How Long Does a Florida Apostille Take?

Florida apostille processing time is 2 business days with our Express service, 3 to 5 business days with Regular Express, or 6 to 8 business days with Standard processing. The price is $275 for the first document and $125 for each additional document. The clock starts when your physical documents are in our hands and have passed our review, not when you place the order. You can order online or call 800-208-2128.

That is the short answer. The rest of this page covers why those times are possible at all, what each option is for, when the clock actually starts, and the one thing that turns a two-day order into a two-week one.

Why two days is possible

If you mail a document to the Florida Secretary of State yourself, you wait for their mail queue. Depending on the backlog, that can run 30 days or more before the apostille is mailed back, and that is on top of mail time in both directions.

We do not mail anything to Tallahassee. Your documents are hand-delivered to the Secretary of State's office, which is how a 2-day turnaround is possible.

Florida apostille processing time: the three options

Express, 2 business days. Submit your completed documents before 12pm EST on a business day and the apostille is back within 2 business days. This applies to Florida-issued documents going to Hague Convention countries. It is the right choice for a visa appointment, a travel date, or a job that starts on a fixed day. Express adds $255 to the order.

Regular Express, 3 to 5 business days. Our most popular option. You have a deadline, but it is weeks away rather than days.

Standard, 6 to 8 business days. No fixed deadline on your end.

All three are business days. Weekends and federal holidays do not count. The times are estimates based on how the Secretary of State's office is running, and they are not guaranteed.

When the clock starts

Here is the sequence, because this is where most of the confusion about timing comes from.

You place the order and receive a confirmation email. You send us a scan or photo of your documents. Many clients would rather not email personal documents, so the order form has a secure uploader for exactly that; replying to the confirmation email works too. We review the scans. Then the physical documents come to us by the method you chose on your order: mail-in, drop-off, or our onsite service. When the physical documents arrive and pass review, we submit them. The 2, 3-to-5, or 6-to-8 days count from that submission.

For clients in the United States, shipping to us and back is included in the price and covered by the times above.

If you are outside the United States, you arrange and pay for shipping your documents to us, so plan for that transit time on top of the processing time. For the return trip, we send you a credit card authorization form for the international shipping charges, and delivery typically takes 2 to 3 business days depending on where you are. Tell us your real deadline on the order form and we will tell you honestly whether it can be met.

What actually causes delays

In our experience, one thing causes more rejections than everything else combined: bad notarizations.

Most of the rejected notarizations we see come from walk-in notaries at shipping-store counters. The signer's name is misspelled. Two letters are transposed. Everything else about the order is right, the apostille is issued, the document reaches the destination country, and it is rejected there because the name on the notarial certificate does not match the name on the passport. In some of those cases the notary refused to correct their own work.

Law offices are not immune. We have corrected notarizations that came from attorneys' offices.

The other patterns repeat week after week. Notarial certificates with blank spaces the notary never filled in. Documents with a stamp and a signature and no notarial certificate at all, which is not a notarization the Secretary of State will accept. Commission dates that do not match the state's records.

A rejected notarization does not cost you a day. It costs you the whole cycle. The document comes back to you, you get it notarized again, you mail it again, and the process starts over. Your two-day order becomes a two-week order.

Here is the hard part. If you have a document notarized on your own, you are responsible for it being done correctly, and most people are not notaries. There is no reasonable way for a customer to look at a notarial certificate and know whether the wording meets Florida's requirements or whether every required space is filled. It is the wild west out there, and the person who pays for it is you.

That is why we notarize documents ourselves whenever a document needs it. Our notarization is done to the Secretary of State's requirements the first time, in person or by video through Remote Online Notarization, handled by notaries handpicked by us and experienced in proper notarization procedures. The review and the notarization happen under the same roof, so nothing goes to Tallahassee that we have not checked. Notarization starts at $100 and current pricing is always on the order form.

Federal documents run on a different clock

FBI background checks and IRS transcripts do not go through Tallahassee. They follow a separate federal process. Standard federal processing runs 4 to 6 weeks. Expedited federal processing runs about 10 to 12 business days and adds $150. The price is $275 per document, and federal documents are not eligible for 2-Day Express. If your order includes both a Florida birth certificate and an FBI report, each follows its own timeline, and we tell you both up front.

Non-Hague countries take longer

If your destination country is not a member of the Hague Convention, your document needs an authentication rather than an apostille. That is a multi-step process that can include federal processing and embassy legalization, and the timing depends on the country. We assess those orders individually and give you a timeline before you pay.

How to get the fastest turnaround

Order before 12pm EST on a business day if you want Express. Upload a scan of your documents with the order, so our review is done before the physical documents get here. Let us handle the notarization. Put your real deadline on the order form, including the date the documents have to be in someone else's hands abroad, so we can pick the service that gets you there.

A Florida apostille is $275 for the first document and $125 for each additional one. Order online or call 800-208-2128, Monday through Friday, 9am to 6pm EST.