FBI apostille questions

Three things have to happen: you obtain your FBI Identity History Summary, the report is submitted to the U.S. Department of State's Office of Authentications in Washington, D.C., and the sealed apostille certificate is returned to you. You can run that filing yourself by mail, or pay a service like ours to prepare and file it under a registered account.

Request your Identity History Summary directly from the FBI through its eDO (Electronic Departmental Order) system, or use an FBI-approved channeler for faster turnaround. Either way you end up with a digitally signed PDF — that's the file we apostille.

Only if you don't have your report yet and want it faster than the FBI's direct queue. A channeler is a private company authorized to pull your Identity History Summary; it has nothing to do with the apostille step. We aren't a channeler ourselves — but if you'd rather not manage that step, checkout offers a $100 report-acquisition add-on and we coordinate it before filing your apostille.

Apostille authority follows whoever issued the document. State-issued records (birth certificates, diplomas, notarized papers) go through your state's Secretary of State. An FBI report is a federal record, so only the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. can apostille it. Your state office will reject it — a common and expensive detour.

No. The Authentication Office certifies the FBI's digitally signed PDF, not reproductions of it. Forward the original file exactly as the FBI or your channeler delivered it. Hard copies from the FBI can be mailed to us instead.

The apostille itself never expires, but most receiving countries want the underlying background check to be recent — commonly issued within the last three to six months. Check the requirement of the specific consulate or agency you're submitting to before ordering the report.

The 120+ members of the Hague Apostille Convention — including Spain, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, South Korea, and Japan. Countries outside the convention (China and Vietnam among them for certain document flows) require embassy legalization instead, which is a different, longer process we don't offer.

Same office, different destination. An apostille is the single-certificate route for Hague Convention countries. An authentication certificate starts the multi-step legalization chain for everywhere else. If your destination is in the convention, you want the apostille.

No one can, honestly. The Department of State's own processing takes days to weeks regardless of who files. Our rush add-on ($45) puts your file at the front of our internal queue at every step, which is the part any private service can truthfully accelerate.

The catch is that $75 buys the filing and nothing else. Getting the finished certificate back to you — a scan, U.S. shipping, international shipping — is a separately priced choice, as is rush handling. Everything is listed with its price before you pay; skip all of it and $75 is genuinely the total.

Not at all, and that surprises people. Because the filing happens federally in Washington, D.C., living in California, Ohio, or abroad changes nothing about the process or the price — only where we ship the finished certificate.

We check formatting before filing precisely to avoid this, and rejections of a properly prepared FBI PDF are rare. If your apostille can't be completed, our money-back guarantee applies and you're refunded in full.