How Much Can a Notary Charge in New York State? Fee Limits Explained

Fees are where New York notaries get nervous. We all know the answer in the abstract – “two dollars” – but the statute is deceptively short and the real-world questions it raises are anything but simple. How much can I charge when three people are signing the same document? Can I add a travel charge? Is the $2 for the whole transaction or for each signature? And if I am notarizing remotely under the RON program, does the same two-dollar rule even apply?

As a New York State Remote Online Notary, these are questions I hear constantly – from fellow notaries, from the public we serve, and from attorneys who assume we know things we were never trained on. The good news is that New York’s fee law is one of the simplest in the country, and it lives in a single short section of the Executive Law. The not-so-obvious good news is that the small print – what is per person, what is per act, what counts as a separate charge, and how Remote Online Notarization changes the math – is where most disputes actually start.

This post walks through the fee structure in New York from the notary’s point of view: what the statute actually authorizes, where the limits are, what you may charge on top of the statutory fee (and what you may not), and how to present those charges so you avoid a complaint later. Whether you notarize across the counter in a town office or conduct a fully remote session from your home office, the same core rules apply, with one big exception for RON that I will flag clearly.

A note on scope: New York’s notarial fee law has not changed in a long time. The dollar amounts below reflect the statute as currently in force and the Secretary of State’s implementing regulation for remote acts. I have double-checked these against the most recent official sources, but the statute is a moving target, so always confirm against the current text before you set a price you will hold a client to.

Disclaimer: The information in this post is for general educational purposes and reflects New York fee law as currently in force; it is not a substitute for reading the statute or the Secretary of State’s regulations in their entirety, nor is it legal or fee-specific advice for your practice. New York notarial fees are set by statute and regulation and can change, so always verify the current text before relying on a specific figure.

The Short Answer: The Core Numbers

Before we untangle the details, here is the quick reference, because this is the part every notary should have memorized:

For administering an oath or affirmation, and certifying the same when required: $2.00 per act.
For taking and certifying the acknowledgment or proof of execution of a written instrument, by one person: $2.00. By each additional person: $2.00. For swearing each witness: $2.00.
For electronic notarial services under the Remote Online Notary program (Section 135-c): a fee set by regulation by the Secretary of State, currently $25.00 per remote act.

Everything else in this post is an explanation of what those three lines actually mean in practice, and where your discretion starts and ends.

Where the Fees Come From

The controlling authority for in-person notarial fees is Section 136 of the New York Executive Law (Executive Law, Article 6, Section 136, “Notarial fees”). It is remarkably brief – three numbered paragraphs – and it reads, in substance, like this:

Paragraph 1: For administering an oath or affirmation, and certifying the same when required, except where another fee is specifically prescribed by statute, two dollars.
Paragraph 2: For taking and certifying the acknowledgment or proof of execution of a written instrument, by one person, two dollars, and by each additional person, two dollars; for swearing each witness thereto, two dollars.
Paragraph 3: For electronic notarial services, established in Section 135-c, a fee set through regulation by the Secretary of State.

Three things jump out immediately. First, the statute says “shall be entitled to the following fees.” The word “entitled” matters: these are ceilings, not floors. You may charge up to two dollars, or a dollar, or nothing at all. The maximum protects the public; the absence of a minimum protects you from being forced into a loss-leading practice. Second, the fees are organized by type of notarial act (oath, acknowledgment, proof of execution, electronic act), not by the value of the document. A deed and a simple affidavit carry the same statutory fee. Third, and this is the one that trips people up, the acknowledgment fee is keyed to people and witnesses, not to documents.

These Are Maximums, Not Minimums

Readers sometimes assume the two dollars is a fixed price. It is not. Section 136 sets the maximum a notary may charge for a given act. You are free to charge less, and many of us do – some notaries waive the fee entirely for walk-in public acts, others charge the full two dollars for a jurat that requires the signer to actually be present and read aloud, and still others price somewhere in between. What you cannot do, for an in-person act, is charge more than the statutory maximum unless you have a separate, disclosed basis (which we will cover in a moment).

