Notary Fees and Remote Notarization by State

Updated August 7, 2026. Quick answer: two things about notarization are worth knowing before you need one, and neither is what people look up. The fee is capped by statute — being charged more is not a negotiation, it is a violation. And remote online notarization is not a settled question: states are still adopting it, and at least one of the rules below has an effective date that has not arrived yet.

The fee is a ceiling set by law

California caps an acknowledgment at “fifteen dollars ($15) for each signature taken”. Oregon caps a notarial act at $10 — and separately allows up to $25 for a REMOTE act.

That second number is the interesting one: Oregon’s legislature priced the technology. The same signature, notarised over video rather than across a desk, is worth two and a half times as much under the statute. Most fee discussions treat remote notarization as a convenience; Oregon treats it as a distinct, more expensive act.

California also makes two acts free by statute: a vote-by-mail ballot identification envelope, and a veteran’s benefit application or claim. If you are notarising a VA claim in California and you are charged, the charge is improper.

The table

Remote notarization: the tracker column

Where remote notarization is authorised, the statutes are strikingly consistent about two safeguards, and they are heavier than most people expect:

• Identity proofing beyond an ID. Washington requires “at least two different types of identity proofing”; Minnesota requires remote ID presentation plus credential analysis plus identity proofing.
• A recording, kept for a decade. Both require an audio-visual recording retained at least ten years. A remote notarization creates a video of you signing that outlives most of the documents it witnesses.

Minnesota goes further and reaches outside the United States, provided the notary has “no actual knowledge of the remote online notarial act being prohibited in the jurisdiction in which the person is physically located” and the matter connects back to the U.S.

And the reason this is a tracker rather than a table: the Washington provision quoted here carries an effective date of 1 January 2027. The rules are still moving, so a row is only as good as the date attached to it — which is why every row below carries one.

Why this matters for estate documents specifically

Notarization is where a lot of estate paperwork quietly fails. Whether a will needs it at all is its own question with a surprising answer — a will usually does not need to be notarized to be valid, though a self-proving affidavit does. And who may serve as witness or notary is not a formality: a beneficiary witnessing a will can cost that beneficiary their gift.

Every row, quoted

California

Cal. Gov. Code §8211, read 2026-08-06.

• acknowledgment: “the sum of fifteen dollars ($15) for each signature taken”
• deposition: “the sum of thirty dollars ($30), and in addition thereto, the sum of seven dollars ($7) for administering the oath”

California’s RON framework was NOT read for this row – the fee section was. The RON cell is blank rather than guessed.

Oregon

Or. Rev. Stat. §§194.277, 194.400, read 2026-08-06.

• fee: “The fee that a notary public may charge for performing a notarial act may not exceed $10 per notarial act, except that a notary public may charge a fee not to exceed $25 per notarial act for a notarial act performed under ORS 194.277”
• ron: “A notary public located in this state may perform a notarial act using communication technology for a remotely located individual if”

Minnesota

Minn. Stat. §358.645, read 2026-08-06.

• scope: “outside this state, but within the United States”
• foreign_condition: “no actual knowledge of the remote online notarial act being prohibited in the jurisdiction in which the person is physically located”

Washington

Wash. Rev. Code §42.45.280, read 2026-08-06.

• proofing: “obtained satisfactory evidence of the identity of the remotely located individual by using at least two different types of identity proofing”
• recording: “create an audiovisual recording of the performance of the notarial act”
• retention: “at least ten years after the recording is made”

CORRECTED 2026-08-07. This note previously read as though Washington’s remote notarization arrives on 1 January 2027. It does not. RON has been authorized in Washington since 1 October 2020 under S.B. 5641; the 2027 date belongs to a 2026 amendment that expands remote notarization to tangible records and to administering oaths and affirmations. Two versions of RCW 42.45.280 sit on the legislature’s site at once, and reading the forward-dated one as the operative one is an easy mistake to make. We made it.

The seven exceptions — and every one is a different kind of no

Forty-four states authorize audio-video remote online notarization and the published version of this table is, near enough, a wall of yes. The seven that are not yes are the reason this page exists, and lumping them together as “no” would lose the whole point: no two of them are no for the same reason.

