You can obtain marriage notice forms and information about fees from any registrar of births, deaths and marriages in Scotland or downloaded from the General Register for Scotland website to the right. Each of you must complete and submit a marriage notice form along with the required documents and appropriate fee to the registrar for the district in which the marriage is to take place.

Timing is important.  The notices must be submitted early enough to enable the registrar to be satisfied that you are free to marry one another.  Normally, notices should be submitted about FOUR weeks before the marriage, but if either party has been married before, the notices should be with the registrar SIX weeks beforehand.  The minimum period is 15 days before the date of the proposed marriage, but if you leave things as late as this you could be faced with the need to postpone your marriage.

Only in exceptional circumstances will the Registrar General authorise a marriage to take place if 15 days’ notice has not been given.

Although you need not both attend personally at the registrar’ office to hand in your marriage notice, at least one of the parties must attend personally before the date of the marriage, to collect the marriage schedule where a religious marriage is intended.

Every person giving notice is required to sign a declaration to the effect that the particulars and information given on the notice are correct.  As a safeguard against bigamous marriages a subsequent check of the information is made by the Registrar General’s office.

Persons related in any of the ways in the list of Degrees of Relationship will each require to sign a separate declaration form which, like the marriage notice form, is obtainable from any registrar of births, deaths and marriages in Scotland.