Apostille first, in the country that issued the document. Court translation second, here. In that order, and never the other way round. That single sentence is the most expensive thing on this site, because getting it backwards means paying a court translator to translate a document that then acquires a page of apostille text which also has to be translated — so you pay twice, and you lose two weeks you did not have.
The second most expensive thing: a Serbian court cannot apostille a British birth certificate. Basic courts here apostille Serbian public documents for use abroad. Your foreign document is apostilled by whatever authority its own country designates, and that is a job you do before you fly, or by post afterwards at considerably more trouble.
Checked on 16 October 2026.
The two steps, and what each one is for
They solve different problems and people conflate them constantly.
The apostille answers is this document genuine. It is a certificate attached to a public document by an authority in the issuing country, under the Hague Apostille Convention, and it replaces the older chain of consular legalisation between states that are both party to it. It says nothing about what the document means and it is not a translation.
The court translation answers what does this document say, in Serbian, in a form an authority here will accept. It is done by a court-appointed translator — a sudski tumač or stalni sudski tumač — who translates the document and binds the translation to a copy with their stamp and signature. A translation from anyone else, however fluent, is not this, and a counter will not accept it in place of it.
Both are required for most foreign documents in a residence file. Neither substitutes for the other.
Which direction you are going matters enormously
This is where the delay comes from, so take it slowly.
Foreign document, to be used in Serbia. Apostilled by the designated authority in the issuing country — in some states a foreign ministry, in others a court, in the United States the Secretary of State of the issuing state. Then brought here and given to a sudski tumač for translation into Serbian. The apostille page gets translated too, which is why the order matters.
Serbian document, to be used abroad. This is the direction Serbian courts handle. The Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that ordinary (basic) courts issue the apostille for public documents from their jurisdiction, with the certificate signed by the court president or an authorised judge and sealed. So the question “which office do I go to” has a precise answer: the basic court with territorial jurisdiction over the body that issued the document. Not a notary, not MUP, not the ministry.
If you are in the first situation — and most readers of this site are — then the honest summary is that the work happens in your own country, not in Belgrade, and the single best piece of planning advice on this site is to do it before you get on the plane.
Before you spend anything: check whether you need it at all
Two exemptions, both worth five minutes.
A bilateral treaty may exempt the document entirely. The Serbian Foreign Ministry notes that legalisation and apostille are not required where a ratified international treaty exempts certain documents for the destination country. Serbia has a number of these. If yours is one of them, the apostille is money and a week thrown away, and nobody at a translation agency has an incentive to tell you.
The receiving authority may not want the document at all, or may accept a different one. Ask the office that will receive the file what it wants, by name, before you process anything. “A birth certificate” and “a multilingual extract of a birth record” are different objects with different costs, and sometimes the cheaper one is accepted.
There is a whole site in this network that does nothing but this question — apostille, consular legalisation, or neither — and it is the right place to start if your document’s origin country is unusual or if you are unsure which route applies. I keep exactly one post on this subject here, because the question is cross-border rather than Belgrade-specific, and this is it.
Working with a sudski tumač
A few things that are true of how this actually goes, as opposed to how it is documented.
The list of appointed translators is public, maintained for the language pairs that have appointed translators. For major languages there are many; for a less common pair there may be very few in the country, which is a scheduling problem you want to discover early rather than in week five.
Ask what they need before you hand anything over: the original, a certified copy, or a scan. Practice varies by translator and by what the receiving authority will accept, and the answer changes what you can post and what you must carry.
Get the turnaround in writing, with a date. A translator quoting “a few days” in August is not quoting the same thing as a translator quoting “a few days” in late September when every foreign file in the city is being assembled at once.
Check the spelling of your own name on the finished translation before you leave. Transliteration of a name into Serbian is a decision somebody made, and if it does not match the spelling on every other document in your file, that mismatch is a counter problem later. One mismatched letter across two documents is enough to be asked to come back. If your name has characters Serbian does not use, agree the transliteration in advance and use the same one everywhere — including on your lease and your bank forms. The bank will ask too.
Bring two copies of everything and keep the originals. A bound court translation is an object you will be asked for more than once.
The costs, in the only form worth giving
I am not going to invent fees. What I can give you is the structure, which is stable:
- The apostille fee is a state fee in the issuing country, set by that country, and in most places it is the smallest line in this exercise.
- The court translation is priced per page, and “page” is a defined unit of characters rather than a sheet of paper — so a dense one-sided certificate can be two pages. Ask how they count.
- A short civil-status document is a small bill. A degree with transcripts, or a multi-page police record, is not, because the per-page unit does the work.
- Courier and certified copies are real lines if you are doing any of this from abroad, and they are where a cheap job turns into a moderate one.
The ratio to plan with: for a typical residence file of two or three short documents, the translation costs more than the apostille, often several times more, and both together are usually smaller than the first month’s rent. For a file with a degree and transcripts in it, the translation can be the largest single line in the whole process. Price it before you decide which residence basis to apply on, because some bases want far more paper than others — the legal bases differ sharply in how much of this they generate.
The order, written out
- Ask the receiving authority what documents it wants, by name. Write down the date and who told you.
- Check whether a bilateral treaty exempts any of them.
- In the issuing country: obtain the document, then apostille it. A fresh issue is often required anyway — many authorities will not accept a civil-status document older than six months, so do not apostille the certificate in your drawer without checking its age is acceptable.
- Bring it here. Originals in hand luggage.
- Court translation in Belgrade, apostille page included, name spelling agreed in advance.
- Two copies made before anything enters a folder.
- Then file — the residence application, or whatever else needed it.
Steps one and two are free and they are the two people skip.
Why this post sits in the health and admin part of the site
Because the apostille queue is where the whole sequence silently stalls, and it stalls behind things that look like other problems. A residence application waiting on an insurance document issued abroad is waiting on this. Dependent health cover through an insured family member is waiting on a marriage or birth record, which is waiting on this. The healthcare chain has four links in front of it before you are insured here, and this step is the one that does not care how organised you are — it runs at the speed of two institutions in two countries.
Start it first. It is the only part of the move that genuinely cannot be hurried from here.