NY Notary Fee Limits: The $2 Cap, Explained

Someone tells you New York notaries can only charge two dollars, and your first thought is: then why would anyone bother? Maybe you saw a TikTok about notary income and started digging into the commission. Now this one number has you wondering if the whole thing is a waste of time.

Let me settle it. The two-dollar figure is real, and I’ll show you exactly where it comes from and what it covers. Then I’ll show you the number almost every fee page leaves out, the one that raises the ceiling: electronic notarial acts pay twenty-five dollars each.

Quick answer

New York’s notary fee limits cap most acts at $2. That includes oaths, affirmations, acknowledgments, and proofs of execution. Protests are cheaper, capped at 75 cents each plus 10 cents per notice of protest, up to five notices. An electronic notarial act is the outlier at $25, set by regulation instead of the fee statute.

The $2 is a ceiling per act. The exam loves people who read it as a flat rate for the whole document, so hold that distinction. I’ll get to the counting trap below.

Where the $2 cap comes from

The fee schedule lives in New York Executive Law §136. That’s the statute that sets what a notary is allowed to collect for the work.

In plain English, §136 says a notary may charge $2 to administer an oath or affirmation, and $2 to take an acknowledgment or proof of execution. “Except where another fee is specifically prescribed by statute,” it caps the standard act at that two dollars.

Here’s a concrete version. A neighbor asks you to notarize a signature on a single-page affidavit. One signer, one act, so the ceiling is $2, and a notary “may not charge a fee that exceeds the amount authorized by law.”

What the exam asks: it wants the exact number, and it wants to know you understand the cap is a maximum, not a minimum. A notary is “entitled to” the fee, which means you’re allowed to collect it, not required to. That’s why the bank teller who notarized your form last year did it for free, which I’ll come back to.

If you’re still working out how you get commissioned in the first place, start here. This piece assumes you already have the appointment or you’re studying for it.

The full fee list, per act

Most pages stop at “$2” and move on. That leaves out half the schedule the exam can pull from. Here’s the whole thing.

The $2 acts

For an acknowledgment or proof of execution, the fee is $2 for the first person, $2 for each additional person, and $2 for swearing each witness. So the $2 attaches to the act, per person, not to the sheet of paper.

Translation: an acknowledgment is you confirming the person in front of you signed willingly, and a proof of execution is a bit rarer, where a witness swears they saw someone else sign. The counting rule is the same either way. Count the people and the sworn witnesses. Ignore the document count entirely.

Picture it: a married couple signs one deed in front of you, and one witness has to be sworn. That’s two signers at $2 each, plus $2 for the sworn witness, for a lawful maximum of $6. One document, three charges.

On the test, it hands you a scenario with a signer count and maybe a witness, then asks for the maximum lawful fee. If you memorized “$2 per document,” you’ll miss it. Memorize “$2 per person, plus $2 per sworn witness,” and this whole category stops tripping you up.

One trap inside the trap: you may not charge the $2 for administering an oath of office. That act is carved out of the fee schedule, so the correct answer to “how much for an oath of office” is zero.

Protests ($0.75, plus $0.10 per notice, max 5)

The protest fee is the odd one out, and it hides in a different statute. It’s not in §136 at all. It lives in Executive Law §135.

A protest is a formal notice that a negotiable instrument, like a promissory note or a bill of exchange, wasn’t paid or accepted. You’ll almost never handle one anymore, but the exam still asks about them. The fee is a maximum of 75 cents for the protest itself, plus 10 cents for each notice of protest, and you can charge for no more than five notices.

Say you handle one protest with three notices sent: 75 cents plus three times 10 cents, so $1.05.

Here the exam pulls a double move, which is why this is a double trap. It wants the strange fractional numbers (75 cents and 10 cents, cap of five notices), and it wants to see whether you know this fee sits in §135 while everything else sits in §136. So you’re memorizing odd amounts kept in an odd place.

The $25 electronic notarial act

This is the number that changes the math on the whole topic. An electronic notarial act in New York carries a fee of $25.

Why so different? Because §136 doesn’t set this one. The statute delegates the electronic fee “to regulation by the secretary of state.” The actual figure lives in the state’s rules, 19 NYCRR §182.11(g), which says an electronic notary is “entitled to a fee of twenty-five dollars for each electronic notarial act performed.”

Read one phrase carefully: “inclusive of all costs.” Here’s what that means in practice. The $25 is per act, so three electronic acts in a single video session come to $75. But the platform you pay to run the remote session, the vendor fee, comes out of your $25. You can’t add it on top.

Concrete example. A client needs three documents notarized over video in one session. Lawful maximum is $75. If your remote platform charges you a per-session fee, that cost is yours to absorb inside the $75. You can’t add it as a fourth line item.

Expect the exam to test that the electronic fee is $25 and that it applies per act. The RON work has its own rules worth understanding in full, and I break down the $25 e-notary work in detail here.

