Two people, one affidavit, both answerable for every word of it. Nine times out of ten it is a husband and wife registering their marriage — so this page sets out exactly what the Delhi Order requires, what it does not require, what every stage costs at the published government rate, and the point almost everyone has backwards: a certificate is evidence that you married. It is not the thing that married you.
A joint affidavit is one affidavit sworn by two or more people together. Each of them signs it. Each of them is personally answerable for the whole of it — not merely for the half that concerns them. That last point is worth pausing on, because it is the entire reason offices prefer a joint affidavit to two separate ones: if the facts are wrong, neither person can say the other one wrote that bit.
Offices ask for one wherever a set of facts has to be confirmed by both people at the same moment:
Marriage registration in Delhi runs on the Delhi (Compulsory Registration of Marriage) Order, 2014. Almost nothing written about it online quotes it, so here is what it says, clause by clause.
Order 4(a) — "Within a period of 60 days, excluding the day on which the final ceremony of marriage is solemnized, the parties to the marriage shall apply jointly in the prescribed Form-A"
Order 4(b) — the application is accompanied by "documentary proof of age of both of the parties to the marriage, solemnization of marriage, identification of the parties, place of residence of the parties to the marriage, citizenship of the parties if any along with the requisite fee of Rupees Two Hundred."
Order 4(d) — "the marriage officer shall fix a date for the parties to appear in person along with two witnesses who shall certify to the solemnization of such marriage"
Order 5 — the marriage officer "within whose district the marriage has been solemnized shall have the jurisdiction"
Source linked at the foot of this page.
Four things follow from those clauses, and each of them decides something practical.
If anyone offers you a marriage certificate without both of you attending, walk away. Not because it is expensive — because the Order makes personal appearance the condition on which the certificate is issued, and a certificate obtained otherwise is a certificate somebody can later attack. We have seen the consequence of that surface years afterwards, in a visa file and in a property dispute.
Tell us the date and district of the ceremony and we will tell you where you stand on the sixty days, which office has jurisdiction, and exactly what it will cost at government rates. Nothing payable in advance.
Read Order 4 again and you will notice something. It asks for Form-A, for documentary proof of age, solemnisation, identification, residence and citizenship, for a fee, for two witnesses and for personal appearance.
It does not, anywhere, say “joint affidavit”.
So where does the requirement come from? From “documentary proof of … solemnization of marriage” in Order 4(b). A joint affidavit of the husband and wife, setting out that the ceremony took place on a stated date at a stated place according to a stated rite, is what district offices in Delhi commonly accept as that proof.
It is an administrative practice built on top of the Order, not a clause of the Order. Which is exactly why the requirement differs slightly from district to district — the format asked for, whether photographs are pasted on it, what stamp value is expected, whether the priest's certificate or the wedding card is wanted alongside.
This matters to you in two ways.
First, the right question is not “what is the joint affidavit format?” but “what does this district accept as proof of solemnisation?” A generic format downloaded from a website is a guess at the answer. Asking the office is the answer.
Second, nobody can tell you the requirement is fixed by law, because it is not. If an office asks for something additional — a particular photograph arrangement, a specific attestation, the card or the priest's certificate — that is within its discretion as to what satisfies it on solemnisation. It is not somebody inventing a rule to extract a fee.
Here is the point that almost everyone has backwards, including a good many people who write about this for a living. Registering your marriage does not make you married. Not registering it does not make you unmarried.
Section 8, The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955
Section 8(5) — "The validity of any Hindu marriage shall in no way be affected by the omission to make the entry."
Section 8(4) — the Hindu Marriage Register "shall at all reasonable times be open for inspection, and shall be admissible as evidence of the statements therein contained and certified extracts therefrom shall, on application, be given by the Registrar"
And the Delhi Order says the same thing in its own words. Order 8: registration "will not tantamount to validity of marriage as the same would be the subject matter of the respective law, custom and practice professed by the parties".
Source linked at the foot of this page.
Put the two sub-sections side by side and the design of the provision is obvious. Sub-section (4) makes the register evidence. Sub-section (5) makes clear that the absence of an entry proves nothing about the marriage. The register is a record of something that already happened elsewhere — at the ceremony, under whichever law and custom governs the parties.
One statutory oddity is worth knowing, because it tells you how the legislature saw this. Section 8(2) allows a State to make registration compulsory and to punish a breach — with a fine which may extend to twenty-five rupees. That figure has not been changed since 1955. A law that treats non-registration as a twenty-five rupee matter is not a law that treats registration as the source of the marriage.
