Apostille Cost UK: What the Whole Job Actually Comes To, Component by Component

The Seven Things You Are Actually Paying For

Ask what an apostille costs and you will be told a single number. That number is almost never the number you end up paying, and the gap is not usually dishonesty — it is that “an apostille” is shorthand for a chain of separate transactions, each with its own price list, its own turnaround and its own failure modes. Until you can see the chain, you cannot tell whether a quote is fair.

Here is the whole chain. Not every job contains every link, and that is precisely the point: the links your job contains are what your job costs.

A worked example makes the shape of it obvious. Two people ring us on the same morning. The first has a GRO birth certificate and needs it apostilled for Spain. Her chain is components 1 (already paid), 3, 4 and 5 — and that is £90 with us, or a little under £60 if she does it herself and waits five weeks. The second has a university degree certificate and a P60 going to the United Arab Emirates. His chain is components 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, twice over, and it will be several hundred pounds. Both of them started the call with the same question: “how much is an apostille?” Work down the components, tick the ones that apply to you, and by the end you will have a number that is yours rather than an average of other people's.

What the FCDO Itself Charges — the Only Fixed Numbers

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office's Legalisation Office publishes its fees, and they are not negotiable by anyone. Every UK apostille provider, including us, pays exactly these. If you want a single anchor point against which to judge every quote you receive, this is it.

Three things in that table repay a second look, because each of them costs somebody money every week.

⏱️ Twenty-five working days is five calendar weeks

The standard service is described by GOV.UK as “usually up to 25 working days, plus courier or postage time”. Twenty-five working days is five full weeks before you add the post in either direction — realistically six. We have corrected this figure on our own pages before: an older version of this article said 15 working days, which was simply wrong, and anyone budgeting a relocation around it would have missed their date. If a provider's website still says ten or fifteen working days for the standard FCDO route, treat everything else on that site with the same suspicion.

💻 The e-Apostille is cheaper and faster, and often unavailable

At £35 and up to two working days, the e-Apostille looks like the obvious choice. It carries two hard conditions. First, the document must be a PDF electronically signed by a UK notary or solicitor — which means it is only available for documents going down the certification route anyway, and only where your certifying professional can sign electronically. Second, GOV.UK excludes an important list outright. You cannot get an e-Apostille on:

• ✗ Birth, death, marriage, civil partnership and adoption certificates, or any other document from the General Register Office
• ✗ ACRO police certificates for England and Wales
• ✗ Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) certificates for England and Wales
• ✗ Disclosure certificates for Scotland and Northern Ireland
• ✗ Fingerprint certificates
• ✗ ACCA membership certificates

Look at that list and you are looking at most of what ordinary people legalise. The documents that can take an e-Apostille are largely commercial and professional ones. And there is a third condition GOV.UK cannot help you with: the authority at the far end has to accept an electronic apostille, and a great many foreign registries, land offices and universities still do not. Our position is deliberately unglamorous — use an e-Apostille when the recipient has confirmed in writing that it accepts one, and paper otherwise. Our e-Apostille versus paper comparison works through the trade-off in detail.

🚚 The courier line is real money, and it is priced by weight

The FCDO's fee is “£45, plus courier or postage costs”, and the courier costs are published separately:

Two consequences follow, and both are worth money. Because the courier is charged per 1.5kg rather than per document, a single return shipment of twelve documents costs the same £6 as a shipment of one — which is the single strongest argument for sending a family's or a company's documents together. And because an overseas return address costs £32 or £42 rather than £6, giving a UK address, even a relative's, and forwarding the bundle yourself is frequently cheaper than having the FCDO ship abroad. Providers who quote you a higher price for overseas delivery are not, in that respect, inventing anything.

The Cost of Getting the Document in the First Place

This is the component people forget, and on some jobs it is larger than the apostille. If you are holding the document already, skip to the next section. If you are not — if the birth certificate is in a box in a loft in another county, if the police certificate has not been applied for, if the company documents have to be ordered fresh because the FCDO will not accept a download — then this is where your money starts going.

