Statewide death registration in Texas began in 1903, when the State Department of Public Health and Vital Statistics was set up, and the Vital Statistics Section of the Department of State Health Services still holds every death filed from that year to the present. It sells two products from that file. The certified death certificate is a copy of the original record, including the history of any corrections made to it. The death verification letter is not a certificate at all: it states the deceased's name, the date of death and the place of death, and the department warns that it is not a legal substitute for a certified copy.
The pricing rewards ordering everything at once. The first certified copy is twenty dollars and every further copy ordered at the same time is three dollars, so an estate that needs copies for a bank, an insurer, a pension plan and a title transfer pays twenty nine dollars for four rather than eighty. The department's death record questions page states plainly that Texas death certificates are not open records and that access is restricted for 25 years from the date of death, which is why identification and proof of relationship are demanded on every certified order. A death outside Texas cannot be supplied by Austin at all; the department sends those requests to the federal National Center for Health Statistics listing of state offices.
- Twenty dollars, then three: the first certified copy costs $20 and each extra copy in the same order costs $3.
- Closed for 25 years: death certificates are not open records until a quarter century after the death.
- Verification letter: name, date and place of death for $20, from any death since 1903, but not a legal certificate.
- Indexes for sale: digital statewide death indexes cover 1965 onward at $10 per year, with microfiche back to 1903.
Written by SearchSystems.net from Texas's own systems: Texas DSHS Vital Statistics death records, DSHS death record questions and answers, DSHS costs and fees, DSHS persons qualified to request or change records, DSHS processing times, DSHS birth and death indexes, DSHS disinterment permits, DSHS directory of local vital record offices, DSHS mail application for a death record, form VS-142, Texas State Library and Archives, vital statistics indexes, each read on October 15, 2026 by the SearchSystems editorial team.
Who may buy a certified Texas death certificate
A certified copy goes to immediate family of the deceased by blood, marriage or adoption, to a guardian, and to a legal agent or representative. The qualified applicants page lists immediate family as a child, a parent or guardian, a brother or sister, a grandparent, or a spouse. Anyone outside that circle has to show a direct, tangible interest with legal paper, and the two examples the department gives are a court order establishing guardianship and an insurance policy naming the applicant as beneficiary. The full definition sits in section 181.1(21) of the Texas Administrative Code.
A qualified applicant does not have to collect the certificate personally. Texas lets that person authorize someone else to pick it up, provided the stand in brings a notarized statement that identifies the exact record and names the person collecting it, along with a copy of the applicant's identification and the collector's own identification. An expired identity document is accepted only alongside a second, unexpired one. The department will not say over the telephone whether a death is on file or what the certificate shows; it releases nothing without an application, payment and acceptable identification from a qualified person.
Three ways to order and what each one costs in time
The department names Texas.gov as the fastest route, and identity is checked there against an online database rather than with a notarized form. Its published processing time for a death certificate ordered through Texas.gov is 20 to 25 business days, against 25 to 30 business days for a mail order, and the clock starts only when the application and payment arrive. Shipping time comes on top. Telephone orders are refused outright; the department cites Texas Administrative Code rule 181.28 for the requirement that every request arrive on an application approved by the State Registrar.
A mail order uses form VS-142, the mail application for a death record, signed before a notary on the strength of the applicant's original identification, with only a photocopy of that identification going in the envelope. Mail orders are paid by check, cashier's check or money order, and all fees may be combined into one payment made out to DSHS Vital Statistics. The Austin headquarters serves walk in customers during office hours, usually the same day although some applications take 24 hours or longer, and takes cards there as well as checks, with a $2.25 processing charge added to card payments at that counter.
Fees, rush service and the money that is never returned
The fee schedule sets the first death certificate at $20, each additional certificate ordered at the same time at $3, and a death verification at $20. Every fee is non-refundable and non-transferable, and the department applies that even where no record is found or the record was identified wrongly, so a search for a death that happened in another state simply loses the money.
Expedited processing costs $25, a charge that rose from $5, and it moves an application up the queue without promising a certificate if the paperwork is deficient. It works only by overnight courier: the whole packet goes to the expedited processing address by FedEx, LoneStar, UPS or a similar service, and the applicant also buys an expedited return method, $16 for overnight delivery within the United States or $22.95 for USPS Express Mail to a post office box.
Ordinary orders come back by first class mail without charge. Any application with missing or wrong supporting documents is returned and closed, and a corrected resubmission starts the processing clock from zero.
Correcting a Texas death certificate
The circle allowed to change a death record is narrower than the circle allowed to buy one. Only the funeral director named on the certificate, the informant named on it, meaning the person who supplied the details to the funeral director, the surviving spouse named on it, or the surviving parent named on it may ask for a correction. The correction itself is $15, the first certified copy of the corrected record is $20 and extra copies bought with it are $3 each.
Corrections are filed by mail or handed in at the Austin office, but there is no same day service for them, and the published processing time is 25 to 30 business days. Expedited handling is available for death amendments. Faxed or emailed packets are rejected because the department insists on original signatures and certified documents, and it returns originals and certified supporting papers once the correction is complete. A status request on a pending amendment, made through the mail order status form, is answered within two business days.
Death indexes, the state library and records older than 1903
For research rather than legal proof, the department sells statewide death indexes compiled by year and arranged by surname, giving the given names, the date of death, the county and the sex of the person. The digital death indexes run from 1965 onward at $10 per year and are requested by emailing the Digital Vital Event Index Form to the address on that page, while microfiche indexes go back to 1903 at prices quoted on request.
The Texas State Library and Archives keeps printed and microform copies of those indexes in its Austin reading room, from 1903 through 2010, with one cumulative volume for 1903 to 1940, single volumes for 1941 to 1945 and 1946 to 1955, and a separate volume for every year from 1956. The library holds no certificates, cannot search the indexes for callers by phone or email, and lends the microform copies to other libraries through interlibrary loan.
Its staff note that deaths were not consistently recorded until the 1930s, that infants may appear as Inf of followed by a surname, and that some women are indexed under a husband's first name. A death before 1903 was recorded, if at all, by the county clerk where it happened, and many of those county volumes were microfilmed and can be borrowed.
County clerks, city offices and justices of the peace
Austin is not the only counter. The department's directory of local vital record offices, arranged by letter, marks which county clerks, city secretaries and justices of the peace hold local death records, meaning deaths that occurred in that place only. In Dallas both the county clerk and the city hold local death records, in Lamb County and Lavaca County a justice of the peace office is listed alongside the clerk, and smaller cities such as Del Rio, Donna and Dumas issue local death records through the city.
Each listing carries cross references to related offices; the City of Dallas entry, for one, points to Collin, Dallas, Kaufman and Rockwall counties and to Terrell. Hours vary, and the department tells applicants to contact the local office for them before going.
Moving a burial and certificates for use abroad
Vital Statistics also issues the permit needed to move a body that is already buried. Its disinterment permit authorizes the remains to be disinterred, transported and reinterred within Texas, and the department directs families to apply through a licensed funeral director. If the body is leaving the state, traveling by common carrier inside Texas, or being cremated after disinterment, a separate burial transit permit from the local registrar is required as well.
Where a Texas death certificate must be presented to a foreign government, the department handles the apostille request through its records for foreign governments service.
Questions about Texas death records
Related Texas records
Related Texas guides on this site are the Texas birth certificates guide for the same Vital Statistics office, the Texas vital records overview, the Texas court records guide for probate filings after a death, the Texas public records law guide, and the Texas county pages for each county clerk.