The Texas Secretary of State Changes To A New Universal Apostille Certificate System
October 7, 2023 
The Texas Secretary of State, as of October 1st, 2023, has changed to a new universal apostille certificate system.
See the official press release from them here: https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/TXSOS/bulletins/36fbde0
What that means to you and your company is that you will no longer receive different certifications for Hague Convention country members (apostille certificates) and non-Hague member countries (authentication certificates).
You will now only receive this new Texas universal apostille certificate for every country in the world, regardless of whether the country is a member or non-member of the 1961 Hague Convention.
The Texas Secretary of State will issue, print, and staple a universal apostille certificate (an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper) to the legal document presented to them.
Then the state will place a red stamp in the bottom right-hand corner for all authentication unit documents or in the bottom middle of the document for the corporations section unit, which will purposely show half the stamp on the apostille certificate and the other half of the stamp placed on your document.
Then the Texas Secretary of State employee who issued the Texas apostille certificate from the authentication unit will sign their initials next to the stamp. For all corporation section unit documents, there will be no initials placed on the document.
If the document presented to them is a non-recordable document (documents that DO require notarizations), they will staple the universal apostille certificate onto the specific page where the notarization was placed on your document by a Texas notary public.
If the document presented to them is a recordable document (documents that DON’T require notarizations), they will staple the universal apostille certificate onto the specific page where the city, county, or state registrar, county clerk, district clerk, or deputy clerk signed their name on your legal document.
These two examples below are what the pre-10/1/23 Texas apostille certificates and Texas authentication certificates looked like, which have been terminated and replaced by the new Texas universal apostille certificate system.
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