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Notaries public

Regulated by The Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Protected title

Notary public

Legal basis

Public Notaries Act 1801; unqualified practice is an offence

Statutory basis

Public Notaries Act 1801; Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 s.57

Collected here

817 entries · 557 carry the register’s own identifier

Register

Faculty Office’s own register

How somebody becomes one

Admission by the Master of the Faculties. A qualified lawyer route and a non-lawyer route both exist; both require the Notarial Practice Course, and a new notary practises under supervision for two years before a full practising certificate.

How to become a notary public — the full route, what it costs, and how many people joined the register in each of the last ten years.

What they may lawfully do

Notaries public may carry on 4 reserved legal activities under the Legal Services Act 2007.

• reserved instrument activities — Preparing instruments of transfer or charge over land and lodging documents at HM Land Registry.
• probate activities — Preparing papers on which to found or oppose a grant of probate or of letters of administration.
• notarial activities — Activities customarily carried on by virtue of enrolment as a notary.
• administration of oaths — Administering an oath or taking an affidavit.

Membership bodies

Society of Scrivener Notaries

Scrivener notaries are notaries who have passed the Society's additional examinations, historically the only notaries permitted to act in foreign languages. The Faculty Office register does not distinguish them.

6 member firms on its published list.

Related membership bodies

These are not registers. Membership of a trade or professional body is voluntary, and a firm or practitioner that is not a member is not thereby unregulated or unauthorised.

Society of Scrivener Notaries

Scrivener notaries are notaries who have passed the Society's additional examinations, historically the only notaries permitted to act in foreign languages. The Faculty Office register does not distinguish them.

6 member organisations listed · 20 of the 817 on this register (2%) work at one of them · scrivener-notaries.org.uk

What the Faculty Office says

Figure	Source	Provenance
about 770 practising notaries in England and Wales the Society's own description of its constituency; not a register count	The Notaries Society	secondary

“Secondary” means the figure was recorded from somewhere other than the body’s own page and has not been checked against it. It is marked because a table is exactly the format that makes an unchecked number look like a measured one.

In law, and in Parliament

423 documents on legislation.gov.uk mention this profession, 100 of them Acts, the oldest from 1533. Hansard records 415 contributions mentioning it, across 0 whole debates.

Every Act and instrument that mentions them, what was said in Parliament, and what each search phrase catches by mistake — or the same for every profession here.

What the annual reports say

This site has 817 entries from the public register. The Faculty Office’s own latest published figure is 777 — notaries holding a practising certificate, 2026 — a difference of +40.

Everyone the Faculty Office's public directory returns, against the number who took out a practising certificate for the year. The directory carries no status flag, so a notary who has not renewed cannot be told apart from one who has. Neither number is wrong: they count different things on different days, and nobody publishing either one says which. Registrars annual report 2026.

How the regulator itself is rated. The Legal Services Board oversees every approved regulator and rates each one against three standards. In 2025 it rated the Faculty Office: well-led — partial; effective approach to regulation — partial; operational delivery — partial. The assessment, and every regulator’s rating side by side.

What regulation costs. In 2025 the regulator’s income was £654,325 and it regulated 760 people — £861 a head. Practising certificate fees, against the Roll at 1 April. Excludes the Contingency Fund, which pays for complaints and is accounted for separately. Neither figure is published beside the other; both are the regulator’s own. The same sum for every profession here.

Notarial practices inspected

Notaries holding a practising certificate

New notaries admitted

Students passing the UCL notarial course

Certificates of Exemption issued

Complaints received about notaries

Notaries on the Roll

Faculty Office income

Faculty Office expenditure

Faculty Office staff costs

Faculty Office staff, full-time equivalent

Faculty Office deficit

Faculty Office reserve

Women in the notarial profession

Women among notaries with under five years' experience

Notaries from an ethnic minority background

Notaries identifying as having a disability

Notaries who attended a fee-paying school

Read from the regulator’s own annual reports and core metrics. A gap in a run means the document that would carry it is not on the regulator’s site, not that the figure is zero. All 157 reports, with the sentence each figure came from.