Introduction to Income
Optimize your income verification process with document, payroll, and bank-based Income verification
Overview
Plaid Income (currently US, CA, and UK only) helps you verify anyone's income and employment in seconds, facilitating an improved decisioning and underwriting process. Depending on the Income product you choose, you can request information such as pay stub data, income streams, and historical income.
You can enable multiple different methods of income verification, then use the appropriate one for your situation. For example, you might enable Bank Income and also provide Document Income as a fallback for customers who prefer not to link their bank account or don't bank with a Plaid-supported institution.
You can verify a user's income via three products:
Document Income: Retrieve gross and/or net income information via user-uploaded documents such as a pay stub, bank statement, W-2, or 1099 form.
Payroll Income (US only): Instantly retrieve employment and gross income information, including the information available on a pay stub, from a user-connected payroll account. Supports approximately 80% of the US workforce, including gig income workers.
Bank Income: Instantly retrieve net income information from a user-connected bank account. Data available includes a breakdown of income streams to the account, as well as recent and historical income.
Most new customers should consider Consumer Report Income Insights instead of Bank Income. Income Insights is an FCRA-compliant product providing details on over a dozen categorized income streams along with ready-made, model-driven attributes like historical gross and net income to streamline debt-to-income calculations and income verification. It also provides details like forecasted income, employer name, income frequency, and predicted next payment date.
Income is recommended for use cases not supported by Income Insights, such as underwriting outside the US, or Payroll or Document Income based flows.
For a fuller view of a borrower's financial situation, Income can be used with Assets, which provides user-permissioned income streams derived from deposit activity.
If you need exact copies of a user's statements, see Statements.
For a fuller view of a borrower's financial situation, Income can also be used with Assets, which provides user-permissioned asset verification.
Income is a product of Plaid Inc., which is not a consumer reporting agency. To learn more about products offered by Plaid Consumer Reporting Agency, Inc., (Plaid CRA) see Plaid Check. Income can't be used in the same Link flow as Plaid CRA products.
Next steps
To learn more about integrating Income, see the docs for the Income product you would like to use: Document Income, Payroll Income, or Bank Income.