What this means if you are worried. If you were married years ago with a proper ceremony and never registered, you are married. You have an evidence problem, not a marriage problem, and evidence problems can be fixed — late registration, or where that is not possible, a declaratory suit. What you should not do is let someone frighten you into paying for a rushed certificate on the basis that your marriage is somehow not real until you have one.
Because an evidence problem is a real problem, and the Supreme Court has said so at length.
Smt. Seema v. Ashwani Kumar — Supreme Court of India, Arijit Pasayat and S. H. Kapadia JJ, 14 February 2006
"marriages of all persons who are citizens of India belonging to various religions should be made compulsorily registrable in their respective States"
"non registration of marriages affects the women to a great measure. If the marriage is registered it also provides evidence of the marriage having taken place"
"If the record of marriage is kept, to a large extent, the dispute concerning solemnization of marriages between two persons is avoided."
The Court set out what a record prevents: child marriages, illegal bigamy and polygamy, desertion, and trafficking. It noted what a record enables: a woman's claim to the matrimonial home and to maintenance, a widow's inheritance, and proof in questions of custody, legitimacy and age.
Source linked at the foot of this page.
Set aside the constitutional argument and the practical list is short and unanswerable. You will be asked for a marriage certificate by a passport office when a spouse's name is added; by an embassy on a dependant or spouse visa; by a bank on a joint account or a nomination; by an employer for dependant benefits; by an insurer on a claim; by a society on a transfer; and by a court in any matrimonial proceeding. In every one of those the question is not whether you are married. It is whether you can prove it to a stranger in five minutes.
Passport, visa, bank, insurance, property — all of them ask for the same piece of paper. Tell us where and when you married and we will get it done properly. Nothing payable in advance.
Most of the couples who come to us are late. That is normal, it is provided for, and it is not a crisis.
| Where you are | What the Order provides | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Within 60 days (excluding the day of the final ceremony) |
Order 4(a) — apply jointly in Form-A. | ₹200 fee under Order 4(b). |
| Between 60 and 120 days | Order 6 — delay may be condoned for a further period of sixty days. | An additional fee of ₹500. |
| Beyond that | Order 7 — a penalty is provided for non-registration within the prescribed periods. The application is still made; it is late. | A penalty of ₹1,000. |
| In a hurry | Order 10 — tatkal registration. | An additional fee of ₹10,000. |
| Years late, or the record is gone | Registration may still be possible; where it is not, a declaration of marital status from a court is the route. | Depends entirely on the case. We will tell you honestly which of the two you are in. |
Read the tatkal line again. Ten thousand rupees is the government's own published additional fee under Order 10 — not a bribe, not an agent's charge, and not negotiable by anyone. If someone quotes you a tatkal figure, the correct next question is: how much of that is the ₹10,000 government fee, and how much is yours?
We publish this because marriage registration is where the most money vanishes into an undifferentiated “package”, and because every figure in the left-hand column below is printed in a government order that anybody can read.
| Item | Who gets it | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Registration fee | Government | ₹200 — Order 4(b). |
| Late fee (61–120 days) | Government | ₹500 additional — Order 6. |
| Penalty (beyond that) | Government | ₹1,000 — Order 7. |
| Tatkal | Government | ₹10,000 additional — Order 10. |
| Stamp paper for the affidavit | State | A small fixed amount. Ask the district what value it expects. |
| Notary attestation | Notary | At the notary's rate. Required by most Delhi districts for this affidavit; not required for the minor's passport declaration described below. |
| Our drafting charge | Us | From ₹500, Same day, payable after the work. |
| Our end-to-end registration service | Us | Quoted separately on our marriage registration page, with the government fees above shown as pass-throughs at actuals. |
Short document, and its whole value is in whether the facts in it line up with the documents behind it. Every line below is a line an officer may check against something else in the file.
Full names as they appear on the identity documents being filed, father's names, ages, and addresses. Where a wife's name has changed on marriage, both the pre-marriage and post-marriage names should appear, because the age and identity proofs will still carry the earlier one.
The exact date of the final ceremony, the address where it took place, and the rite or ceremony performed. “Married according to Hindu rites and customs” is acceptable; the date and the address are not optional and are what the sixty days and the jurisdiction both hang on.
That each was unmarried, or a widow or widower, or divorced with the decree identified. This is the clause that makes the affidavit worth having, and it is the one that is worth being careful about — see the section on false statements below. A single status affidavit covers the same ground for someone who is not yet married.
