The employer lists are copied from each other. Here is the ten-minute check that works on any company, including the ones nobody has listed.
You typed a company name and the word "felons" into a search box, and you got back a page that said yes. Then another page that said yes. Then a forum thread from 2019 where three people disagreed. None of them told you where the answer came from.
So we checked. On 17 August 2026 we went through 31 large employers that show up over and over on those lists and tried to find, for each one, a statement published by the company itself. Not a list. Not a staffing agency's blog. The company's own words, on the company's own website, with a link.
Seven of the 31 had one. Around a dozen had nothing traceable at all — every result pointed back to another list, which pointed back to another list. And several of the lists were citing a 2016 pledge that no longer exists.
That is the real state of the information. The rest of this page is what to do about it: a check you can run on any employer in about ten minutes, including the small local one that no list will ever cover, and the honest version of the table everyone else is guessing at.
Three things go wrong, and once you can see them you stop trusting the lists entirely.
They quote a pledge that ended. In 2016 the White House ran a Fair Chance Business Pledge and roughly a hundred companies signed it. That program is over. It survives only on an archived government page. A company signing something ten years ago is a historical fact, not a current hiring policy, and several lists still present it in the present tense.
They confuse companies with similar names. One example worth keeping in your head: the fair chance employer that signed a national hiring pledge is Butterball Farms, Inc., a butter and dairy manufacturer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is a different company from Butterball, LLC, the turkey producer in North Carolina, which is who everybody assumes is meant. We found no public fair chance statement from the turkey company. If a list cannot keep two companies straight, it cannot tell you what either one does.
They answer the wrong question. "Does Company X hire felons" has no single answer, because a national chain is not one employer making one decision. It is thousands of hiring managers, in states with different laws, filling roles with different legal requirements, looking at offenses of different types and different ages. The useful question is narrower: will this manager, for this role, in this state, with this offense, this many years later.
Run these in order. Most people stop at step one and get a bad answer; the value is in steps three through six, which no list can do for you.
Put this in a search box, with the real domain: site:example.com "fair chance".
Then try "second chance", then "criminal", then
"background check". You are looking for a careers FAQ, a newsroom post, or an
impact report. If nothing comes back, that is information too — it means the company has
chosen not to say, and every list claiming otherwise made it up.
The Second Chance Business Coalition publishes its member list, and it is roughly fifty large companies. The Getting Talent Back to Work pledge covers a different and generally smaller set of employers. Membership is a real signal — it is a public commitment with the company's name on it — but read it for what it is: a statement of intent from headquarters, not a promise from the store you are applying to.
This is the step nobody tells you about, and it can be the strongest protection available to you. Under the Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act, in force since 20 December 2021, federal agencies and federal contractors on covered contracts may not ask about criminal history before a conditional offer. The exceptions are real — positions requiring a security clearance or access to classified information, law enforcement roles, and jobs where another law specifically requires an earlier check — but outside those, a covered contractor has to let you get to the offer stage first.
You can look a company up on SAM.gov or USAspending.gov. Plenty of employers you would never think of — food service contractors, uniform suppliers, IT firms, logistics operators — hold federal contracts.
Fair chance law is mostly local. As of the most recent count from the National Employment Law Project, 37 states have some form of ban-the-box or fair chance policy, but only 15 extend it to private employers rather than just government jobs: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Many cities and counties add their own rules on top, and a city ordinance can cover you when your state law does not. NELP's state and local guide is the place to look yours up.
Some doors are closed by statute, not by preference, and finding that out after you have paid for training is an expensive way to learn it.
This is the step that actually produces an answer. Corporate policy is a floor. The decision is usually made by a store manager, a plant HR coordinator, or the owner of a twelve-person shop. Call and ask a specific question: "I'm interested in the warehouse opening. I have a felony conviction from 2019, non-violent, unrelated to this work. Is that something that would rule me out here, or should I apply?"
You will get a straight answer more often than you expect, and you will get it in two minutes instead of two weeks. A no on the phone costs you nothing. A no after four rounds of interviews costs you a month.
Checked 17 August 2026. This table is deliberately shorter and more boring than the ones ranking above it, because everything in it is something the company said in public with a link attached.
| Company | What it publishes |
|---|---|
| JPMorgan Chase | A "Second Chance Agenda" page on its own site stating that nearly 10% of its US hires over the past five years had a prior record unrelated to the role. Also a coalition member. Note that as a bank it still sits under the Section 19 limits above. |
| Georgia-Pacific (Koch) | Company newsroom describes removing the criminal history box from applications in 2015 and a "Creating Second Chances" strategy from 2020, with named employees hired through it. |
| Koch Industries | Documented through the same Georgia-Pacific corporate newsroom, plus coalition membership and the national hiring pledge. No standalone policy page of its own that we could find. |
| Union Pacific | Company news feature on its second-chance hiring practice, with named hires. Also a coalition member. |
| Aramark | Newsroom material on IN2WORK, a culinary training program for incarcerated and returning people, with a stated commitment to hiring from it. |
| Greyston Bakery | Open Hiring: no resume, no interview, no background check. You put your name on a list and wait for your turn. The clearest policy of any employer we checked. |
| Dave's Killer Bread | Company news release on its Second Chance Project. Note the corporate-cohort side of that program moved to a separate non-profit in 2023; the hiring stance itself has not been withdrawn. |
| Butterball Farms, Inc. | The Michigan butter manufacturer, not the turkey company. Community page describing advocacy for hiring returning citizens. |
These companies have put their name on the Second Chance Business Coalition roster. That is a genuine public commitment. It is not a policy document, it does not bind an individual store, and none of them publish "we hire people with felony convictions" in those words on a careers page we could find.