Every figure below is the issuing body's own published fee, checked on 16 September 2026.

👶 Birth, death, marriage and civil partnership certificates

Three separate registration systems cover the United Kingdom, and they charge differently.

Two points that save real money here. First, additional copies are much cheaper than repeat orders, and each apostille covers one physical document which the receiving authority will keep. If a foreign registry, a bank and an employer all need your marriage certificate, order three copies now at £12.50, £10 or £8 each rather than repeating the whole chain twice in six months. Second, the GRO priority service at £38.50 is only worth paying for when it is genuinely the bottleneck — it saves three days at the front of a process whose FCDO leg is up to twenty-five. Paying for priority issuance and then joining the standard FCDO queue is money spent on nothing.

GRO certificates are among the cleanest documents in this field: they are issued by a UK public official, the FCDO holds the signatures, and they go straight to the apostille with no certification step. That makes them our £90 price. The detail is in our birth certificate apostille guide and our marriage certificate guide.

🛡️ ACRO police certificates

An ACRO police certificate is the standard UK criminal-records document for overseas use — visas, residency applications, professional registration abroad. It costs £68 for the standard service, with a stated turnaround of 20 working days. ACRO also runs a faster premium service at a higher fee — £121 at the time of writing, though we were unable to re-confirm that figure directly at source on the day this page was updated, so treat it as indicative and check the current premium price on acro.police.uk before budgeting on it. The £68 standard fee and the 20-working-day turnaround are the figures we work to, and they are the ones we have had to correct in the past — this page previously carried £65 and ten working days, which was wrong on both counts.

Add the ACRO fee to the apostille and the real cost of a police certificate for, say, a Spanish residency application is £68 plus £90 with us, and the real timeline is twenty working days plus the apostille. An ACRO certificate is signed by a public official, so it goes direct to the FCDO — no solicitor, no £120. It also cannot take an e-Apostille, so paper is the only route. Our ACRO police certificate guide covers the application itself.

🏢 Companies House documents

Company documents are where issuance costs stop being trivial, because a corporate file usually contains several of them and Companies House charges for each. The published fees:

A note on terminology that causes a surprising amount of confusion and occasionally a wasted order. What overseas authorities call a certificate of good standing is, in Companies House's current language, a company certificate with certified facts including a summary statement. Ask for it by the old name and you may be sold something adjacent. Ask for it by the new name and confirm which facts must appear — directors, secretaries, registered office, objects — because the certificate is built from the facts you specify. And note what you cannot get: Companies House does not issue certificates carrying information on people with significant control, shareholders, shareholdings or the statement of capital. If the authority abroad has asked for a shareholding certificate, it will have to come from the company's own officers and be certified by a solicitor, which puts it on the £120 route.

🎓 Degree certificates, transcripts and professional qualifications

Universities set their own replacement-certificate fees, so there is no single number to publish. What matters for your budget is structural: a degree certificate is issued by a university, not by a UK public official, so the FCDO cannot apostille it directly. It needs a solicitor or notary to certify it first, which puts every degree on the £120 route. Our degree certificate apostille guide explains the mechanism and the exceptions.

📋 Court documents and other government output

Sealed court orders, decrees absolute, grants of probate and letters issued and signed by a government department carry a signature the FCDO holds on file, so they go direct and sit at our £90 price. Court fees for sealed copies are set by the court and vary by document type, so we publish no figure. A photocopy of a sealed order is not a sealed order, and sending one costs you a rejection and a return journey.

Solicitor Certification, and Why Two Quotes Differ by £60

This is the section that decides your bill. Everything above it is arithmetic you cannot change; this is the one place where knowing the rule saves you money.

