Legalisation Cost and Processing Time
Planning
What Legalisation Costs and How Long It Takes
There is no single price, because the chain crosses four or five separate authorities and each sets its own fee and its own queue. What follows is the honest shape of it: the parts that are fixed, the parts that vary, and where the weeks actually disappear.
The one fixed cost
Federal authentication is twenty dollars per document, everywhere, always. Note the wording: per document, not per page and not per package. A file of six documents carries a hundred and twenty dollars of federal fee before anything else.
Cost and time by stage
| Step | Who | Typical cost | Typical time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notarisation | You | $5 to $25 | Same day |
| County clerk certification | You | $1 to $10 | 1 to 5 days |
| Secretary of State authentication | Issuing state | $2 to $30 per document | 1 day to 6 weeks |
| U.S. Department of State authentication | U.S. Department of State | $20 per document | About 9 business days by drop-off, roughly 5 weeks by mail |
| Embassy or consulate legalisation | Destination country | Varies widely by country | 2 days to several weeks |
| In-country ministry attestation | Destination country | Varies | Varies |
Embassy fees are deliberately not quoted here. They move without notice and differ by document category within the same mission, so a number on this page would be wrong more often than right. Each country profile links to the mission’s own schedule.
Where the delay really is
The federal layer, by mail
Roughly five weeks, excluding transit in both directions. Drop-off service in Washington is about nine business days, which is why most of the professional market uses it.
Slow states
Secretary of State turnaround ranges from same day to six weeks. If your document originates in a slow state, that is your bottleneck and no amount of federal expediting fixes it.
The mission’s own queue
Two days at a quiet consulate, several weeks at a busy one, and longer around national holidays that are not in the U.S. calendar.
Getting it wrong once
The largest single cost in most delayed files is not a fee. It is a rejection at stage four or five that sends the document back to the beginning.
Want the timeline compressed?
The stages we can accelerate, we do; the ones we cannot, we tell you about before you pay.
Requirements on this page were last checked against official sources on .
Questions people actually ask
Why are the ranges so wide?
Because state fees, state turnaround and embassy fees differ enormously. A single-document file through a fast state can clear in three weeks; a multi-document commercial file through a slow state and a busy mission can take three months.
Is expedited service worth it?
It depends where the bottleneck is. Paying to expedite the state layer achieves nothing if the embassy is the slow link. Identify the slowest stage for your destination before spending on speed.
Do these figures include shipping?
No. Add tracked courier both ways for every stage, which for a five-stage chain is a real cost in itself and a real source of delay.
This guide is published by a private document processing service. It is not legal advice and we are not a government agency. Requirements change without notice, so confirm anything critical with the mission before you post documents.