This asymmetry is worth internalizing: the statute protects the public by capping you, and protects you by giving you the discretion to charge less. If you bill a client a “notary fee” above the statutory maximum and cannot justify the difference, you are in overcharge territory.

The Big Misconception: Per Person, Not Per Document

Here is the most tested and most misunderstood fee rule in New York, and it lives entirely in Paragraph 2 of Section 136.

The acknowledgment fee is “by one person, two dollars, and by each additional person, two dollars.” That means the fee is attached to the person who is acknowledging, not to the document being acknowledged. This has two consequences that are worth working through, because they answer the questions clients ask most often.

Scenario one: a single document, multiple signers. Suppose a document – say a lease with two landlords and a guarantor – requires three people to execute acknowledgment certificates. You are not charging three times one document. You are charging two dollars for the first person to acknowledge, plus two dollars for each additional person. So a three-person acknowledgment of one instrument is up to $6.00 total under the statute, not $2.00, and certainly not “$2 per document” times however many pages.

Scenario two: one person, multiple documents. This is the flip side, and it is the one that surprises people. The statute keys the fee to the person and the act, not to the number of documents. In practice, if one person is taking an acknowledgment of a single instrument, that is one act for that person, and the fee is two dollars. Where clients trip us up is when they believe that signing five separate pages means five separate two-dollar fees. The cleanest way to think about it, and the way the Department of State has framed it, is that the fee follows the notarial act per person. If one person is acknowledging one instrument, you charge one two-dollar act. If a session involves multiple distinct notarial acts for the same person (for example, an acknowledgment on one instrument and an oath on a different one), each act carries its own two-dollar maximum.

The practical takeaway for us as notaries: count the acts and the people, not the pages or the dollar value of the transaction. A low-value affidavit and a high-value deed can cost exactly the same statutory fee, which is one reason clients sometimes feel they are “overpaying” on a small document – they are not; that is simply how New York prices notarial acts.

Swearing Witnesses: The Second Two-Dollar Line

Paragraph 2 also covers “swearing each witness thereto” at two dollars apiece. This is relevant chiefly when you are taking a proof of execution or a proof of execution under certain statutes where witnesses to the instrument must be sworn. If a proof of execution requires one or more witnesses to be sworn before you, each such witness carries a two-dollar charge. This is a smaller, often-missed line item, but it is still within the statutory ceiling, and it is why a proof of execution can legally cost more than a plain acknowledgment.

Oaths, Affirmations, and Jurats

Paragraph 1 of Section 136 covers administering an oath or affirmation “and certifying the same when required.” This is the jurat bucket. When a signer swears or affirms that a document is executed “to be true and correct” (the language of an oath) or affirms it “to be true and correct to the best of my knowledge” (the affirmation variant, commonly used by those who object to a religious oath), you are administering an oath or affirmation, and the statutory maximum is two dollars per act.

A subtle point here that matters for RON: the oath/affirmation fee and the acknowledgment fee are two separate statutory line items. If a document requires both – for example, a jurat on one signature block and an acknowledgment on another within the same document – you are looking at two distinct acts, each carrying its own two-dollar maximum. This is where a single signing appointment can legitimately total more than two dollars without any “extra” charge being involved.

Protests of Notes and Commercial Paper

For completeness, New York has a legacy fee for protesting a note or other commercial paper, historically $0.75, plus $0.10 for each additional notice of protest up to a maximum of five notices. In modern practice, most notaries rarely take a protest, because commercial-paper protests are far more common in financial and shipping contexts than in everyday document work. But if you are a notary who handles promissory notes, bills of exchange, or instruments of that kind, this is the fee line to know – it is the one place where a single notarial act can involve multiple small charges rather than a flat two dollars.

The Remote Online Notary Exception: The $25 Act

This is where our world – the RON world – breaks away from the in-person statute, and it is the single most important fee rule for any New York notary who works remotely.

Section 135-c of the Executive Law creates the Remote Online Notary program, and Section 136, Paragraph 3 defers the fee for electronic notarial services to a regulation by the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State set that fee in the implementing regulation (9 NYCRR, Part 424) at $25.00 per electronic notarial act.