🔍 The rule, in the government's own words

The Legalisation Office authenticates signatures and seals by matching them against specimens it holds. When it receives a document it checks, in GOV.UK's phrasing, whether any signatures, stamps or seals match its own records. If there is nothing to match, there is nothing to apostille. GOV.UK then sets out the way round it: you can get other documents legalised “as long as they have been certified by a UK ‘public official’, such as a UK notary or solicitor”, and it gives the examples of “a power of attorney, a contract or a qualification certificate”.

So the deciding question is never how official a document looks. A payroll department's logo, a university crest and an employer's letterhead all count for nothing. What counts is whether a UK public official whose signature the FCDO holds has signed it. Where one has, the document goes direct. Where none has, a solicitor or notary signs a certificate, and the apostille attaches to that certificate rather than to your document.

💰 What certification itself costs

Here we are going to disappoint anyone hoping for a firm number, and the reason matters. No regulator sets a fee for certifying a document. Solicitors' charges were deregulated decades ago; the Solicitors Regulation Authority requires firms to be transparent about their prices but does not fix them, and the Faculty Office does not set notaries' fees either. The result is a genuine market, and the spread across the country is wide.

What we can tell you is what drives the number, so you can judge a quote you are given:

• ● Solicitor certification versus a notarial act. A solicitor certifying a copy as a true copy of an original they have inspected is the cheaper of the two. A notary public executing a notarial act — signing and sealing under their own authority, and entering it in their protocol — is a more formal and more expensive instrument. Many civil-law jurisdictions, particularly Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland and most of Latin America, and a good number of Middle Eastern consulates, specifically require the notarial version.
• ● Number of documents. Most firms price the second and subsequent documents in the same appointment well below the first, because the identity check and the attendance are the fixed costs.
• ● Whether you must attend in person. Certification of a copy usually requires the original and often your ID; a notarial act almost always requires you in the room. Travel and appointment time are real costs, to you if not on the invoice.
• ● Complexity. Certifying a one-page degree certificate is not the same job as drafting and executing a power of attorney for use in a foreign jurisdiction, and should not be priced as though it were.
• ● Electronic signing. If you want the £35 e-Apostille rather than the £45 paper one, your solicitor or notary must be able to sign the PDF electronically. Not all can, and those who can sometimes charge for it.

Our £120 price includes the certification, arranged through the solicitors we work with, with the FCDO apostille on top of it as one job. We publish that as a single number precisely because the underlying market is opaque, and because a client should not have to go shopping for a solicitor in order to find out what an apostille costs.

💸 The £60 gap, explained

Now the question this section exists to answer. You ring two providers, describe the same document, and are quoted £69 by one and £129 by the other. One of them is not necessarily ripping you off. There are four ordinary explanations, and only one of them is bad news.

What Each Named Document Costs, and Why

The table below is the practical heart of this page. For each document we have set out what it costs to obtain if you do not already have it, whether it needs a solicitor, our price for the apostille, and — the column most guides omit — why it falls where it does. The “why” is what lets you check the logic against your own paperwork instead of taking our word for it.

All prices are per document. Our price includes the FCDO fee, certification where the route requires it, submission and UK return delivery.

Two caveats we would rather state than have you discover. First, the “solicitor?” column describes the usual case, and there are documents that sit on the boundary — a medical letter, an unusual government output, an older court document. We check every document before it is submitted rather than assuming, and where a document we expected to go direct turns out to need certifying we tell you before we charge you, not after. Second, where the destination is outside the Apostille Convention, add the embassy stage to every line in that table. That is the subject of section eight, and it changes the numbers considerably.

Doing It Yourself: the True Total and the Real Risks

You do not need a service to get an apostille. The Legalisation Office deals directly with the public, and anybody can post a document to it. So the honest question is not whether you can do it yourself — you can — but what it actually saves, and what it actually costs you in time and risk. Here is the arithmetic for three real cases, with nothing hidden.

Case one: a GRO birth certificate for Spain, no certification needed

That is a genuine saving and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it costs you is time: the standard FCDO route is up to 25 working days plus postage in both directions, so realistically five to six weeks from the day you post it. Our price buys next-working-day submission through a registered business account, which is a different product, not a better version of the same one. If your deadline is in three months and the document is simple, doing it yourself is a perfectly rational choice, and we will say so on the phone.

