PSA birth certificate and CENOMAR from Canada

The PSA birth certificate is the most requested Philippine document in Canada, and the consulates do not issue it. Neither do they issue the marriage certificate, the death certificate or the CENOMAR. All four come from the Philippine Statistics Authority in Manila, and all four are ordered online from Canada without any consular appointment. This page exists because half the people who book a consulate slot for "birth certificate" did not need one.

The consulate asks for PSA certificates; it does not produce them. Passports, dual citizenship, civil registry reports: every one of those procedures wants a PSA document on security paper as input. Order it first, then book the consular appointment.

The four documents and who asks for them

Document	Typically required by
Birth certificate	Passport applications, RA 9225 dual citizenship, sponsorships, school enrolment
Marriage certificate	Passport name change, spousal sponsorship, pensions
Death certificate	Estates, insurance, SSS survivor claims
CENOMAR (certificate of no marriage)	Marrying in the Philippines or in Canada, annulment cases

How to order from Canada

Two official channels deliver abroad: psahelpline.ph and psaserbilis.com.ph. Both take foreign cards, both courier internationally, and both need the basic index data: full name as registered, date and place of the event, and the parents' names. Delivery to a Canadian address usually lands in two to four weeks; delivery to a relative in the Philippines is faster and they can courier it onward.

Order two copies. Nearly every consular procedure keeps the original you submit, and the second copy costs far less than a second three-week wait.

When the PSA has no record

A "negative result" does not always mean the event was never registered; records from before the PSA's centralisation are patchy. The fixes:

Birth never registered in the Philippines

Late registration is filed with the local civil registrar of the city or municipality where the birth happened, usually through a relative there with an authorisation letter. Once registered locally, the record takes months to appear in the PSA’s central database, so start early if a passport or RA 9225 application depends on it.

Born abroad to Filipino parents

If the birth happened in Canada and was never reported, the record does not belong to a Philippine civil registrar: it is created by the Report of Birth filed at the consulate covering the province where the birth occurred.

Record exists but is wrong

Clerical errors, a misspelled name, a wrong birth date digit, are corrected through a petition under RA 9048, filed with the civil registrar in the Philippines or, for events registered at a post, through that post. Fix the record before applying for anything that copies it, because the passport will faithfully reproduce the error.

What "security paper" means and why copies fail

Agencies want the certificate on SECPA, the PSA's security paper, issued recently. A photocopy, a scan, or a local civil registrar copy is routinely rejected, and "recently" matters too: many offices treat PSA documents older than six months to a year as stale. If your certificate has been in a drawer since 2019, order a fresh one before the appointment.

Order checklist

Full registered name, including middle name
Date and place of the event as registered
Complete parents’ names for birth documents
A card that supports international billing
Two copies of each document you will submit anywhere

Fees and requirements

How each post books appointments