Is There a Free OFAC Search? How to Check the SDN List Without Paying (or Signing Up)

Yes, Checking the OFAC List Is Free

The OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List and the other sanctions lists Treasury publishes are public government data. Anyone can search them, for any reason, at no cost. There is no law requiring you to pay for access, no license needed, and no restriction on who can look someone up.

What you pay for, when you do pay, is not access to the data. It is volume, integration into your workflow, ongoing rescreening, and a documented record that the check happened.

Option 1: Treasury's Official Sanctions List Search

OFAC runs its own free tool at sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov. It searches the SDN List and the Non-SDN Consolidated Sanctions List (which folds in the Sectoral Sanctions Identifications List and a few smaller lists) using a name field with optional fuzzy logic.

It works, but it has some rough edges worth knowing about before you rely on it:

• The match sensitivity slider defaults to 100, meaning exact match only. If you type a name and leave the default setting, you are only catching entries spelled exactly the way you typed them. Sanctioned names are frequently transliterated from Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and other scripts, so a real match can easily be spelled differently than what you searched. You have to manually drag the slider down to catch spelling variants, and it is not obvious from the interface that you should.
• It only covers two lists. The SDN List and the Non-SDN Consolidated List, both from OFAC. It does not include the BIS Denied Persons List, the UN Consolidated List, or sanctions lists from the EU, UK, Canada, or Switzerland, which is fine for a purely domestic, OFAC-only check but incomplete if your risk exposure is broader.
• It produces no record. The tool shows you results on screen. There is no saved search history, no exportable report, no timestamp you can hand to an examiner. If you close the tab, the only proof the search happened is your own memory of doing it.

For a single, one-off lookup where you just need an answer right now, this is a perfectly legitimate option. For anything you might need to defend later, it falls short.

Option 2: OFACScreen's Free Search

OFACScreen offers a free sanctions search at ofacscreen.com/screen/. No account, no email address, no credit card. You type a name and the highest-scoring matches come back on screen, ranked, with the true number the search found stated beside them. A common surname returns hundreds of low-scoring alias hits, so the screen shows the top ten of however many there are and says so; the $9.99 report carries every match the search found.

The free search checks all eight sanctions lists OFACScreen carries, not a cut-down subset: OFAC SDN, OFAC Non-SDN Consolidated, EU FSF, UK OFSI, Canada SEMA, Swiss SECO, UN Consolidated, and the BIS Denied Persons List, roughly 70,000 entries in a single pass. List coverage is not the thing behind the paywall. A free visitor and a subscriber run the same query against the same eight lists and the search finds the same matches; what differs is how many are drawn on screen and what survives the tab closing.

Matching is fuzzy by default rather than defaulting to an exact-match-only setting you have to know to adjust, so it catches reasonable spelling and transliteration variants across both primary names and recorded aliases without you configuring anything first. The lists refresh automatically once a day, so a free search runs against the current published data, not a stale snapshot.

The limits on the free search are volume and how much of a wide result set it draws: 25 searches per day from a single IP address, and the top ten matches on screen with the true total stated beside them. See Understanding the OFAC SDN List for more on what the list itself actually contains, and How Fuzzy Matching Works in Sanctions Screening for why match settings matter as much as which list you search.

So What Do You Actually Pay For?

Since every list is already in the free search, it is worth being blunt about where the paid line actually falls. You are not paying for data or for coverage. You are paying for volume, automation, and evidence:

• A documented report. A one-time $9.99 audit-ready PDF for a single search, including a clearance certificate when the search comes back with no matches. This needs no account and no subscription: run the free search, then buy the report for that search if you need it on paper.
• API access, on every plan including the 14-day trial, for screening inside your own signup, checkout, or origination flow.
• Batch CSV upload, on every plan including the 14-day trial, for screening a whole customer or vendor file in one run instead of typing names one at a time. How large a single file may be is what rises with the tier: 25 rows on the trial, 100 on Starter, 10,000 on Professional and above.
• Continuous monitoring, which re-screens your saved entities daily against the refreshed lists and flags anything newly designated.
• Audit-trail export, a CSV of your screening history on paid plans, for handing to an examiner or dropping into a compliance file.
• Team seats, on every plan including the 14-day trial, so more than one person can screen and review under one account: 3 users on the trial and on Starter, 10 on Professional, 25 on Business. The count includes the account owner, and everyone shares the owner's monthly searches and audit trail.
• Search volume above the free daily cap, since 25 searches a day per IP does not cover an ongoing compliance program.

