How to order a Polish birth, marriage or death certificate from the UK or the USA

First check how old the record is

A Polish register office keeps birth records for 100 years and marriage and death records for 80 years, counted from the end of the year in which the record was made. Within two years after that it hands them over to the state archive. If the person is still alive, the record stays at the office until the death is registered.

A birth from 1940 is therefore still at a register office. A birth from 1890 is in a state archive or in a parish register. Many of those registers have been scanned.

Who may order a copy

• the person the record is about
• the spouse
• descendants: children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren
• ascendants: parents, grandparents, great-grandparents
• siblings
• a legal representative or guardian
• anyone else only with a legal interest shown in documents, for example a request from a court

A grandchild living in the USA may order the birth record of a grandfather born in Poland. A cousin is not on the list, so a cousin applies with a power of attorney from someone who is.

Where to send the request

Any register office in Poland (Urząd Stanu Cywilnego, USC) accepts the request, not only the office in the town where the birth, marriage or death took place.

Polish consulates no longer order copies for you. The Polish consulate in the USA writes on its page that consular offices are not authorized to obtain copies of civil status records from register offices in Poland. You write to the register office yourself. You can ask it to send the copy to your consulate, which hands it to you for a consular fee.

The online form on gov.pl needs a Polish trusted profile (profil zaufany) or a Polish electronic ID card. Without them you apply by post. The consulate in the USA also warns that an electronic copy may not be recognised outside Poland.

Registers from the former eastern lands of Poland are a separate case. The Warsaw register office keeps registers from the lands that belonged to Poland until 1945 and were then taken into the Soviet Union, among them the former Białystok, Lwów, Stanisławów, Wołyń, Tarnopol, Polesie and Nowogródek voivodeships. They were handed over in 1949. The office notes that the set it received was far from complete.

What to put in a postal request

• the type of copy: short (odpis skrócony), full (odpis zupełny) or multilingual short copy (wielojęzyczny odpis skrócony)
• the full name of the person, the date of the event and the place
• for a marriage, also the name of the spouse
• how you are related to the person
• proof that you paid the fee and the address for delivery
• if you know them, the office that made the record and the record number, which help the clerk find it faster

The full copy repeats the whole record as it was written, with every later note. The short copy shows only what the record says today. The multilingual short copy is issued on paper only. Ask your lawyer or the office handling your case which type it needs.

Fees and waiting time

• 22 zł for a short copy, the same for a multilingual short copy on paper
• 33 zł for a full copy
• 17 zł more for a power of attorney when someone applies for you
• you pay by bank transfer to the account of the office you write to and add the proof to the request
• 7 days when the record is already in the electronic central register, 7 working days when it is a paper record at the office you wrote to, 10 working days when it is at another office

Records made on paper before 1 March 2015 have to be moved into the electronic register first, so they can take longer.

Why a request can come back empty

Register offices do not search. The Warsaw office says so on its own page: the applicant has to give the date and place of the event, the parish and the personal details of the people in the record.

Families abroad often know only a village name in an old spelling, a year that is off by a few years or a surname written the English way. With that the clerk has nothing to search by. If the office refuses, you receive an administrative decision and have 14 days to appeal to the voivode.

Records older than 100 years

Older registers are in the state archives or still with the parish. Many of them are scanned and free to view online, for example on Szukaj w Archiwach (the Polish State Archives) and epaveldas (the Lithuanian archives). They are written in Latin, Polish, Russian or German, mostly by hand.

Once you know the register, the year and the record number, you can ask the archive that holds the register for a certified copy.

Sources

• gov.pl, Uzyskaj odpis aktu stanu cywilnego (urodzenia, małżeństwa, zgonu), Ministry of the Interior and Administration, updated 29 April 2026
• Civil Status Records Act of 28 November 2014 (Prawo o aktach stanu cywilnego), article 28, consolidated text Dz.U. 2026 item 393
• gov.pl, Polish consulates in the USA: Obtaining copies of civil status records and certificates of civil status from civil registry offices in Poland
• Warsaw city knowledge base, Księgi aktów stanu cywilnego znajdujące się w USC m.st. Warszawy, księgi zabużańskie, updated 27 November 2024