How to Become a Notary Public, State by State

A notary public commission is issued by the state — usually the Secretary of State, but not always. In Florida the commission runs through the Governor’s office, in the District of Columbia through the Office of the Secretary, and in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee a county officer appoints or elects notaries who then hold statewide powers under state law. States issue a commission, not a “notary license,” and each state page below leads with what its own statute and commissioning authority call it.

The requirements vary more than most people expect, and the variation is the reason this atlas exists. Across the 51 jurisdictions covered here, 24 require an examination and 21 require none, with 6 more requiring one only for certain commission types. 27 require a surety bond — which is not the same thing as errors-and-omissions insurance, and several states require the bond while leaving E&O optional — and 22 require no bond at all. 18 require a training course before you are commissioned. Commission terms run from 1 year to 10, with a four-year term the most common at 16 states.

Online notarization is where the law is moving fastest. 45 jurisdictions authorize remote online notarization, 43 of them only after a registration separate from the base commission. Six do not authorize it: California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. Two of those are worth reading carefully rather than counting — California and North Carolina have both enacted remote notarization in statute while it remains inoperative, California until the Secretary of State certifies its technology project (or January 1, 2030, whichever comes first) and North Carolina until the first remote notary licence issues, with emergency video notarization extended to July 1, 2027 in the meantime. A statute that exists is not the same as a service you can use.

Every figure on every page below is read from the commissioning authority’s own pages, its official notary handbook, or the statute — never summarised from memory — and each page names its sources and the date it was last verified. Where two official sources disagree, both are stated and attributed rather than quietly reconciled.

Counts here range over the structured exam_required, bond_required, training_required and ron_status fields of the 51 gate-passed records behind these pages, so they move when the data moves.