New Brunswick is raising fees for the records Americans need to prove Canadian citizenship by descent

The Provincial Archives of New Brunswick will charge new fees for its records starting December 1, 2026.

Citizenship-by-descent applicants in Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota may feel it most, since generations of New Brunswickers settled in those states.

The archive says it is reviewing its fees. It hasn’t published the new amounts. It also hasn’t said whether requests already in its queue will pay today’s fee or the new one.

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Thousands of Americans with New Brunswick roots need a certified copy of an ancestor’s birth, marriage, or death record to prove they’re Canadian citizens by descent.

Canada’s citizenship department now requires records from the original source, such as a provincial archive. A printout from a genealogy website won’t support your application on its own.

As of the time of writing, a certified copy costs $11 CAD per record, shipping included. Each extra page costs $1 CAD, according to the archive’s citizenship by descent page.

The December change will be the archive’s first fee change since Bill C-3 took effect on December 15, 2025. That law removed the first-generation limit, a rule that stopped Canadian citizenship from passing beyond the first generation born abroad.

Why is New Brunswick raising the fees for record requests?

The archive hasn’t said why it’s changing its fees. Its citizenship request page does note that it’s “experiencing higher than usual demand.”

In 2025, the archive handled about 100 genealogy requests a month.

Requests jumped in December 2025, the month Bill C-3 took effect. By spring 2026, the archive was receiving about 400 citizenship-related requests a month and carried a backlog of more than 1,000, according to provincial archivist Joanna Aiton Kerr.

In May, a first inquiry took six to eight weeks to get a reply. By August, the archive said an archivist would need at least 12 weeks to start on a request.

The archive now puts that wait at six months or more. It warns the estimate could grow if demand keeps rising.

Six months gets your request to an archivist’s desk. The search itself takes longer if your ancestor’s record sits on microfilm instead of in the digital collection. After staff collects payment, the record reaches you by ground mail in two to four weeks, with no tracking.

Recent changes to how applicants can order the records they need

In late July 2026, the archive posted birth registrations from 1929 and marriage and death registrations from 1975.

That update pushed its online collection past one million records. The database listed 1,167,941 records after its November 6 update.

You can search births registered in New Brunswick before 1930, and marriages and deaths registered before 1976. For later records, you’ll need Service New Brunswick’s Vital Statistics office.

On July 29, the province launched a new vital statistics search platform. You can use it to find records, track requests, and handle some tasks yourself. In its announcement, the province tied the launch to the surge in citizenship requests.

Search online before you send a request. If you find the record, you can order a certified copy from its page. If you don’t, the archive’s county genealogical guides list church records by parish and year. Add those details to your request and staff can find the record faster.

Online payment is still on the way. For now, archive staff will contact you to take payment by Visa or Mastercard.

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