• Alabama — reported as remote ink only, and we could not confirm it. The account we have is that Alabama’s statute runs the identity check over live audio-video but still requires the notary’s original wet-ink signature on the paper document — RIN, not RON. But our sources for that are a notary trade body and a vendor, not Alabama. We tried four routes to the statute itself on 2026-08-07: the Secretary of State’s notary page (certificate failure, then 404), the legislature’s retired code subdomain (no longer resolves), and its current code viewer twice (navigation only, no statutory text). So this row is reported, not verified. If Alabama matters to your decision, read § 36-20-73.1 yourself.
• California — enacted, and still not operative. SB 696 (2023) is real law with tiered operative dates: the administrative pieces switched on in 2024 and 2025, but the part that actually lets a notary perform audio-video RON “shall become operative when the Secretary of State has completed the technology project necessary to implement the new provisions or by January 1, 2030, whichever is earlier.” California has a RON law and no usable RON. A table that prints “yes” here tells a Californian to do something they cannot do.
• Connecticut — remote ink again, by a different route. Verified in the session law itself, read 2026-08-07. Under Public Act 23-28 the notary watches the signing over video, and then — the Act’s own words — “the individual shall mail or otherwise cause to be delivered the signed original copy of the record to the notary public for certification and execution”. Paper still has to travel. And the Act bars remote acknowledgment outright for “the making and execution of a will, codicil, trust or trust instrument”, health-care instructions, living-will affidavits, disclaimers and real-estate closings — and says an acknowledgment taken anyway “shall be ineffective”. That is most of what a reader of this site would want notarised.
• Georgia — we could not confirm that any permanent statute exists, and we are not asserting that none does. What we have says Georgia’s remote notarization ran on the Governor’s emergency orders, that those lapsed, and that HB 334 died in 2022 over whether RON could be used for real-estate closings. But those sources are a bankers’ association newsletter and a bill-tracking service, not Georgia. On 2026-08-07 the General Assembly’s own bill page returned a JavaScript shell with no bill data, its API returned 401, and the Secretary of State’s notary page returned 403. Asserting that a state has no such authority is exactly the claim we will not make on non-official sourcing — the same rule that governs our Tennessee row on the security-deposit table. Treat Georgia as unresolved, not as a no.
• Massachusetts — enacted, and the Secretary says don’t. The statute exists; the required training programme and registration form do not, and the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s own page tells notaries they “shouldn’t use online remote platforms at this time.”
• Mississippi — contested, and we are not calling it. Mississippi adopted a revised notarial-acts law, and the sources disagree about whether it carried the remotely-located-signer provisions or deferred them. The cell is blank rather than guessed. Two vendor sites say yes; we are not resolving a legal question in favour of the companies that sell the service.
• South Carolina — in-person electronic only, plus the distinction everyone drops. Verified in the code itself, read 2026-08-07. Chapter 2 of Title 26 governs electronic notarization, and § 26-2-50 requires that the principal “appears in person before the electronic notary public at the time of notarization” — flatly, with no remote exception. We read every section of the chapter; none authorizes audio-video notarization without physical presence, and Title 26 has no RON chapter. South Carolina does recognise RON performed by notaries commissioned elsewhere — and that is recognition of out-of-state acts, not in-state authority. Tables that conflate the two put South Carolina in the yes column.

Three of these seven were checked against the state’s own source on 7 August 2026, and two could not be. Which is which is marked on every row above and set out in full below — because on a page whose entire value is seven exceptions, how well each one is sourced is part of the answer, not a footnote to it.

Three different things, one label

Most of the disagreement between published RON tables is not disagreement about the law. It is three distinct procedures wearing one name:

• RON — remote online notarization. The signer appears by live audio-video and the record is electronic end to end. This is what this column measures.
• RIN — remote ink notarization. The signing is witnessed over video, but a paper original with a wet-ink signature still has to reach the notary. Connecticut is “no” here only because of this distinction — it has a working remote mechanism and it is not RON. Alabama is reported to be the same and we could not confirm it.
• IPEN — in-person electronic notarization. Electronic document, electronic seal, and the signer standing in front of the notary. South Carolina is IPEN-only.

Two of the four “not authorized” states are not authorized only because we are measuring RON specifically. If you are trying to get a document notarised without travelling, that distinction is the entire answer — and it is the one a yes/no column destroys.

What began as an emergency order, and what survived it

Remote notarization went from a niche to near-universal because of the pandemic, and a great deal of what is still republished as a state’s “RON rule” is an executive order that no longer exists. Thirty of these fifty-one rows carry that history in their notes, and what this table reports is the permanent position only.

Two states show the two possible endings. Oregon’s emergency authority had a sunset in June 2021 and the legislature removed the sunset before it arrived — the authority never lapsed. Georgia’s did lapse, and the bill meant to replace it died. Same starting point, opposite law today.

