What the UK part costs, and what it does not cover
Sending a document by standard post to the Legalisation Office costs £45 per paper, while a registered business paying for the faster next working day service is charged £40 per paper instead; that quicker option stays closed to a private applicant working entirely alone on a single certificate.
Turnaround for that part of an apostille from United Kingdom to Haiti runs up to 25 working days, and that figure already folds in the office's own checks rather than counting only the days a letter spends travelling through the post each way.
None of that fee or timescale reaches into what happens once the paper leaves the Legalisation Office behind. Haiti's own mission in the UK sets a wholly separate charge and a wholly separate pace for finishing its half of the work.
A family sending three certificates together still pays that UK fee three separate times, once per document rather than once per envelope, so counting the papers carefully before sealing anything up avoids a stalled parcel further down the line for everyone involved.
Getting a Stoke-on-Trent paper through both checks
A civil record such as a birth or marriage certificate can begin as a fresh certified copy from Stoke-on-Trent Register Office, Civic Centre, Glebe Street, keeping the true original safely at home rather than sending it anywhere at all by post.
Anything else — a degree certificate, a company letter, a power of attorney — travels forward exactly as it was originally signed, without a local stop first, straight to the single office that carries out the UK's part of the whole process from here.
That office checks the signature and adds its own stamp before posting the whole bundle back to the sender rather than forwarding it on anywhere else, so you keep hold of the paper yourself between the two separate stages of the wider process.
An apostille issued in Stoke-on-Trent for use in Haiti is not, by itself, the finished article at that point; a further check by Haiti's own mission in London still has to happen before the paper is genuinely done and ready to travel further.
Only once that second check is complete does the certificate count as ready. It can then be sent on to Haiti and handed over there for whatever purpose it was originally needed for by the person carrying it in the end.
A photocopy of the paper before it leaves your hands costs nothing and is worth keeping regardless, since either office along the way may raise a question later about exactly what was originally sent for legalisation abroad in the first place.
Why Haiti asks for more than the UK stamp
Document legalisation for Haiti covers both parts of the route described above, not just the first one; a search for an apostille for Haiti alone leads to only half the answer, which trips up plenty of first-time applicants each year.
Documents travel this longer route for a Haitian marriage that needs recognising abroad, a family record tied to an immigration case, or paperwork behind a property or business matter of some kind, and every one of those needs the second check finished too.
What you need for an apostille for Haiti is, in practice, patience for two separate offices rather than one: the UK side handles the signature and the stamp, and a wholly different mission in London finishes the rest of the job afterwards, in its own time.
Because that second office sits outside anything the UK side controls, its own fee and its own pace are the only real unknowns in the whole route — everything on the UK side is fixed, published, and can be planned around confidently well ahead of any deadline that matters.