Overview and Qualifications Qualifications Applicants must be 18 years of age and residents of Alaska who are legally in the United States. Applicants may not within 10 years before the commission takes effect have been convicted of a felony or incarcerated for a felony conviction. If you have ever had a Notary commission revoked or have been disciplined for Notarial misconduct in Alaska or any other jurisdiction please contact the office to discuss before submitting your application. Types of Commissions Regular commissions Limited Governmental Notary commissions The statutes allow both types of commissions to be held concurrently if you desire. Term of Office Regular commissions are issued for a four-year term and have a specific expiration date that must be included as part of every notarial certificate you complete. Limited Governmental commissions are open ended and are active as long as the Notary remains employed by the governmental entity they were working for when they obtained the commission. Limited Governmental notaries will indicate that their notary commission expires “with office” on the completed notarial certificates. Application Fee The application fee is $40.00, and is non-refundable and non-transferable. The $40.00 application fee is waived for State of Alaska employees who are applying for Limited Governmental commissions. Please make checks payable to “State of Alaska.” The State of Alaska’s EIN number is 92-6001185. Notary Bond What is a Notary Bond? In theory, notary bonds protect the public against financial loss caused by notarial misconduct. They are not insurance for the notary and do not serve to protect the notary. Rather, the bond is a contract between the notary and the Surety, who agrees to pay up to $2,500.00 to an obligee when terms of the bond apply. Alaska’s $2,500.00 bond requirement does not prevent the damaged party from suing the notary for the full amount of their losses. Many applicants have been requested by an employer to function as a notary. In most of these situations you will not be the first employee to become a notary and your employer will have long ago decided how they would like to acquire the necessary bond. Before you put too much effort into learning about notary bonds, try going back to whoever is asking you to do this and see if they already have a prefered method for obtaining the necessary bond. Accounts payable clerks can be a good resource for figuring out if your employer purchases commercial notary bonds. If you or your employer prefer not to purchase a commercial bond, the bonding requirement can also be met using an individual Surety via our notary bond form. Since the notary bond is mandatory for all regular notary commissions, please do not submit your application until you have the required notary bond in hand. The bond itself is mandatory and no other documentation related to the purchase of a bond is acceptable. Similarly, there are no substitutes for this bond. There is no other type of insurance or bond that you or your employer already have that will be accepted in lieu of the required $2,500 Alaska notary bond. If you purchase a commercial notary bond, submit the bond and any supporting documentation that is provided to you by your insurance/bonding company as part of your commission application. There is no need to submit the state’s blank notary bond form in addition to a commercial notary bond. The blank form is only intended to be used by applicants who are supplying their own third party individual Surety. The Surety must always be a third party (applicants may not function as their own Surety.) The bond obligates your Surety unconditionally for the entire four-year period of your commission. If you choose to fill out the State’s notary bond form instead of purchasing a commercial notary bond please make sure that your Surety understands that once the commission is issued they will be liable for the bond for the entire four year period and will not be able to withdraw from their obligation as Surety. Notaries may submit subsquent bonds (to become effective upon receipt,) but Sureties do not have the ability to withdraw support from a bond once it has been accepted by the state and the commission has been issued. Sureties/employers have no authority to request that regular notary commissions be revoked – even if the employer has paid fees and expenses related to the employee’s commission – since the commission is issued to the individual notary and not the employer/business. Also, when a notary-employee terminates employment they remain commissioned notaries and if the employer has accepted direct liability for the ex-employee’s notary bond, they will remain liable for that notary bond even after the employee terminates. It’s possible that the money saved by assuming the liability for these bonds directly is worth the risk involved in doing so, but if the employer does not wish to end up in this situation they should purchase commercial notary bonds for their employee-notaries rather than assume the liability for their bonds directly. Either way, this is a decision that will need to be made at the time the notary applies. Once the commission is issued the employer is stuck with whatever bond was submitted as part of the application. We will accept replacement bonds during the term of any active regular commission, but any subsequent bond that is accepted cannot retroactively cover the notarizations previously performed by the notary and will only be in effect moving forward from the date that it is accepted until the end of the commission. The original bond will still be covering the period the notary was active prior to the acceptance of subsequent bonds. Since government entities cannot be held liable for notarizations that are not related to their official function, we cannot allow government entities at any level or of any type to function as Surety on a notary bond. Each notary bond only covers one four year commission. The effective dates of the bonds must exactly match the dates of the commission, so all notary bonds submitted are actually open ended (regardless of any attempts by bonding agents, etc. to assign effective dates to them) and only receive their actual effective dates at the moment the Lieutenant Governor issues the notary commission. The way that our notary statutes are constructed prevents any other interpretation or approach, and the only solution in instances where bonding companies disagree with this assessment will be for the State to refuse to accept bonds from those businesses from that point forward. If we have accepted a notary bond as part of an application that Surety is obligated to honor the bond for any claims submitted during the term of the commission it was attached to. Each bond only covers a single four year regular commission. When one commission has expired (or is about to expire) you will need to execute or purchase a new notary bond as the old bond will have technically expired at the same moment that the notary commission expires. See step-by-step Alaska Notary Public Application Process on our home page for detailed instructions on applying.