How these rows are sourced, including where that is weaker than it looks

Thirty rows are statute-tier, ten official-agency and eleven secondary. But “statute-tier” is a label somebody typed, so we checked it against the URL each row actually cites — and three of the thirty were read from a commercial code site rather than a state one: Colorado, Indiana, Vermont. Those three carry a ⚠ in the source column.

Colorado is the one to be careful with: we have separately caught that same commercial mirror serving superseded statutory text under a “current through” label. An aggregator is reliable for a stable rule and dangerous for a moving one, and this is a moving area of law.

The check ran the other way too, and found three rows labelled secondary that were in fact read from the state’s own site — Michigan, North Carolina, Utah. Those are better than their label, and we would rather be wrong in that direction.

The rows that matter most are the rows sourced worst, and that is not a coincidence. Of the seven exceptions above — the entire value of this page — Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi rest on secondary sources, because a state that has not done something publishes no statute saying so. There is no official page announcing an absence. That is a structural problem with negative claims, not a research failure, and it is why the weakest rows are the interesting ones.

What we went back and checked, and what beat us

Because of that, on 7 August 2026 we re-checked the exceptions specifically — not a random sample of the table, which would have landed on uncontroversial “yes” rows and taught us nothing. Only a state legislature, state code site or Secretary of State counted. Trade bodies, vendors, bill-trackers and commercial code sites were not allowed to settle anything, which is the whole point.

• Confirmed at the state’s own source: South Carolina (the in-person requirement, quoted above), Connecticut (the mail-the-original requirement and the ineffectiveness clause, quoted above), and Washington.
• Could not be reached at all: Georgia and Alabama — four routes each, all failing on 401s, 403s, 404s, certificate errors or JavaScript shells that serve no text. Both of those rows carry negative claims, so both are now hedged rather than asserted.
• Still unsettled: Mississippi, which is why its cell is blank.

Washington is the one that changed something. This page previously implied that Washington’s remote notarization begins on 1 January 2027. It does not — it has been in force since 1 October 2020, and the 2027 date belongs to a later amendment that widens it. The legislature publishes both versions of the section at once and we read the wrong one. That correction is the return on going back to check, and it is the reason we publish what failed as well as what passed.

Coverage, and what this page still does not have

The remote-notarization column now covers all 51 jurisdictions, up from four, each with its authority, effective date, source and read date.

The fee column does not. Two states’ fee caps — California and Oregon — were read at the statute. The other forty-nine were never read, and they say “not read” rather than showing a dash, because a dash in a fee column reads as “no cap” and that would be a fabrication. Statutory fee caps are the next wave.

Also not here: journal and recording-retention requirements beyond the ones quoted above — commission terms and eligibility — which document types each state excludes from remote notarization (Connecticut’s exclusions are listed because they change its answer; the others are not) — and county or municipal recording offices’ own acceptance rules, which are a real second layer for deeds. Nothing here is legal advice.

Cite this

Clear Money Guide, Notary Fees and Remote Online Notarization by State, 2026. https://clearmoneyguide.com/notary-rules-by-state/. Read at primary source on the dates shown; reusable under CC BY 4.0.

Remote notarization: all 51 jurisdictions. Statutory fee caps: two. The fee column shows “not read” for the forty-nine states whose fee statutes have not been read, rather than a dash that would imply no cap exists. Journal requirements, commission terms and the witness-conflict rules are still the next wave. Nothing here is legal advice.

See methodology and corrections. No advertising appears on this page and we earn nothing from it.

Changelog correction, 7 August 2026. This page displayed an earlier “Updated” date than its last material change (the table completed 4 -> 51 on 2026-08-07). The date is now correct. The cause was structural rather than careless: our edit discipline replaces a table or appends sections in place to preserve earned content, and it was preserving the dateline along with it. On a page whose value is being current, that understates the thing readers came for, so the rule now is that any change to a tracker updates its date in the same operation.

How this page is kept current

What moves it: state legislatures and secretaries of state. Remote-notarization authority arrives by session bill and by implementation date — two of the entries here are enacted but not yet operative, and Washington’s expansion takes effect on 1 January 2027, which is already in our register.

What we do not promise. There is no automated watcher behind this page. What exists is a dated register of changes we already know are coming, checked at every batch close rather than waited on, plus a re-read whenever we touch the page for another reason. We would rather describe that plainly than claim a monitoring cadence we do not run — a tracker that overstates its own maintenance is the thing this page class exists to avoid.