DBS fees fall on 5 October 2026

What is not changing

The DBS fee is only part of what a check costs you, and it is the only part that is falling.

• Your provider's admin fee. Umbrella bodies and registered bodies set their own charge on top, commonly somewhere between £8 and £15, and some charge separately for identity verification. Nothing obliges them to pass the DBS reduction on, and nothing stops them raising their own fee at the same time. Ask yours for their price from 5 October in writing.
• VAT. The DBS's own fee does not carry VAT. Your provider's admin fee generally does. If your invoice shows one VAT figure across the whole lot, it is worth asking them to itemise it.
• Staff time. Chasing identity documents, getting a form completed correctly, resolving a query and filing the certificate is roughly three quarters of an hour per person for most organisations. At £15 an hour that is £11.25, and it does not move.
• Eligibility. Who may be checked at which level is set by law and is untouched by a fee change. A cheaper Enhanced check is not an invitation to run one on somebody who does not qualify for it.

What it actually saves

Put the pieces together for a single Enhanced re-check of a paid member of staff, on the new fees:

The DBS fee is about 58% of that, and the saving is about 12% of it. For an organisation re-checking forty paid staff on a three-year cycle, the change is worth roughly £113 a year. A hundred staff, about £283 a year. Real money, and not the number that decides anything.

For a charity whose people are volunteers, the fee change is worth nothing at all, because volunteer checks and volunteer Update Service subscriptions were already free. The entire cost of a volunteer re-check is the staff time, which is exactly the part that is not falling.

Which fee applies to a check submitted around the date

The DBS has told registered bodies to have their systems and published prices updated before 5 October, but it has not published a rule for an application that is submitted before the date and processed after it. Practice varies between providers. If you have a check in flight in the first week of October, ask your provider which fee they will charge you rather than assuming.

What we would not do is hold back a check to save £8.50. If somebody is starting work with children or vulnerable adults, a fortnight of delay is not worth the money, and the safeguarding consequence of an unchecked person in post is not a budgeting question.

Three things worth doing before 5 October

1. Correct your own published figures. If you are an agency, a membership body or a tutoring organisation that quotes a DBS price to your own customers, your website, your rate card and your onboarding emails all now say something that will be wrong on 5 October. This is the job people forget until a customer points it out.
2. Get your provider's new price in writing. One email. The answer tells you whether the reduction reaches you or stops with them.
3. Revisit the Update Service decision. At £15 a year, a subscription now costs a little over a third of an Enhanced check spread across three years, and it is free for volunteers. If you are still re-checking on a calendar rather than monitoring status, the arithmetic has moved slightly further in the Update Service's favour, and it was already favourable.

Where the Update Service fits

The Update Service is the DBS's own subscription that keeps a certificate live. Once somebody is on it, an organisation that is legally entitled to check them, and has their permission, can ask the DBS whether their certificate is still current. That status check is free and the answer is immediate. It tells you only whether the certificate stands or whether new information has been recorded since it was issued — never what the information is.

Two details catch people out. The individual has to subscribe themselves, either during the application or within 30 days of the certificate being issued; nobody can do it for them, and once the window closes the only route back is a fresh check. And a subscription that lapses stops working silently — the certificate does not expire, it simply stops being something you can verify.

The honest limit: a status check confirms the certificate you already hold is still current, which is what the Update Service exists for. Some regulators, funders and contracts specify a fresh check at a fixed interval regardless, and a status check does not satisfy that. Read your own obligations before you drop a renewal cycle.