Two features of the $25 fee deserve emphasis:

First, it is an all-inclusive cap. The $25 is intended to cover the notarial act, the audio-video technology, the identification methods, and the associated processing for that single remote act. It is not “$25 plus whatever your technology platform costs you.” If you use a RON platform, a document storage service, a knowledge-based authentication service, or an identity-proofing vendor, those are your operating costs, and the $25 is the amount the statute and regulation allow you to charge the principal for the remote act itself.

Second, it is per electronic act. If a client needs a remote acknowledgment, that is one $25 act. If the same client needs two separate electronic notarial acts in one session (for example, two documents each requiring its own remote acknowledgment), that is two acts, and each carries its own $25 maximum. The “per act” language works the same way here as the “per person, per act” language does for in-person work – it follows the act, not the transaction.

A note on who pays what: because the $25 cap is set by regulation and is all-inclusive, transparency matters even more for remote work. Your client is paying for a regulated act, not an open-ended service. If you are adding a travel-equivalent “service fee” on top of the $25 for a remote session, you are in the same gray zone we will discuss next, and you want to have it disclosed and agreed to in advance.

What You May Charge Beyond the Statutory Fee

This is the section most notaries are least confident about, so I will be precise about the distinction that matters.

The statutory fee (the two-dollar in-person fee, or the $25 RON fee) is the fee for the notarial act itself. New York does not, in Section 136, have a general “travel” or “service” fee line the way some other states do. That creates a gap, and the gap is where the “service charge” question lives.

The working rule is this: the statutory fee covers the act. Anything that is genuinely separate from the act – your time traveling to a client’s location for an in-person appointment, a courier service that delivers a document, a convenience fee for after-hours or home-visit service – is not, strictly speaking, the notarial fee. It is a service charge, and New York practice generally permits a notary to charge for a bona fide service, so long as the notarial fee itself does not exceed the statutory maximum and the service charge is disclosed and agreed to in advance.

The danger zone is blending the two. If you charge a client “$40 for the notary” and that $40 is really “$2 notarial fee plus $38 travel and waiting time,” the safest practice is to separate them on the invoice or the engagement: “Notarial act (acknowledgment): $2.00. Travel/convenience service: $38.00.” That way, if the $2 notarial fee is challenged, it is clearly within the statute, and the $38 is clearly a disclosed service.

There are a few guardrails to keep in mind:

Disclose and agree in advance. The service charge should be disclosed before or at the start of the engagement, not invented at the end. A verbal agreement is defensible; a surprise is not.
Keep it reasonable. A “convenience fee” that dwarfs the notarial fee, with no real service behind it, invites a claim that you were effectively overcharging the notarial act.
For RON, be careful. Because the $25 RON fee is an all-inclusive cap on the remote act, any additional service charge on top of it is extra-regulatory, and you want it to be clearly a separate, disclosed service (for example, a scheduling or document-preparation fee) rather than a disguised portion of the $25.
Some notaries choose not to charge a service fee at all, particularly in a RON context where the $25 is already a healthy fee for the work involved. That is a defensible choice, not a weakness.

The cleanest test is always the same: if you removed the statutory notarial fee from the line item, what is left? If what is left is a real, disclosed, agreed-to service, you are in good shape. If what is left is just padding, you have a problem.

Common Fee Mistakes to Avoid

A few patterns come up over and over, and each one is avoidable:

Charging “$2 per document” when the statute charges “$2 per person per act.” This is the most common in-person error and it under-collects on multi-signer documents and over-collects on single-person, multi-page documents.
Treating the two dollars as a fixed price rather than a ceiling. If you bill more than $2 for an in-person act and cannot point to a separate, disclosed service charge, you have overcharged the notarial fee.
Bundling an undisclosed service into the notarial fee. This is how a $2 fee quietly becomes a $40 fee, and how complaints get filed.
Applying the in-person $2 mental model to a remote act. A remote act is a $25 regulated act, not a $2 one. Undercharging by $23 is a loss; confusing the two creates inconsistency.
Forgetting the “additional person” and “each witness” lines. A multi-person acknowledgment, or a proof of execution that requires sworn witnesses, is legally worth more than $2, and not collecting it is a silent revenue leak.
Not keeping the receipt. The fee is one thing; being able to show what you charged, what the act was, and that the statutory ceiling was respected is another. A clear, itemized record is your best defense against an overcharge complaint.

