Apostilling a Last Will and Testament from Reading
A will is a private paper the person who made it writes and signs, often with a solicitor's help. No government office prints one, unlike a birth or marriage certificate, so there is no counter anywhere that hands out a fresh copy on request. That single fact shapes the whole route: whoever holds the will has to arrange its certification before an apostille can go anywhere near it.
This page covers only the certification and apostille mechanics, not what a will means in law or what an executor must do with one. Those questions sit with a solicitor, not with a stamping office, and nothing here is written to answer them. What follows is simply the paper trail: how a copy gets made, who signs off on it, and which office fixes the stamp once that copy exists.
Issuing body & pre-requisites for a Last Will and Testament
Reading Register Office, at Civic Offices, Bridge Street, Reading RG1 2LU, certifies civil records such as births, marriages and deaths. A will falls outside that list entirely, so it has no role in this process at all. Before an apostille can be fixed, the will needs certifying as a true copy, commonly done by a solicitor or a notary rather than any government desk.
Once that certified copy exists, The Legalisation Office, part of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, is the body that fixes the apostille to it. This is how to apostille a Last Will and Testament wherever in the country the will was written, because that office works from a single postal address in Milton Keynes and covers every case the same way.
Cost & turnaround
The apostille cost for a Last Will and Testament in Reading, and everywhere else, is £45 per document through the standard postal route. A registered business handling paperwork on someone's behalf can use a next-day service instead, priced at £40 per document, a route not open to a personal one-off order.
Standard turnaround runs up to 25 working days, plus the post each way, on top of whatever time the certification step itself takes. Start the certified-copy step early, since the apostille stage cannot begin until that copy is already in hand. A registered business filing several documents at once still pays per document, so the total scales with how many papers go in the same batch.
Keeping the original safe
A signed will is often the only copy that carries the maker's own signature, so it goes nowhere near the post. The certified copy stands in for it at every stage: it is what a solicitor or notary produces, what travels to Milton Keynes, and what the apostille is fixed to.
This arrangement means the original stays wherever it is normally kept, safe from anything that could go wrong in transit. If a certified copy is ever lost after the apostille is fixed, a fresh one can usually be produced from the original without disturbing it a second time. Whoever holds the original should keep it somewhere secure and dry, exactly as before, since none of this process ever asks for that paper to move.
Translation & acceptance notes
Whether the receiving country wants the will translated is not covered here, since it depends entirely on that country's own rules for foreign paperwork. Where translation is asked for, it normally happens after the apostille is fixed, so the stamp itself is left untouched by that later step. Some receiving desks read English directly and skip a translation, particularly where the request is for an English-speaking court or office.
Legalisation of a Last Will and Testament in Reading is, put plainly, two separate jobs run in order: certification of a true copy, then the national stamp. To apostille a Last Will and Testament in United Kingdom for use abroad, keep the certified copy and its apostille together as one set once both are back.