If you are preparing your police clearance certificate for a skilled worker or employment visa application in the United States, the document must first carry an officially recognized apostille. Without it, the United States's receiving institutions — embassies, consulates, employers, universities or immigration officers — cannot legally verify that your record was issued by a competent authority. This page explains how the apostille works specifically for the United States, who issues it, what other steps usually accompany it, and how DoCertify handles the entire chain on your behalf.
Documents bound for the United States are authenticated through issuing-state Secretary of State for state-issued documents and the U.S. Department of State for federally-issued documents. Because both the United States and most likely the country where the document was issued are members of the 1961 Hague Apostille Convention, a single apostille certificate is sufficient — no embassy legalization is needed.
Three issues account for most rejections: (1) the apostille is missing or was issued by a non-competent authority; (2) the translation was completed by a translator not recognized in the United States; (3) the order of operations was wrong — for example, a translation produced before the apostille was added, leaving the apostille text untranslated. We sequence the chain correctly the first time.
Generally no. the United States authorities for skilled worker or employment visa application purposes require the physical original or a re-issued certified true copy bearing a wet-ink stamp from the issuing institution. Digital-only documents are accepted only for a narrow set of issuers that publish a verifiable online register.
Standard turnaround for apostille of your police clearance certificate bound for the United States is 3–7 working days from the moment we receive the original document. Urgent processing is available in 24–48 hours for most countries of origin where the issuing authority offers expedited service.
No. The entire apostille chain is processed in the country where your police clearance certificate was issued, not in the United States. You only need to ship the original document to our processing office; the apostilled and translated package is then couriered to wherever you are.
Employers and skilled-worker visa officers in the United States sit on dozens of applications per week. A document chain that arrives correctly authenticated and translated the first time moves through the queue faster, while a chain with a missing step is set aside and often only flagged after weeks of waiting. We process your police clearance certificate so that the work-visa decision-maker can verify it on first inspection.