Case two: a degree certificate for Portugal, certification needed

Here the comparison stops being clean, because the solicitor's fee is the variable and you cannot know it until you have rung round. That is the real cost of the DIY route on a certification job: not the money, but the shopping. You are procuring a professional service in a market with no published prices, for a task most people do once in their lives, and then posting the result into a five-week queue.

Case three: five documents for a UAE work visa

At five documents the DIY route changes character entirely. Five FCDO fees is £225. One return courier covers the lot, which helps. But every document that needs certifying needs its own certification, the embassy stage has to be arranged separately for each, and — this is the part that hurts — a single mistake in the package can send the whole bundle back. The FCDO does not partially process a package; a problem with one document delays the shipment it arrived in.

Our position, stated plainly: for one simple document with a distant deadline, do it yourself and save about £30. For anything needing certification, anything irreplaceable, anything with a date attached to it, or any file of more than two documents, the arithmetic moves — and it moves because of the risk line, not the fee line. If you want a second opinion on which of those you are, ring us and describe the documents. We have talked people out of orders before.

The Non-Convention Uplift: When the Apostille Is Only the Middle

Everything so far assumes the destination is a party to the 1961 Apostille Convention. For most of Europe, the Americas, Australia, India, Japan and a long list besides, the apostille ends the chain: it is issued, and the document is ready. For a shorter but commercially significant list, it does not. The document is certified if it needs certifying, apostilled by the FCDO, and then presented to the destination's embassy or consulate in London for consular legalisation.

That third stage is what turns a £90 job into a several-hundred-pound one. Our price for the full route starts at £150 per document, and the mission's own consular fee sits on top of that. We deliberately do not publish embassy fees on this page: they are set by each mission, they change without notice and without announcement, and a stale consular fee on a pricing page is worse than no figure at all. We quote them at the point of order, against what the mission is charging that week.

The lesson generalises: Convention membership changes, and each change moves real money. We check the destination against the HCCH status table before quoting, every time, and you should ask any provider whether they do the same. Our What Do I Need? tool carries the current position for 127+ countries, and the UK document legalisation overview explains how the two routes differ.

💰 What a non-Convention file really costs

Take a typical UAE employment file: a degree certificate, an academic transcript, an employment reference letter and an ACRO police certificate. Three of those four need solicitor certification. All four need an apostille. All four need embassy legalisation. Before the consular fees are added, that is four documents on the from-£150 route, and the ACRO certificate also carries its own £68 issuance and twenty working days at the front. The cost is not the problem people usually hit, though — the timeline is. Start the ACRO application on day one, not after the degree is back from the solicitor.

Multi-Document Files and Corporate Economics

Almost nobody legalises one document. Relocations run to four or five. Family files — two adults and two children moving to Spain or Portugal — run to six or eight. A company opening a subsidiary abroad will typically need the certificate of incorporation, a certificate with certified facts, the memorandum and articles, a board resolution, a director's passport copy and sometimes a certificate of tax residence. The economics of a file are different from the economics of a document, and understanding the difference is worth more than shopping around on the headline price.

📈 What scales, and what does not

👥 The family file, priced honestly

Two parents and two children moving to Spain. The documents: two birth certificates for the children, one marriage certificate, two ACRO police certificates, and one degree certificate for the parent whose professional registration needs recognising. Six documents.

Add to the left-hand column the £68 × 2 ACRO issuance and the £12.50 × 3 certificate issuance if those documents have to be ordered, and you have the true cost of the file: about £743 including issuance, plus five to six weeks if you do the FCDO leg yourself, or days if you do not.

The £150 difference in that example is the whole argument for using us rather than a cheaper headline price. We are mid-market on one document. On a file, the money is not in the per-document rate — it is in correctly identifying which documents qualify for the direct route, and charging £90 for those rather than £120. Five of the six documents above never needed a solicitor anywhere near them.