Here’s the schedule in one place, which is the version worth memorizing:

Act	Maximum fee	Statute or rule
Oath or affirmation	$2	Exec Law §136
Acknowledgment or proof, per person	$2	Exec Law §136
Swearing each witness	$2	Exec Law §136
Oath of office	$0 (carved out)	Exec Law §136
Protest of a note or bill	$0.75	Exec Law §135
Each notice of protest (max 5)	$0.10	Exec Law §135
Electronic notarial act	$25	19 NYCRR §182.11(g)

What happens if you overcharge

People assume the cap is a soft guideline. It isn’t. Charging more than the statutory fee is the kind of thing that ends a commission.

The clearest example on record is a Department of State decision, 61 DOS 97, involving a notary named Roberts. He charged $40 for four notarizations, $10 each against the legal $2. That overcharging came bundled with other misconduct, notarizing without the person appearing and making false attestations, and his commission was revoked. The decision spelled out the principle plainly: overcharging “has consistently been held to be a serious act of misconduct.”

There’s a second consequence, and it hits your wallet directly, separate from any disciplinary action. A notary is a public officer, and Public Officers Law §67 makes a public officer who collects more than the lawful fee liable to the person overcharged for treble the unlawful amount. Run the Roberts math forward: charge $10 for an act that caps at $2, and the $8 overcharge exposes you to three times that, $24 owed back to the customer, before the state ever weighs in on your commission.

So the honest read is this. Two extra dollars won’t feel like a crime in the moment. In the state’s eyes it’s misconduct, it opens you to civil liability, and stacked with anything else it’s the kind of thing that ends the appointment. Charge the schedule, and you never have to think about it.

For the wider picture of how fees and penalties connect, I walk through the full fee-and-penalty breakdown from the booklet, which is the state’s own study source.

Does the $2 cap kill the money angle?

Straight answer: the money was never in the counter fee, and the state never set it up to be. You’re not going to get rich notarizing documents behind a counter, and no working notary pretends otherwise.

Two things keep the cap from being the whole story.

First, the electronic act pays $25, more than ten times the standard fee. That’s the real ceiling for a growing slice of the work, and it’s where the side-hustle questions actually start.

Second, the $2 caps the notarial act only. New York does not fix your travel fee. If you drive to a client as a mobile notary, you can charge for the trip. The travel fee has to be reasonable, disclosed up front, and listed on its own line, separate from the $2 act.

That’s the model most working notaries run on. The income comes from mobile visits, travel, and loan-signing work, and the counter fee is beside the point. If you want the numbers behind that, I get into what NY notaries actually earn and whether this is a real side gig or TikTok hype in separate pieces, with sourced ranges instead of guesses.

One last thing before the FAQ. The $2 feeling unfair isn’t just in your head. A notary carries full, unlimited personal liability for an error, whether it’s intentional or inadvertent, for that same $2. The cap is low while the responsibility is total, and noticing that is fair. Letting it talk you out of the exam would be the real mistake.

Is the $2 going up?

No, and probably not before your exam. The $2 fee has been frozen since 1991. Every recent attempt to raise it has stalled in the Senate Finance Committee, including bills in 2019, 2021, 2023, and 2025.

The current one is Senate Bill S6268 (2025), sponsored by Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, which would raise the fee from $2 to $5. It was referred to the Senate Finance Committee on March 7, 2025, and it’s been parked there ever since, still not law.

For the exam, this is good news. The number is stable. The current DOS License Law booklet, the state’s own study source, still carries the $2 figure. So when a practice question or the real test asks for the fee, the answer is $2, full stop. Don’t let a headline about a proposed raise make you second-guess it.

Worth knowing for context: New York’s $2 is among the lowest fixed notary fees in the country, tied with Georgia at the bottom, and every other state sits higher.

FAQ

How much does a notary charge in New York? For standard acts, a maximum of $2 per person for an oath, affirmation, acknowledgment, or proof of execution, plus $2 for swearing each witness. Protests are capped at 75 cents plus 10 cents per notice, up to five notices. Electronic notarial acts are $25 each.

Is the NY notary fee $1 or $2? It’s $2. The $1 figure is a common myth, and even some commissioned notaries repeat it, but the correct fee for a standard act is two dollars.

Can a NY notary charge a travel fee? Yes. The $2 cap applies only to the notarial act, and New York does not fix travel or mobile fees. You can charge for travel as long as it’s reasonable, agreed up front, and shown on its own line, separate from the $2.

Why do NY notaries only get $2? The fee was set in the statute and hasn’t been raised since 1991. Attempts to increase it keep stalling in committee, most recently S6268, which proposes $5 and is still not law.

Do bank and law office notaries charge the $2? Usually not. The statute says a notary is “entitled to” the fee, which means allowed rather than required, so employee notaries commonly notarize for $0 on the job.

What does it cost to become a notary in NY? Separate from what you can charge, becoming a notary runs a $60 application fee and a $15 written exam fee, with attorneys and Unified Court System clerks exempt from the exam. I break down what it costs to get commissioned in full if you’re budgeting for it.

The one thing to walk in knowing

Fees are one of the most reliable exam topics because the answers are fixed and countable. $2 per person for the standard acts, the oath of office at zero, 75 cents and 10 cents for protests in a different statute, and $25 for electronic acts. Learn those and the counting rule, and you own a whole category of questions.

Fee questions are on the exam. See if you’d get them right: take the free practice test.

If you want the fee schedule drilled the way the exam actually tests it, the course covers it with lifetime access and free updates as the law changes.