What Archives Charge to Copy a Record, and Why One Bills You for Finding Nothing

You have a shelf mark. You know the record exists, you know which series it is in, and you are four thousand miles from the reading room. The last step is the simple one: get a copy.

Then you open the fee page and the number does not make sense. The archive that holds a two-hundred-page pension file wants eighty dollars for it. The archive that holds a will wants two pounds fifty. One of them will charge you thirty-nine pounds just to go and look, and keep the money if the answer is no.

Every figure in this article was read off the institution's own published page in September 2026, and each table says so again underneath it. Fee schedules change without notice, so treat all of them as a snapshot rather than a quote, and confirm on the archive's own site before you send money.

These are not arbitrary. Each one is set by a different mechanism, and the mechanism tells you which requests are cheap and which are ruinous long before you send the form. Almost nobody publishes them together, so a researcher working across two countries has no way to see that the same request costs twenty times more on one side of an ocean than the other.

This article is about getting the document. What it costs afterwards to have a page of eighteenth-century handwriting turned into text you can read is a separate bill with a separate logic, and we covered that one in what it actually costs to get an old record read. The two are frequently confused, and for a hard document the reading is often the smaller number.

The short answer. Access pricing splits into four models, and knowing which one you are dealing with is worth more than knowing any individual price. Per-image archives charge pennies and are nearly always the cheapest route: ScotlandsPeople sells most records for six credits, £1.50, and a will for £2.50. Fixed-fee-per-file archives charge one price regardless of length: NARA's full Civil War pension file is $80 for up to a hundred pages. Cost-recovery archives charge for staff time and charge it whether or not the record turns out to exist: The National Archives at Kew charges £38.95 per fifteen minutes of searching, non-refundable. And free archives, which now include some of the largest national collections in Europe, charge nothing at all. The expensive mistake is using a cost-recovery service for something a free or per-image archive already holds.

The fee you should fear is the one for looking

Start with the charge that catches out the most people, because it is the only one you can pay and receive nothing for.

The National Archives at Kew is explicit that as a government department it is obliged to charge for some public services, and that the prices are set by statutory instrument. The current schedule sits in the Fees Regulations made under the Public Records Act 1958, and the archive says the figures are based on recovering the cost of providing the service. That is why they look like accountancy rather than retail.

The headline items, as published on the archive's own fees page:

Fees as published by The National Archives on its own fees page and observed in September 2026.

The Search fee is the one to understand properly. The archive defines it as the cost of confirming whether a record or piece of information is held, identifying where it is, and retrieving it. Then it says the thing that should change how you order: because the cost is attached to the time taken, the Search fee is non-refundable in the event that the record is not held. It also does not include copying, which is billed separately on top.

So a speculative enquiry to Kew is a purchase, not a question. Thirty-nine pounds buys fifteen minutes of a person's attention and no promise of a document. The archive does list narrow circumstances in which it will refund: if the fee was charged twice by mistake, or if the archive itself gave you incorrect information before you paid. Being wrong about what exists is your risk, not theirs.

How to use this rather than resent it. A non-refundable search fee makes catalogue work enormously valuable. Every hour you spend in Discovery narrowing a request from "is there anything about this man" to a specific piece reference is an hour that converts a Search fee into a Page Check and a copying charge. And the Page Check, at £9.92, is the cheap insurance: it counts the pages and gives you a costed quotation, so you find out what the copying will come to before you commit to it. Paying ten pounds to avoid an open-ended copying bill on a file you have not seen is usually the right trade.

There is a second use for the Search fee's refund policy, and it is one this blog cares about disproportionately. If you pay it and the record is not held, you have bought a formal statement from a national archive that a specific record is not in a specific series. That is expensive but genuine negative evidence, and it is worth writing down properly rather than letting the disappointment bury it.

Per-image pricing is the cheapest thing in genealogy

Against forty pounds for a search, look at what a per-image archive charges for a finished document.

ScotlandsPeople runs on credits, and publishes the conversion: one credit is worth 25p. Its own charges page then prices records in credits:

Credit values and record prices as published by ScotlandsPeople on its own charges page and observed in September 2026.

High-quality downloads from the separate Image Library cost £15 and are paid by card rather than credits.

Two pounds fifty for a will. That is the same document class that, in England, sends you to a court whose registered copies are spread across two national series and two hundred former church courts, and whose modern successor charges differently again. The Scottish figure is not a discount for Scots. It is what an image costs when an archive has already digitised the series and is pricing delivery rather than labour.

