District of Columbia Marriage & Divorce Records: Court Records Only

The District of Columbia is the most structurally unusual jurisdiction in this cluster. In most states a health agency issues or at least sells marriage and divorce records. In DC it does neither. DC Health's Vital Records Division issues birth certificates, death certificates and domestic partnership records, and nothing else. Its Registrar does receive a monthly report of marriages, divorces and annulments from the Superior Court under DC Code Sec. 7-231.18, but that is a vital-statistics function rather than a service counter: DC Code Sec. 7-231.25 lists the records the Registrar may issue certified copies of, and marriage and divorce are not among them. For anyone ordering a document, marriage and divorce are court business from beginning to end.

That distinction resolves most confusion about DC records. If you are looking for a health-department order form for a DC marriage or divorce record, you will not find one, because it does not exist.

This page covers records. For residency, grounds, and the process of ending a marriage in DC, see District of Columbia divorce laws. For the national comparison, see the marriage and divorce records hub.

DC marriage records: the Marriage Bureau

The Marriage Bureau, part of the Superior Court's Family Court Operations Division, issues marriage licenses and holds marriage records. It sits in the Moultrie Courthouse at 500 Indiana Avenue NW, Room JM-690, and is open on weekdays.

To order a certified copy you complete the Marriage Bureau's request form, which the court publishes online, and submit it by mail or in person. The Bureau's fee schedule, from its own order form, is:

Figures are as of August 2026 from the DC Courts order form. A few points about this schedule are worth pulling out.

The no-record-found search letter costs more than a certificate. At $20.00 it is twice the price of the record itself, which is unusual, but it exists because agencies sometimes need documented proof that no DC marriage is on file.

Triple seals are the exemplified version that some foreign governments and federal agencies require for use abroad. Check with the receiving agency before paying for them, since most domestic uses do not need one.

We did not find a restrictive eligibility clause on the Marriage Bureau's order form. It sets out the request fields and the fee schedule rather than a class of eligible requesters. That is consistent with DC Code Sec. 46-416, which makes all applications for marriage licenses open to inspection as public records, subject to the one limit described below. Even so, if your connection to the record is remote, call the Bureau at the number it publishes rather than assuming.

DC divorce records: nothing orderable but the case file

There is no orderable DC divorce certificate. The Registrar does hold a registered report of every DC divorce, because the court forwards one each month under DC Code Sec. 7-231.18, but DC Code Sec. 7-231.25 does not authorize the Registrar to issue certified copies of it, and DC Superior Court issues no vital-record-style divorce document either. What you can actually obtain is the court record: the case file and the decree entered in it.

The Superior Court's Family Court Operations Division handles divorce. The court's divorce page covers filing a new case, including the residency requirement that one spouse must have lived in the District for six months before filing, but it is a filing-process page rather than a records-request page and it does not name a custodian or fee for copies of an existing decree.

Here is the honest position on ordering one. DC Courts publishes no dedicated page for obtaining a copy of a divorce decree. We searched for one and confirmed it is genuinely absent rather than merely hard to find. What the District does publish is the Marriage Bureau order form line quoted above, which prices a "Regular Certified Copy (Motor Vehicles, Social Security & Divorce)" at $10.00 each. That is the mechanism named on an official DC Courts document for obtaining a certified copy connected to a DC divorce: the same Marriage Bureau channel and the same $10.00 fee.

Before mailing anything for a divorce copy, call the Family Court at the number DC Courts publishes and confirm that your request goes through that form. A jurisdiction that has not published a dedicated process is a jurisdiction where a phone call saves a wasted trip.

What is public, and what is not

DC divorce files are Superior Court records, and access to them runs through court rules rather than a vital-records access statute. As in any court, individual cases and individual documents can be sealed by order, and family cases often contain financial and child-related material subject to restriction.

The DC Code creates no confidential-marriage program and no time embargo on marriage or divorce records, but it does draw two lines worth knowing. First, DC Code Sec. 46-416 makes all applications for marriage licenses open to inspection as public records "except as limited by Sec. 46-416.01," and that section confines disclosure of an applicant's Social Security number to paternity and child-support purposes. Second, DC Code Sec. 7-231.24(a) makes vital records, vital reports, indices and related documents confidential and not subject to disclosure under the District's FOIA, and Sec. 7-231.24(b) makes it unlawful to permit inspection of or copy one except as the chapter, its rules, or a court order allow. Because Sec. 7-231.01(57) counts a registered report of marriage, divorce, dissolution of marriage or annulment as a vital record, that confidentiality bar covers the Registrar's marriage and divorce holdings.

What it does not reach is the Marriage Bureau's own record books or the Superior Court's case files, which is why the ordering route described on this page still works. If a clerk restricts a specific file, ask which order governs it.

For the general request framework and the route to court and agency records, see District of Columbia public records laws.

Historical DC marriages and divorces

Current records and historical records run through completely separate offices.

The DC Office of Public Records and Archives, a division of the Office of the Secretary, holds District of Columbia Historic Marriages covering 1811 to 1924 and a separate Marriage Indexes collection covering 1870 to 1924. Both are listed as collections on the DC Archives site, which is where research requests start. This is a genuinely different custody chain from the Marriage Bureau's current holdings.

For divorces from the era before the Superior Court's modern jurisdiction, the picture is murkier. Federal courts held divorce jurisdiction in the District before the court reorganization of the early 1970s, and an index for the earlier period is reported to sit with the Clerk of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. We could not confirm that on a primary source, so treat it as a lead to follow with the National Archives and the federal court clerk rather than a verified custody statement.

The District recognizes common-law marriage, which is directly relevant to records work: a common-law marriage produces no license and no certificate, so there is nothing at the Marriage Bureau to order. See District of Columbia common-law marriage for how those marriages are established and proved instead.

Related DC pages

See District of Columbia death records, which does run through DC Health, for the contrast. For the cross-jurisdiction process guides, see how to get a copy of your marriage certificate and how to find out if someone is married or divorced.