Practical Examples

Let me put the numbers together the way a client would actually experience them.

Example A: Single signer, one acknowledgment, in person. You charge up to $2.00 for the act. If you also travel to the client’s home, you may add a disclosed travel or convenience fee on top. The notarial fee itself stays at or under $2.

Example B: Three signers on one document, in person, each acknowledging. That is $2 for the first person and $2 for each of the two additional people – up to $6.00 total in notarial fees, before any separate service charge.

Example C: One document, two signers, but one signature is an oath/jurat and the other is an acknowledgment. Two distinct acts. Up to $2 for the oath/affirmation and up to $2 for the acknowledgment, so up to $4.00, plus any disclosed service.

Example D: A remote acknowledgment under RON. One electronic act, up to $25.00, all-inclusive. If the client needs a second remote acknowledgment in the same session, that is a second act at a second $25.

Example E: A proof of execution with two witnesses to be sworn. The proof of execution is a two-dollar act, and each sworn witness adds two dollars – up to $2 for the act plus $2 per witness, so up to $6.00 with two witnesses.

How to Present Fees Professionally

The notary who charges the fewest complaints is usually not the one who charges the least; it is the one who charges clearly. A few habits make a real difference:

State the notarial fee and any service charge separately and in advance. “The notarial fee for the acknowledgment is two dollars; because I am traveling to your location, I am adding a $40 travel fee. Does that work for you?” is a sentence that ends most disputes before they begin.
For RON, state the $25 cap and what it includes. “My remote notarial act is $25, which covers the audio-video session, identity verification, and the electronic record, per the New York Secretary of State’s regulation.”
Itemize on any invoice. Notarial fee, service fee, and any other charge, each on its own line.
Keep your receipts and records. A clean, dated, itemized record is worth more in a fee dispute than any argument you could make.
Be comfortable charging less. Because the two dollars and the $25 are ceilings, charging less is always safe. Charging more is only safe when it is clearly a separate, disclosed service.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much can a New York notary charge for a standard acknowledgment? Up to $2.00 per person, in person, under Section 136 – not per document, not per page. The fee is per person and per act.

How much can a New York Remote Online Notary charge? Up to $25.00 per electronic notarial act, all-inclusive, as set by the Secretary of State’s regulation under Section 135-c and Section 136, Paragraph 3. That $25 covers the act, the audio-video technology, and the identity verification; your platform and storage costs are your operating expenses, not pass-through charges.

Can a New York notary charge for travel? Yes, as a separate, disclosed, agreed-to service or travel charge in addition to the statutory notarial fee. Keep the notarial fee at or under the statutory maximum and disclose the service charge in advance – that is the cleanest way to defend it later.

Can I charge less than the maximum, or more? Less is always safe – the statutory amounts are ceilings, and you may charge any amount up to and including the maximum, or waive the fee entirely. More is safe only when the extra is a separate, disclosed service, not padding on top of the notarial fee.

Closing

New York’s notarial fee law is short, stable, and forgiving in one direction: it caps you, so you are never legally allowed to charge more than the statute permits for the act itself. The art is not in finding the number – the number is always two dollars in person and $25 remote, plus any separately disclosed service – the art is in knowing what a “notarial act” is, counting the acts and the people rather than the documents and the pages, and presenting your charges with enough transparency that nobody can later argue you padded them.

If you take one thing from this, take the distinction that actually drives the practice: the statutory fee protects the public by capping the act, and your discretion to charge less – plus your right to a separate, disclosed service charge – is what makes the business workable. Master that one split, and you will rarely be caught off guard by a fee question, whether it comes across the counter or through a screen.