The 50p line for Virtual Volumes downloads is worth flagging separately, because it is the one that makes kirk session research affordable. Browsing those volumes online is free; you pay two credits only when you want to keep a page. For anyone working through kirk session minutes looking for a named father, where the method is to read forward through months of unindexed minutes, that split between free browsing and paid saving is the difference between a feasible project and an impossible one.

Fixed-fee pricing rewards long files and punishes short ones

The United States runs a third model, and it inverts the incentives of both the others.

The National Archives and Records Administration publishes a reproduction fee schedule, set out in regulation at 36 CFR Part 1258. Two structural features matter more than any individual number.

There is a floor. The minimum reproduction order is $20.00, described as covering twenty-five pages or fewer at the $0.80 rate. You cannot order one page for eighty cents. The smallest possible order is twenty dollars, so a single-document request from NARA costs the same as a twenty-five-page one.

Genealogical records are sold as fixed-fee packages. NARA's NATF order forms each carry a flat price that supersedes the per-copy rate, which means the cost of a file has almost nothing to do with its size:

Fees as published by NARA and observed in September 2026, on a page NARA itself heads "as of April 20, 2018". See the caveat below.

Work an example, because this is where the model bites. A Civil War pension file of 187 pages costs $80 for the first hundred and $0.70 for each of the other eighty-seven, which is $60.90, for a total of $140.90. The same researcher who orders the Pension Documents Packet instead pays $30 flat.

That gap is exactly the decision covered in which pages of a pension file actually matter. The packet is a pre-selected subset. The full file is everything. Whether $110.90 of difference is worth it depends entirely on whether the evidence you need is in the eight or so pages that carry the genealogy, or in the correspondence and medical affidavits around them, and that is a question to answer before you order rather than after.

One honest caveat about these figures. NARA's own fee page is headed "as of April 20, 2018." We have not found a more recent published schedule, and the regulation it points to is the authority rather than the page. Treat the numbers above as the last published position rather than as a guaranteed current quote, and confirm before you send money. Seven years is a long time for a fee page to stand still, and the possibility that the page is simply stale is at least as likely as the possibility that nothing has changed.

Civil registration is priced as a certificate, not as an image

The fourth pattern is the one people meet first and generalise from wrongly.

Modern civil registration in England and Wales is not sold as an archival copy at all. It is sold as a certificate, which is a legal instrument, and it is priced accordingly. The government's own ordering service lists a certificate at £12.50, sent four days after you apply. If you do not have a GRO index reference number, you pay £3.50 extra for each search and wait fifteen working days. A priority service costs £38.50 and goes out the next working day if you order by 4pm. Those are the figures published on the government's own ordering service and observed in September 2026.

Note what that does to the arithmetic of a family reconstruction. Thirty birth certificates at £12.50 is £375, before any search fees, for a set of documents that in Scotland would cost £45 as images. The difference is not the quality of the record. It is that one country sells you a scan and the other sells you a certified statement.

The lesson generalises: check whether an image route exists before you buy a certificate. For older events in England and Wales the image is often on a commercial site or in a parish register, and the certificate adds legal weight you do not need for research purposes.

Free is now a serious option, and it is where the archive guides on this site point

The most important development in access pricing over the last decade is that several national archives stopped charging.

Italy's Portale Antenati, run by the Directorate-General for Archives at the Ministry of Culture, publishes digitised civil registration images free to consult, which is what makes the marriage packets behind an Italian marriage act reachable at all from outside Italy. Poland's Szukaj w Archiwach, covered in our Polish State Archives guide, is free. Ukrainian Wikisource's scanning project and the Estonian and Latvian portals described in our guide to Russian Empire revision lists are free, some with registration.

Kew is in this section too, which surprises people who have just read its fee schedule. The archive publishes some of its material as digital microfilm that is free to download, including the Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills proved at Oxford during the Civil War, in PROB 10/639 to PROB 10/642, which you can take straight off the catalogue at no charge. It also gives away a small set of specimen wills, Jane Austen's among them, annotated to show the parts of a will. The same institution charging £38.95 a quarter hour to look something up is handing you a curated set of documents for nothing, because a partner paid to digitise one series and not another.

That is the pattern, and the ranking that follows from it is ours rather than an institutional position, so treat it as our judgement: for a researcher choosing where to spend, the order to try is free national portal, then commercial subscription site, then per-image national archive, then fixed-fee package, and only then a cost-recovery search. Each step up that ladder roughly multiplies what you pay for the same page.

