Skip the Six-Week Wait
for Your FBI Apostille

About three weeks end to end. You order your report from an approved channeler and it comes back within a day. The State Department leg is the slow part: our courier hand delivers it and collects on a pick-up slip that runs roughly two weeks. Return shipping adds a couple of days.

Doing it yourself by post takes five to six weeks at the State Department alone, before you have sourced the report or worked out which office it goes to. There is no same-day route at the Office of Authentications, and anyone telling you otherwise has not been there recently.

An FBI background check is a federal document, so only the federal government can authenticate it. That is the U.S. Department of State in Washington. State offices authenticate documents their own state issued, such as birth certificates and notarised papers.

This is the single most common mistake in the process, and it usually costs people a month.

That is set by the country you are applying to, not by us, and it is set per consulate rather than per country. All four Spanish consulates we read say six months, not the three months the rest of this industry publishes. Italy varies: San Francisco says six months, while Miami and Chicago do not list the FBI check at all. The clock runs from the date the FBI issued the report, not the date it was apostilled.

We check your date against your consulate before you pay, and tell you if it will not hold.

Two things, both short. Get fingerprinted once at a Live Scan location, about twenty minutes. Then order your report with the link we send you, which takes a few minutes and comes back in hours. The FBI may only release it to you, so nobody can do that step for you.

We handle Washington: the form, the hand delivery, the collection, the scan and the shipping.

We tell you the same day, with the reason and what it takes to fix it.

The $20 government fee is paid when your document is filed, so it is spent by that point and cannot be returned. Any resubmission is quoted before we do it.

No. Your report is delivered to you and then deleted. We do not retain criminal history records after an order closes, and the file is never used for anything other than fulfilling your order.

No, and we are not permitted to. We are a courier and agent service. We can tell you what a consulate publishes as its requirements and link you to the source, but which visa you should apply for is a question for an immigration attorney or an accredited representative.