Reviewed by Carlos Vargas, Texas Licensed Funeral Director (TFSC #119648) ·
The office is in Washington, and Texas is on its list
Most countries in these guides run a consulate in Houston that covers Texas. Myanmar does not. The embassy publishes a list of its missions in the United States and their consular service areas, and the Washington office takes the long list of states that includes Texas, alongside Oklahoma, Tennessee, Louisiana and the inhabited territories of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The same page gives that office as 2300 S Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20008.
The Consulate-General in Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard exists, but its area is Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Oregon, Nevada and Washington state. A Dallas family that telephones Los Angeles is telephoning the wrong office. Nor will the Texas Secretary of State’s index of foreign consular offices help: Myanmar has no entry on it at all, though Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Nepal each do. That absence is the answer, not a gap in our reading.
The death certificate form, and why we will not print a fee
The embassy lists the certificates a citizen can apply for on one page, and a death certificate endorsement is item eight on it. Everything on that page, including the instructions and the application form, is written in Burmese. There is no English version. A family in Dallas whose Burmese is limited, which describes a great many second-generation families, cannot read the procedure that governs their own case.
The form itself is a three-page scan. Its English title survives on the second page as Death Certificate Endorsement, and the Burmese text asks for an application from the next of kin, a copy of the proof of relationship, a copy of the deceased person’s passport, and the death certificate issued by the hospital or department concerned. There is a fee line. We are not printing a number for it, and here is why: the scan carries a corrupted text layer, and the figures that can be pulled out of it are nonsense, reading $6, $36, $66, $3 and $8 across three pages. One of those fragments could be read as fifteen dollars by someone in a hurry. We will not do that to a grieving family. Telephone the consular section and ask what the endorsement costs.
Myanmar is not in the apostille system at all
This is the one point on this page that is completely settled. The HCCH status table for the Apostille Convention, read on September 21, 2026, lists 130 contracting parties, and Myanmar is not among them. Read the table alphabetically and Morocco is followed straight by Namibia. There is no Burma entry either. So an apostille from Texas is not the finishing step for a Myanmar document, whatever a general article about international paperwork may tell you.
What replaces it is the older and slower route: a Texas document is authenticated and then legalized by the embassy that holds jurisdiction, which is Washington. The Texas Secretary of State’s authentication pages describe the state-level certificate that comes first. Budget mailing time in both directions, because the embassy is thirteen hundred miles from Dallas and there is no counter closer. Our guide to the paperwork explains the difference between an apostille and a legalization.
What the airlines actually publish
There is no nonstop from Dallas/Fort Worth to Yangon, so this will be a connection, and the carrier that operates the last leg matters as much as the first. Thai Airways Cargo publishes its human remains conditions in plain English: the shipment must be accompanied by a death certificate issued by the appropriate authorities in the country of death, and the coffin must be secured in rigid caskets preventing shifting and the escape of offensive odors. On ashes the same page is more relaxed, saying funeral urns may be carried on any passenger or cargo aircraft provided governmental rules and regulations have been complied with.
At the far end, Myanmar Airways International tells you who will be handling the aircraft: it provides ground handling at Yangon International Airport with its own personnel, covering the acceptance, storage, loading and unloading of cargo. It does not publish a human remains product, so do not assume one exists. We also tried to read the dedicated human-remains pages of three other carriers and could not: two would not render their own text and one refused our request outright. Nothing from those pages appears here.
| Question | Who to ask |
|---|---|
| Which office has jurisdiction | The embassy in Washington, D.C. |
| What the endorsement costs | The consular section, by telephone |
| Authentication of the Texas documents | Texas Secretary of State, then the embassy |
| Casket and urn specification | The airline’s cargo department |
| Who meets the flight at Yangon | The receiving funeral home in Myanmar |
Flight rules and the money question
Two things families ask about, answered separately. On flying, we read the Federal Aviation Administration’s own index of United States flight restrictions by country. Its alphabetical list runs from Afghanistan through Yemen, and Burma, Myanmar and Yangon appear nowhere on it. There is no American flight prohibition standing between Dallas and Yangon.
Money is a different matter and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The Treasury keeps a live Burma-related sanctions program and publishes business advisories under it. We are not going to characterise what that program covers, because the answer depends on who is being paid and through which bank, and getting it wrong in either direction would be worse than saying nothing. Raise it with your own bank before you wire anything to Myanmar, and raise it with the airline before you book, so that a payment is not the thing that strands a shipment.
Questions families ask about a return to Myanmar
- Do I contact Los Angeles or Washington?
- Washington. The embassy publishes the consular service areas of all three of its missions in the United States, and Texas falls to the Washington office at 2300 S Street, N.W. Los Angeles covers eight western states and does not cover Texas.
- Will a Texas apostille be accepted?
- No. Myanmar is not a party to the Apostille Convention and has no row in the HCCH table. Texas documents take the older authentication-then-legalization route through the embassy.
- What does the embassy charge for the death certificate endorsement?
- We do not know, and we will not guess. The form is a Burmese-language scan whose figures do not extract reliably, so the only honest answer is to telephone the consular section and ask.
Sources checked and case confirmation
Sources checked September 21, 2026. Myanmar publishes less about this than almost any country in these guides: no English procedure, no readable fee, no human-remains product from the national carrier, and no entry on the Texas consular index. Each of those is stated above as a gap rather than filled in. Confirm the documents, the fee, the route and the receiving arrangements for the individual case. Contact Vargas–London with the township in Myanmar and where your relative is now, without sending medical or identity documents through the inquiry form.