The degrees of prohibited relationship are defined by the law governing the marriage, and there are customs which permit what the general rule forbids. Where a custom is being relied on, say so rather than staying silent.
Ages at the date of marriage, consistent with the documentary proof of age being filed. An inconsistency here is the commonest reason a file stalls.
Where you live now, as opposed to where you married. Both matter, for different reasons.
That the marriage be registered and a certificate issued, addressed to the correct marriage officer — the one for the district where the ceremony took place.
Both deponents verifying that the contents are true to their knowledge, with place and date, and both signing. An affidavit describing itself as joint but signed by one person is not defective — it is something considerably worse.
Send us the date, the place and the rite, and copies of what you have. We will find out what that district wants and draft to it. From ₹500, payable after the work.
Order 4(d) requires two witnesses who will certify to the solemnization of such marriage, and the Delhi Order requires them to bear proof of permanent residence in Delhi. Three practical points follow, and they cause more last-minute panic than anything else in the process.
If you are planning a ceremony now rather than registering an old one, decide your two witnesses before the wedding and tell them what will be required of them afterwards. Couples who do this register in a fortnight. Couples who do not spend three months trying to get two busy relatives into the same room.
Marriage registration is the common case, but it is not the only one, and the requirements elsewhere are different enough to be worth stating.
For a passport for a child, the prescribed document is the declaration by the applicant's parent or parents or guardian, signed by both parents. It is a joint declaration in substance, and its requirements are noticeably lighter than the marriage one.
Specimen declaration by the applicant's parent(s) or guardian for issue of a passport to a minor — Passport Seva, Ministry of External Affairs
"On plain paper"
The parents declare that they are the parents or guardians of the minor child, that the child "is a citizen of India" and "has not lost, surrendered or has been deprived of his/her citizenship", and that they "undertake the entire responsibility for his/her expenses". Both father and mother sign separately, each giving their own identity document details. The form warns that false information may lead to "Cancellation (impounding/revocation) of the passport" or criminal proceedings under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and the Passports Act, 1967.
Source linked at the foot of this page.
Note the two words that save you money: on plain paper. No stamp paper and no notary attestation is asked for on this one. If you are being quoted for a notarised joint affidavit on stamp paper for a child's passport, ask why. Our passport affidavit guide explains how the passport annexures came to work this way, and which ones changed.
Banks, insurers, companies and registrars ask for a joint affidavit whenever two people are asserting the same thing about a shared asset — that a passbook or certificate was lost from a shared home, that a nomination reflects an agreed position, that co-owners consent to something. Two features recur:
Eight of those ten are settled before a word is drafted, by establishing the date, the district and what that district currently asks for. That is the part of this job that takes the time. The drafting itself takes an hour.
A joint affidavit is worth something precisely because a false one is an offence — and because both signatures carry that risk, not one.
Sections 227 and 229, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023
"Whoever, being legally bound by an oath or by an express provision of law to state the truth, or being bound by law to make a declaration upon any subject, makes any statement which is false, and which he either knows or believes to be false or does not believe to be true, is said to give false evidence."
Section 229 fixes the punishment at imprisonment which may extend to seven years with a fine up to ten thousand rupees where the false evidence is given in a stage of a judicial proceeding, and three years with a fine up to five thousand rupees in any other case. On a joint affidavit that exposure is not split between the two deponents — each has sworn the whole document, so each answers for the whole of it, including the part that was the other one’s to know.
Source linked at the foot of this page.
In a marriage joint affidavit the clause that carries the real risk is the one about marital status before the marriage. A statement that a party was unmarried, when there was a subsisting marriage, is not a paperwork irregularity. It goes to bigamy, it can unravel the registration years later, and it will surface — in a visa file, in a property matter, in a maintenance or succession proceeding, in a background check.
Where we stop, and we do stop. We do not draft a joint affidavit stating that a party is unmarried, widowed or divorced when we have been told otherwise, and we do not draft one where a prior marriage is being left out. Where there was an earlier marriage, the honest route is to produce the decree or the death certificate; where a divorce is pending rather than granted, that is a different conversation and it is one worth having before a ceremony rather than after.
We also will not accept one party's word for the other's status. A joint affidavit binds both signatories, and we tell both of them what they are signing.
Two standing promises. You pay nothing in advance — placing the order is free and payment comes after the work. And we do not draft a declaration we know to be untrue, whoever is asking and whatever it is worth to them.
Tell us the date and the district and we will tell you exactly where you stand — which fee applies, which office has jurisdiction, and what that office is asking for. If you are late, we will tell you what it costs to fix rather than what it costs to worry about.
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