What we could not price, and will not guess at

Three gaps, stated rather than papered over.

We did not find a published per-download price for individual records on The National Archives' Discovery catalogue, which the archive describes only as "charges apply" on the relevant guide pages. We did not verify current subscription pricing for the commercial sites, because it moves constantly and is regionally variable in ways a table would misrepresent within a month. And we did not attempt a figure for archives that supply copies on request without a published schedule, such as the Belarusian state archives, which quote per page on enquiry. A number we cannot point at a source for does not go in the table, which is the same rule that governs every other figure on this site.

Everything above was published by the institution named and read in September 2026. Fee schedules move without announcement, and the NARA page, still headed with a 2018 date, is a standing reminder that they do not always move when you expect. If you are reading this long after September 2026, use the tables to understand which pricing model you are dealing with and check the current number yourself.

What KleioBase costs by comparison, and what it does not do

Disclosure, since we sell a tool.

KleioBase does not sell archive access and holds none of these images. So the useful question is not whether we are cheaper than Kew. It is what happens to the money you have already given Kew.

Every fee in this article is non-refundable and per-document, and it buys you a file on a hard drive. Nothing about paying it once stops you paying it again. The expensive failure in genealogy is almost never the £38.95. It is the £38.95 paid twice, eighteen months apart, because nobody wrote down that the record was not there. It is the pension file ordered a second time because the first copy is in a folder called "scans2" and you cannot remember which ancestor it belonged to. The thirty birth certificates costed earlier in this article come to £375 on their own, before a single pension file or will. What decides whether that was money well spent is not the price per certificate. It is whether you can still find and connect them in three years.

That is the half we charge for. KleioBase is a research companion that turns a folder of purchased scans into one connected archive: it reads the handwriting, links every person named to everyone already in your knowledge base, and answers questions across the whole collection with citations back to the exact record behind each claim. Put against the numbers above, it is the only line on this page that makes the other lines cheaper.

Two of its features do that directly, and both are on the free plan.

Recording negative evidence stops you buying the same nothing twice. A non-refundable Search fee that comes back empty has still bought you a formal statement that a record is not in a series. Written down with the series, the span and the date, that is a result you never have to purchase again. At £38.95 a go, and with no refund when the answer is no, the second search is the single most avoidable cost in this article.

A searchable archive stops you buying the same something twice. A pension file you already own but cannot locate costs $80 to re-order, which is over five months of Researcher. Records in KleioBase are attached to the people they name and searchable by name, place and date, so the question "do I already have this" has an answer.

For transparency, since this is an article about prices, the monthly allowance is counted in credits rather than uploads, because adding an image is always free and a credit is only spent when a record is actually processed. Processing a page costs one credit, or five for a deep scan.

Credits can be topped up separately, at $5 for fifty, $12 for a hundred and fifty, or $35 for five hundred.

Now the honest limits. Three of them, because a page about prices is the wrong place to be vague about what you get.

We cannot order anything for you. There is no integration with Kew, NARA, ScotlandsPeople or the GRO, and no way to pay an archive fee through us. You still do the ordering.

Processing a page is a second cost on top of the archive's. A page you paid £1.52 to obtain costs one more credit to read. If your documents are already transcribed and already organised, you are paying for something you have done, and you should not bother.

Nothing tracks what you spent. There is no budget field, no receipts ledger and no per-record cost, so the running total in this article is a spreadsheet you keep yourself. We would like to fix that one.

Full plan details are on the pricing page.

Where to start before your next order

Take the next record you intend to buy and ask three questions in order.

Is it free somewhere? Check the relevant national portal before any commercial or cost-recovery route, because the free versions of large European collections are now good enough that the paid copy is frequently the same scan. If it is not free, is it sold per image or per file? Per-image is nearly always the cheaper route for a single document, and per-file only wins when the file is long. And if the only route is a cost-recovery search, spend the time to get a piece reference first, because a Search fee is the one charge in genealogy that can buy you nothing at all.

A fee schedule reads like an obstacle, but it is mostly an accident of when each archive digitised and who paid for it. The institutions charging the most per page are usually the ones that never got a partner to fund a mass scanning programme, and are still moving physical paper for you by hand. The two pound fifty will and the thirty-nine pound search are not measuring the value of the document. They are measuring which decade the archive's funding arrived in.