By mail

The State Department states five weeks from the date they receive your request. Applicants commonly report six weeks or longer once postage in both directions is counted. Peaks make it worse, and nothing about the queue is visible to you while you wait.

In person

There are no appointments. A courier walks in, drops off, and collects on a slip dated about two weeks out. That is the fastest route that exists, and it is available to anyone willing to make two trips to Washington.

The whole chain, honestly

If you are starting from nothing, the realistic sequence is: fingerprints in a day, the FBI report back within hours through a channeler, roughly two weeks at the Office of Authentications, and two to three days of return shipping. Call it three weeks. Doing it yourself by post is six to seven, most of which is the federal queue plus the time it takes to work out which office the document even goes to.

What actually saves time

Not paying for speed, because there is none to buy. What saves time is using a channeler rather than the FBI directly, sending it to Washington rather than to your state, and getting the paperwork right first time so it is not returned unprocessed.

Source: U.S. Department of State, Office of Authentications. Checked 2026-08-04. We re-check this page weekly and update the date when anything changes.