🏢 The corporate file

Company work has one additional feature that catches finance teams out: recency requirements. Many foreign registries will only accept a certificate of good standing, or a certified copy of the register, issued within a defined window — three months is common, and some are stricter. That interacts badly with a slow apostille route. A certificate ordered in January, apostilled over five weeks on the standard FCDO service and then sitting in a lawyer's inbox for a fortnight can be out of date by the time it is filed, and the whole chain has to be repeated from the £22 Companies House order upward.

So on corporate files the order of operations matters more than the unit price. Order the Companies House documents last, not first. Get the certification and the apostille arranged so that the documents move continuously. If an embassy stage follows, work backwards from the consulate's timetable, not forwards from today. And bundle: one submission, one return courier, one set of tracking. Our company documents apostille guide goes through the standard subsidiary-formation bundle document by document, and our pricing page sets out how volume is handled.

What Makes a Price Legitimately Higher

Not every expensive quote is a bad one. There are five reasons a price can properly exceed the £69–£94 market band for a basic apostille, and being able to name them is the difference between negotiating from knowledge and simply feeling overcharged. If a quote is high and one of these explains it, the quote is fair. If a quote is high and none of these applies, ask why.

How to Read a Competitor Quote

We would rather you compared quotes properly than took ours on trust, partly because we are not the cheapest and we know it. A quote for an apostille should answer seven questions. If it answers all seven, you can compare it with any other quote that does the same. If it answers three, the number on it does not mean anything yet.

🔍 Reading the shape of a price list

Beyond the seven questions, the structure of a price list tells you a great deal before you have spoken to anybody.

• ● A single flat price for all documents means one of two things: either everything is being charged at the certification rate, in which case direct-route documents are subsidising the rest, or certification is excluded and will be added later. Neither is dishonest. Both cost you money if you do not ask.
• ● Two prices, split by whether certification is needed — which is how we publish, at £90 and £120 — means the provider is committing to make the assessment and live with it. Ask them to make it on your documents before you pay.
• ● A price list with no turnaround against it is incomplete. Time is half of what you are buying in this field.
• ● A page still quoting 10 or 15 working days for the standard FCDO service, or an embassy stage for Viet Nam, has not been checked recently. That is a maintenance signal, and it applies to every other number on the site too.

What an Apostille Does and Does Not Certify

We have put this last because it is the most expensive misunderstanding in the field, and it is a cost question even though it looks like a definitions question. People spend hundreds of pounds on a chain of certification, apostille and sometimes embassy legalisation, and then discover that the authority at the far end wanted something else entirely. No one refunds that.

Article 5 of the 1961 Convention is short and exhaustive. The certificate “will certify the authenticity of the signature, the capacity in which the person signing the document has acted and, where appropriate, the identity of the seal or stamp which the document bears”. That is the complete list. Three things, and nothing else.

On a certified document the point becomes sharper still. Where a solicitor has certified a copy of your degree certificate, the apostille confirms that a genuine UK solicitor signed the certificate. It says nothing whatever about the degree. The chain authenticates the last signature in it, not the first document in it.

Why this costs money: several kinds of requirement look like apostille requirements and are not. A foreign university asking for verification of a UK degree wants the awarding institution or a verification service to confirm the award, which an apostille cannot do. A foreign regulator asking for confirmation that a company is in good standing today wants a recently dated certificate, not an apostille on an old one. A lender asking for income to be verified wants an accountant's certificate, not an apostilled P60. In each case the apostille chain can be completed perfectly and still fail, because it was never the right instrument.

Frequently Asked Questions

If your question is not here, it is probably on our main FAQ, in the complete UK apostille guide, or answerable in ninety seconds on the phone. Call 0203 916 6250, message +44 7494 434 224 on WhatsApp, or email info@legalisenow.com with a scan and the requirement you were given. We will tell you which route applies and what it costs before anything is charged — including when the honest answer is that you can do it yourself for less.