Among the roughly fifty members: Walmart, Target, The Home Depot, Lowe's, McDonald's, Kroger, CVS Health, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Best Buy, Macy's, Gap, Ralph Lauren, Total Wine, PepsiCo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Prudential, Allstate, Aon, AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, Cisco, Micron, Texas Instruments, Accenture, Deloitte, Indeed, Randstad, Kelly Services, General Motors, BorgWarner, Eaton, Eli Lilly, Procter & Gamble, American Airlines, United Airlines, Union Pacific, Koch Industries, DICK'S Sporting Goods, NBCUniversal and the NBA. The current roster is on the coalition's own site — check it rather than trusting this paragraph in six months.
These names come up constantly on the lists. We looked for a company-published position on each and did not find one: Amazon, Chipotle, Waste Management, Cintas, US Foods, Sysco, UPS, FedEx Ground, Nucor, Bunzl, and Finish Line. For DISH Network / EchoStar we read the careers FAQ directly and it does not mention criminal records, background checks or fair chance hiring at all.
Starbucks and Tyson Foods appear on many lists as fair chance employers. Both signed the 2016 pledge. Neither has a current statement we could find. That is not evidence they refuse to hire you — it is evidence that the lists are ten years out of date.
What "they don't say" means in practice: it means go to step six. Silence from headquarters is not a rejection from the warehouse.
You have rights at this exact moment and almost nobody uses them.
Before an employer turns you down because of a background check, the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires it to send you a pre-adverse-action notice that includes a copy of the report and a document called "A Summary of Your Rights Under the FCRA," and then wait a reasonable period before deciding. After it decides, it must send a second notice naming the company that ran the report and telling you that you can dispute anything wrong on it.
Use the gap. Background check errors are common: wrong person, charges shown as convictions, a dismissed case, a single arrest reported as three. If the report is wrong, say so in writing before the decision is final, not after.
On timing: federal law generally stops a reporting company from listing an arrest that did not lead to a conviction once it is more than seven years old. Convictions have no federal time limit and can be reported forever. Some states are stricter than federal law, so check yours — an old conviction that federal law permits may still be off-limits where you live.
Worth knowing too: a criminal record is not a protected class under federal law, so refusing to hire you is generally legal. What EEOC guidance discourages is the blanket rule — the policy that screens out everyone with a record without weighing the type of offense, how long ago it was, and whether it relates to the job at all. That guidance is still published as of 2026. It gives you language for a conversation more often than it gives you a lawsuit.
When you get to the conversation, bring something that reduces the employer's risk rather than asking them to absorb it.
The Federal Bonding Program, run by the US Department of Labor through state workforce agencies, provides free fidelity bonding — insurance protecting an employer against theft or dishonesty by a specific employee — typically covering the first six months. It costs neither of you anything and it answers the risk objection with a document.
The Work Opportunity Tax Credit is worth up to $2,400 for hiring someone within a year of conviction or release, but its authorization expired on 31 December 2025 and Congress has not renewed it as of this writing. Do not walk into an interview offering a credit that does not currently exist. What you can accurately say is that you are a target group and that the employer should file Form 8850 within 28 days of your start date to preserve the claim, because past lapses have been closed retroactively and only employers who filed on time could claim. We go through both in detail in Jobs That Hire Felons.
A job you can't afford to keep is a trap of a different kind. Before you say yes, run the number: what the offer actually nets after tax and withholding, and whether that covers transport, tools, childcare and the first month while you wait on a paycheck. Our paycheck calculator gives you the take-home figure, and the budget calculator tells you whether it clears your real costs. Both are free and need no account.
Where these facts came from. Confirmed: the Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act date and exceptions; the FCRA adverse-action sequence and the seven-year arrest rule (15 U.S.C. § 1681c); the FDIC Section 19 changes effective 30 October 2024; the WOTC lapse and the 28-day Form 8850 deadline; the coalition rosters, read on their own sites. Convention: "a reasonable period" between the two adverse-action notices is commonly treated as about five business days, but the statute sets no number. Our own check: the 31-employer survey, the tiers above, and the DISH/EchoStar careers FAQ reading — all done on 17 August 2026 and all re-checkable from the links given. State counts are NELP's most recent published figures and move as legislatures act.
Educational content, not legal or employment advice. Hiring law, ban-the-box coverage, licensing bars and program eligibility vary by state and change — confirm current rules with your state workforce agency, licensing board or a legal aid organization before relying on anything here. Company positions described above are as published on 17 August 2026 and may change without notice. See our editorial standards.