the dispute (15 U.S.C. § 1681s-2(b)).
There are a few public instances of employees alleging The Work Number contains wrong information. A class action filed in federal court in Virginia in 2024 alleges The Work Number reported one man as working full time at a poultry plant in a state where he never lived, while also working at two other employers hundreds of miles away.
One caution before you dispute a termination reason. If the reason is wrong and you were fired after reporting discrimination, reporting a violation of law, or taking protected leave, talk to an employment lawyer first. The code itself may be evidence, and your employer’s response to the dispute can become evidence too.
Ask your employer whether it participates
Employers choose whether to send payroll data to The Work Number, and some payroll systems let an employer switch it off. You can’t force your employer to stop. You can ask HR whether the company participates, and a few questions from employees are how these decisions get revisited.
If your report shows a reason you were never told
Your employer decided what to tell Equifax about why you left. If that reason doesn’t match what you were told, and you were fired after you reported something or took protected leave, the mismatch may be evidence. Courts can treat an employer’s shifting explanations as pretext (a legal term meaning the stated reason covers the real one.)
We wrote a guide for each state where we practice:
