DOCUMENT AUTHENTICATION
Get your China-issued documents authenticated/legalized by both China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a foreign embassy/consulate in China.
If you are interested in using our document authentication/legalization service, please submit a quote request.
Introduction About Document Authentication/Legalization
The purpose of consular authentication is to certify the signature or seal of a host-government official who has previously executed, issued, or certified a document so that the document can be recognized in the country which the consulate/embassy represents.
Suppose a China marriage certificate which has been notarized by a Chinese notary officer will be used in Germany for purposes of immigration. Obviously, the immigration officers in Germany are unable to tell if the Chinese notary officer’s signature is genuine or fake. That’s where consular authentication comes into play.
The Germany Embassy in China, too, has no idea about what a Chinese notary officer’s signature should look like. But, the Embassy has a powerful Chinese friend, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), who can verify the signature of every Chinese notary officer. Upon verification, the MFA adds a signature on the document and forwards the document to the Germany Embassy. The Embassy then compares MFA’s signature against an exemplar on file and if the signature appears to be authentic, places an authentication certificate on the document. This is end of consular authentication/legalization.
Service Fee and Processing Time
The processing time for consular authentication simply varies from embassy to embassy. What difficult is to know the cost. As explained in the above introduction, an authentication process involves both China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a foreign embassy in China. Each of these two entities set the fees based on multiple factors. The fees charged by the Ministry are mainly determined by document type (i.e. commercial or civil) and your nationality (also known as “Reciprocity Fee”), while the fees charged by an embassy vary from embassy to embassy and document to document.
Below are calculators created by us to help you get a basic idea of the estimated service fee and processing time for using our document authentication service. Note that we choose rush service whenever it is available.
Estimate of Our Service Fee
Estimate of the Processing Time
What Our Clients Say
Click here to view a list of all testimonials.
I also love that the service was end-to-end such as the service can include picking up the documents from the school.
I also like that I can pay in two parts installments (this option is helpful for students on a tight budget).
Keren
Tatenda