Video: FBI Background Check Apostille, Explained
South Korea's E-2 visa, the route most American English teachers take, requires a national-level criminal record check. For an American applicant, that document has exactly one form: the FBI Identity History Summary. Korean immigration does not accept state police checks, county checks, or city reports, however official they look. A state-level document in an E-2 file is not a weaker version of the requirement; it is the wrong document, and the application stalls until the federal one replaces it.
Because the check is a federal document, its apostille comes from the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., not from any Secretary of State. This is the second place E-2 files go wrong: an applicant gets the right FBI check, then has it apostilled at the state level, and Korean immigration rejects the pairing. South Korea has applied the Hague Apostille Convention since 2007, so the apostille is the correct and complete form of authentication. No Korean consulate legalization step sits behind it.
Korean immigration requires the FBI check to have been issued within six months of the visa application. The clock runs from the check's issue date, and the apostille does not reset or extend it. That makes the FBI check one of the last documents to start, not the first: order it too early and it can age out while a contract, a start date, or the rest of the file is still moving. Teachers who lose an E-2 timeline to paperwork usually lose it here.
The E-2 file also needs an apostilled copy of your bachelor's degree, and that document travels the opposite route: a notarized copy authenticated by the Secretary of State of the state where the university sits. Two documents, two levels of government, two apostilles. Files get tangled when applicants assume one office handles both, or send the FBI check to a state office that has no authority over federal records. Keep the two tracks separate from the start and each one is straightforward.
EPIK and the other public-school programs, and private academies (hagwons) hiring directly, all feed into the same immigration requirement. Recruiters' checklists differ in order and presentation; the underlying rule does not. Wherever a checklist says "criminal background check," read it as the apostilled FBI Identity History Summary, issued inside the six-month window.
Tell us where the document is going and what you already have. We confirm the route before you commit to anything.
Start Your Order TodayNo. Korean immigration requires the national-level FBI check for the E-2; state, county, and city checks are not accepted, and a state check in the file only delays it.
Yes. A channeler delivers the same FBI-issued Identity History Summary, and the Department of State apostilles it the same way. What matters is that the document is the FBI's, kept as issued.
For Korean immigration, the apostilled check is the finished document. A school or recruiter may ask for copies or extra forms for their own files, which is separate from the immigration requirement.