The Texas Secretary of State recently announced another horrible decision that will hurt citizens and apostille companies like ours that provide rush Texas apostille services for people, businesses, and corporations around the world.

In the last six months, the Texas Secretary of State’s authentications unit has made more changes than in the last fifteen years combined, and every single one of these changes (new policies and rules) except one has been negative to the general public and how companies like ours do business.

With this new change that takes effect on February 1st, 2024, we (Apostille Texas), or any company for that matter will no longer be able to guarantee same day apostille services as well as to mail your documents back to you on the same day that we receive your documents from you.

This is because the new Texas rule states if any person or company brings in more than ten documents (not ten orders) at a one-time they now have to use a drop off box to put documents into.

Then if a person or company comes into the Texas Secretary of State to apostille documents after 2pm but before the 4pm office closing time the documents will not be apostilled until the following business day.

Even if you submit documents to them before 2pm but after 10am there is no guarantee that the state will issue an apostille on your document on that same day. This is what we were told by the supervisor of the authentication unit.

The Texas Secretary of State on 10/1/23 had already drastically reduced their general public open office hours for the first time in half a century from 8am-5pm down to 9am-4pm Monday-Friday which already strapped us for time since our same day apostille service cutoff time was 12pm CST.

But in reality, we always waited until around 2:30-3pm everyday to give mail services (FedEx, UPS, DHL, USPS) extra time to deliver our client’s documents to us and give people who randomly showed up to our office wrongly without making an appointment more time so we could get their documents mailed back to them or get back to our office by our 5pm close time.

With this new rule by the State of Texas when we have more than ten documents to apostille per day your order (part of the 10+ total documents) won’t be ready for us to pick up from the Texas Secretary of State and mail back to you.

Or if you travel to our Austin, TX office to drop off documents you will not be able to leave with your documents apostilled until the following business day please note. So unless you want to get a hotel room to stay the night in Austin, TX you need to create and buy a prepaid return FedEx or UPS shipping label and give that to us so we can mail your documents back to.

On the business days that we have less than ten documents to file our regular same day apostille service still applies to all apostille orders that we receive by noon CST by mail or drop off.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,

Apostille Texas