We read the public pricing and turnaround page of every firm below on 2026-08-20, and we re-fetched by hand every price we print. We sell apostilles, so we are in this table too, on the same terms as everybody else. That is a conflict of interest and you should treat this page accordingly. The defence is that you can click every source and check us, which is more than the two other comparison pages in this category offer, because both are written by firms that appear in them and neither takes a submission.

The rows are alphabetical. There is no ranking, no score and no badge, because a ranking would be our opinion dressed as a fact.

The other two comparison pages in this category

There are two, and you should know what they are before you trust any of us. apostilles.us/compare compares seven services and Apostilles.us is one of them. It carries a “Verified June 2026” date, states that competitor figures come from public websites and review platforms, and puts its own row first. notarygeek.net publishes the other one, and it answered 403 to every request we made on 2026-08-20, so we did not read it and say nothing about what it contains.

Neither page has a way to submit a service for inclusion, and neither includes us. This page has the same conflict of interest theirs does. The difference we can offer is that every number here links to the page it came from, the gaps are printed rather than filled, and no figure was copied from another comparison page, including theirs.

Where somebody else is better than us

This is the part a vendor-written comparison usually skips, so here it is first.

• On price we lose, and not narrowly. US Authentication Services publishes an FBI apostille at $69 on its Economy tier, Monument Visa publishes $75 with government fees included, Globeia publishes $110 and FederalApostille.org publishes a $120 flat rate. We charge $299.
• On the fastest published federal figure we lose. We publish about three weeks end to end. Several firms publish shorter federal figures, and those are printed in the table with their own footnotes.
• On non-Hague destinations we are not an option at all. We do not sell consular legalization and we will not. 9 of the 11 firms here publish that they do, and One Source Process and Apostille World publish actual legalization prices rather than a quote form.
• On state documents we are mid-priced. Ours is $149 per document. Globeia publishes a US apostille starting at $75, and Apostilles.us publishes an Economy tier at $149 plus a $19 fee.

What we do that we have not found any of them publishing is check your consulate’s own recency rule against your appointment date before taking your money, and tell you not to order when the dates do not work. That is the whole pitch. If it is not worth the difference to you, buy the cheap one.

Which one should you choose

Six real situations. Four of them do not point at us.

You are an American abroad with no US address

Almost everybody here ships internationally, so this is a weaker filter than it looks. Three firms publish a price for it, Monument Visa from $55, US Authentication Services at $85 and us at $99. The rest describe the service without a number. What matters more is who receives the paper. An apostille is a physical certificate stapled to a physical document, so somebody needs an address that accepts couriers. Compare the shipping column, then compare the price of the thing being shipped.

You need an FBI background check apostilled for a residency application

This is the situation we built for, so weigh what follows accordingly. The risk here is not the stamp, it is the clock: most consulates require the report to have been issued within three or six months, and that window runs from the FBI issue date, not the apostille date. We check that before charging. Nobody else on this page publishes that they do. If your dates are comfortable and you already know your consulate’s rule, you are buying a courier run and the cheaper firms sell the same courier run.

You need a birth or marriage certificate apostilled

This is a state job, not a federal one, and the state is the one that issued the record rather than the one you live in. Any firm in the table that handles state documents can do it. Price it on the published state figure, and remember that you order the certified copy yourself either way, because states release vital records only to the registrant or close family.

Your destination is not in the Apostille Convention

Do not buy an apostille, from us or anyone. It will not be accepted. You need consular legalization, which ends at that country’s embassy rather than at a US office. We do not sell it. Use one of the firms in the table that publishes it, and read our apostille or legalization page first so you can tell which one you actually need.

Your appointment is close and you need it fast

Take every fast federal number in this table with the same warning we put on our own. The Office of Authentications has no appointment system and no paid expedite. A courier drops off and collects on a pick-up slip about two weeks later, so nobody controls that stage. What a firm can genuinely save you is the mail time either side and the month you lose by sending it to the wrong office. If a service promises a same-day federal apostille, that route does not exist. State apostilles are different and can genuinely be same-day.

You want the lowest price and nothing else

Then buy the lowest published price in the table and do not read further. The stamp is the same stamp from the same office. We say this on our own pricing page too, and we would rather you read it here than find out after paying us.

What we could not source, and what we did about it

A comparison page is only worth reading if the gaps are printed rather than filled. These are ours.

