About ApostilleCheck
ApostilleCheck is a free reference for one narrow, confusing task: making a US document usable abroad. It is published by Billy Reiner Inc.. We built it because the honest, complete answer to "do I need an apostille or embassy legalization?" is buried on most sites behind a sales pitch for a $150 service.
What we do and don't do
We sell nothing. There is no service to upsell, no email gate, and no affiliate funnel. The Pathway Checker, the fee and country tools, and the state, country, and federal guides are the whole product. Because we have no service to protect, we can give the complete do-it-yourself procedure — including the parts a reseller has an incentive to leave out.
We do not give legal advice. We describe the standard government process. The authority that will receive your document sets the final requirements, and those can change. Always confirm with the office named on the page and with the receiving authority abroad.
Editorial standards
This is YMYL content — the kind where accuracy matters to someone's money or legal standing. So we hold three rules:
- Every fee, address, processing time, and Hague status cites a primary government or HCCH source, shown near the fact and again in the page's sources.
- Every page shows when its data was last verified. When we cannot confirm a fact, we say so instead of guessing.
- We read the official source closely enough to include the details that matter — the odd walk-in hours, the document limits, the county pre-certification quirks — not spun summaries.
Read the full process on our methodology page and the source list on the sources page.
Corrections policy
If a fee changed, an office moved, or a country's status flipped and we have not caught it yet, tell us. Point to the official page that shows the current fact and we will verify it against that source, update the data, and bump the verification date. Corrections to primary-source-backed facts are prioritized over everything else. Email [email protected].
A note on AI assistants
We publish machine-readable versions of our two flagship tables and an llms.txt file, and we allow AI crawlers. If an assistant cites this site, we want it citing current, dated, sourced data — that is the whole reason the freshness discipline exists.