What Free Searches Don't Give You

Here is the part that trips people up: running a free search is easy, but proving you ran it is not, and proof is usually what actually matters.

If you are a business with any kind of compliance obligation, a regulator, an auditor, an insurer, or a counterparty is not going to take your word for it that you checked a name. They want a record: who was screened, when, against which lists, and what the result was. A browser tab that is no longer open is not a record. Neither is a vague memory of "I checked, it was fine."

This is exactly the gap the one-time $9.99 audit-ready PDF report is built for. Instead of running a free search and having nothing to show for it, you get a document listing the name searched, the date and time of the screening in UTC, all eight lists checked by name, every match with its score and the list it came from, and a clearance certificate if nothing matched. It is a one-off purchase with no account and no subscription attached, so you can drop it into a customer file, a closing package, or a vendor onboarding record without signing up for anything.

When Free Is Enough, and When It Isn't

Free search is genuinely fine for:

• A one-off personal check, like screening a new tenant or a private buyer before a personal transaction.
• Checking a single vendor or contractor before signing a small, low-stakes contract.
• Curiosity or due diligence that does not require documentation for anyone else.

You need something more than a free, no-signup search when:

• You need to hand someone documented proof of a specific search. That is the $9.99 report, and it still needs no account.
• You are screening customers, vendors, or counterparties as part of an actual compliance program, where regulators or examiners expect a retained, exportable screening history rather than one-off results on screen.
• You are screening more than a handful of names, where batch upload beats typing names one at a time. Batch upload is on every plan, including the trial, with larger per-file limits further up. See Batch Screening Best Practices.
• You need screening built into a signup flow, checkout process, or loan origination system, which calls for an API rather than a manual search box. The REST API is on every plan, including the trial, so you can integrate before you pay.
• You need ongoing rescreening, since OFAC adds and removes designations without notice and a name that was clear last month is not guaranteed to be clear today. Continuous monitoring re-screens your saved entities daily.
• You are running more than 25 searches a day, which is where the free search's daily cap stops being workable.

If any of those apply, a subscription is worth the cost, but pick the tier by the feature you actually need rather than assuming everything arrives at once: API, batch upload, monitoring and team seats are on every tier including the trial, and what rises with the tier is size, bigger files, more seats, more monitored entities, more searches a month. If you're evaluating tools, Choosing OFAC Screening Software walks through what to look for beyond price.

Common Mistakes People Make with Free Tools

• Leaving the match setting on exact-only. On Treasury's tool, this means you only catch names spelled precisely the way you typed them, which misses a large share of real transliteration variants.
• Using a tool that only checks the SDN List. Someone can be sanctioned without appearing on the SDN List specifically. The Non-SDN Consolidated List, and depending on your industry, lists beyond OFAC entirely (see Beyond OFAC: Additional Sanctions Lists), can matter just as much. Check what a free tool actually covers before you rely on a clean result from it: Treasury's own search stops at two OFAC lists, while OFACScreen's free search covers eight.
• Not recording the date and list version. Sanctions lists change constantly. "I checked at some point" is not defensible months later. Note the date you searched and, if the tool provides it, the list version or update date.
• Treating a clear result as permanent. A name that is clear today can be added to a list next week. A single search is a snapshot, not a guarantee.

Quick Step-by-Step: How to Run a Free OFAC Search

1. Go to a free search tool. Treasury's official tool at sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov for an OFAC-only check, or OFACScreen's free search at ofacscreen.com/screen/ for all eight lists in one pass with fuzzy matching on by default.
2. Enter the full name. Use the complete legal name if you have it. Partial names produce noisier results.
3. If using Treasury's tool, adjust the match slider. Lower it from 100 to catch spelling and transliteration variants, not just exact matches.
4. Review any potential matches carefully. A name match alone is not a confirmed match. Compare date of birth, address, nationality, and any ID numbers listed against what you know about the person or company. See How to Handle an OFAC Match for the full process.
5. Document the result. Write down (or save) the name searched, the date, the lists checked, the list version, and the outcome. A screenshot is weaker than it looks, since it carries no list version, no match parameters, and a date that can be cropped, so a dated, exportable report is what an examiner or auditor will actually want to see. The $9.99 report produces one from the search you just ran without an account, covering the name, the UTC timestamp, the eight lists by name, and every match with its score; note the list versions yourself, because the report does not print them.

A free search answers the immediate question of whether a name shows up on a sanctions list. Whether that is enough depends entirely on what you need to do with the answer afterward.