Apostille vs. Embassy legalisation for Romania
A birth certificate, degree or company record leaving Derby for Romania needs one certificate, not two. Romania belongs to the group of countries that accepts a plain apostille outright, so the paperwork stops at the UK stage and never reaches an embassy desk, and no second office is ever waiting to pick the file up afterwards.
Where some destinations expect a second stamp from their own diplomatic mission, Romania does not. A registrar in Bucharest, Cluj or any other Romanian city checks the apostille against a shared list and files the document straight away, with no consular queue and no second fee sitting between the applicant and the finished paper, and no separate appointment to book anywhere along the way.
Romania's Hague status & what it means
Britain has issued this kind of certificate since 1965. Romania signed up to the same Convention in 2001, so a paper crossing this corridor is read under one shared set of rules on both ends, decades of practice behind each side and neither government needing to double-check the other's process before a document is filed or a certificate accepted.
That shared membership is why nothing beyond the FCDO's own check is required here. Once the office has matched the signature and fixed its mark, the certification is finished — a Romanian office has no further ground to ask for a second stamp, a translation of the certificate itself, or any repeat check on the same document, however unfamiliar the paper looks to the clerk handling it.
The Derby → Romania route step by step
Start with the paper itself. Derby Register Office at Riverside Chambers, Full Street, Derby DE1 3AF prints fresh certified copies of birth, marriage and death entries, which is the safer starting point for a civil record than sending the family's own copy through the post and risking it on a return journey.
That copy, or an academic or company paper that needs no register-office step at all, then goes to the FCDO Legalisation Office in Milton Keynes by post. The same office handles every UK apostille regardless of destination, so there is no Romania-specific queue or separate desk to find, and no extra form to fill in because of where the paper is heading.
Cost & timing for this route
£45 buys the standard postal service per document. Registered businesses can instead use a next-day lane for £40 per document — cheaper and faster, but restricted to businesses rather than open to a private applicant sending a single family paper, whatever the paper's eventual use in Romania turns out to be.
Plan for up to 25 working days plus postage each way under the standard service; that is the real figure to build a deadline around, since the next-day option is not available outside a registered business account. A Derby applicant sending a document legalisation for Romania request through the household post should count on roughly a month, not a week, and should post early rather than close to a fixed date, since the postal leg alone can take several days each way.
Destination-specific requirements for Romania
Most papers on this route are family certificates for a Romanian marriage or residence file, transcripts for a university place, or a trading document for a company registrar. All three travel the identical process described above, with the destination changing nothing about the UK-side steps, only where the finished paper is posted on to afterwards.
For what you need for an apostille for Romania, the short list is: the original or a fresh certified copy, unmarked and undamaged, sent to the FCDO. Nothing about a Romanian court or registry changes that list — the destination only decides where the finished, apostilled paper goes next, not what the FCDO does with it beforehand.