• 5 of the 11 firms publish no federal price at all. Two of them, Apostilles.com and Queen Bee Notary, publish no price of any kind on any page we could reach, while listing federal apostille work in their own navigation. Those cells say “Not published” and stay empty. We did not substitute a figure from a competitor’s comparison page, which is where such a number would have come from.
• One firm contradicts itself. FederalApostille.org publishes two different federal turnarounds in two blocks of the same page. We print both rather than choose the flattering one or the damning one.
• One site refuses automated requests. apostillesusa.us answered 403 to an automated fetch and 200 to a browser. We read it as a browser and say so.
• We did not open every page a firm publishes. Where a firm lists a service we did not read, the caveat says so and we make no claim about it.
• The government source still refuses us. travel.state.gov answered 403 to every request on 2026-08-20, as it did on our last two pages. The federal facts we repeat here carry their 2026-08-04 reading, and the $20 fee and five weeks from receipt, per the state department. applicants commonly report six or more. come from that reading, not from a fresh one.

We also did not measure quality, reviews, support or whether anybody actually delivers on what they publish. We have no way to verify that for another firm, so we do not comment on it. This page compares what these companies say, not how well they do it.

Every source on this page

One block per firm. Each quote is verbatim, each links to the page it came from, and each carries the date we fetched it.

Common questions

What is the best apostille service in the US for expats?

There is no single best one, and any page that names a winner is selling you something.

The cheapest published price for an FBI report apostille that we could read on 2026-08-20 was $69 from US Authentication Services, on their Economy tier at a stated turnaround of 5 or more weeks.

Monument Visa publishes $75 including government fees at a stated 5 to 6 weeks, Globeia publishes $110, and FederalApostille.org publishes a $120 flat rate with government fees included.

5 of the 11 firms publish no federal price at all.

ExpatPapers charges $299 and is not the cheapest, which we say on our own pricing page.

Pick on the thing that will actually break your application: whether the firm handles the right office, whether it ships where you live, and whether anyone checks your consulate deadline before taking your money.

How much does it cost to get an FBI background check apostilled?

The government part is fixed and small. The U.S. Department of State charges $20 per document, and the FBI channeler fee is paid by you when you order the report.

Everything above that is a service fee, and the published service prices we read on 2026-08-20 ranged from $69 to $995.

Some firms state that government fees sit inside their price, others state that fees are charged separately on top, and several do not say either way.

Read the fee line before you compare the headline numbers, because they are not measuring the same thing.

Which apostille services handle non-Hague consular legalization?

Of the 11 services on this page, 9 publish consular or embassy legalization services, read on 2026-08-20, and two of those publish actual prices for it rather than a quote form.

Served123 states that it coordinates the US Department of State step and then refers the embassy leg rather than running it.

ExpatPapers does not sell consular legalization at all and will not take money for it.

If your destination is outside the Apostille Convention, do not order an apostille from anyone, including us.

Can an apostille service get my FBI report for me?

Federal rules release an FBI Identity History Summary only to the applicant or the applicant’s attorney, so you order your own report.

ExpatPapers does not obtain documents and has no retrieval line on its price list.

Some firms publish services around the edges of this, such as fingerprint submission kits or certified-copy retrieval, and their own pages are linked in the table.

Whoever you use, the report is issued to you and the apostille is the part a service actually runs.

Do I need a US mailing address to use an apostille service?

None of the services we read on 2026-08-20 states that a US mailing address is required.

Several publish international return shipping, and three publish a price for it: Monument Visa states international shipping starts at $55, US Authentication Services states $85 for International Priority, and ExpatPapers charges $99.

What you do need is a US address or a courier to receive the document if you want a physical original, because the apostille is a paper certificate attached to a paper document.

Is there a same-day federal apostille?

No, and this is the one claim in the category that is simply not true.

The Office of Authentications runs no appointment system, so a courier drops off and collects on a pick-up slip roughly two weeks later.

One Source Process publishes Rush and Same Day tiers and states on the same page that they are "Not available for Federal Docs.", which is consistent with that.

Any same-day promise you see is describing a state apostille or same-day submission, not a same-day federal apostille.

Read next

• The apostille guide, which office handles which document
• Apostille or legalization, the destination-country test that comes first
• Does it need notarizing?, the step before the state office
• What this industry gets wrong, every repeated claim set against its source
• Our pricing, including when you should use somebody cheaper