Reviewed by Carlos Vargas, Texas Licensed Funeral Director (TFSC #119648) ·
One office, one fee, and no Texas address
There is no Sudanese consular office anywhere in Texas. The Texas Secretary of State publishes a directory of consular offices in the state and Sudan is not on it, so the file goes to Washington and only to Washington.
The Embassy of the Republic of Sudan publishes its particulars: 2210 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20008, on (202) 338-8565, with a consular mailbox rather than a switchboard extension. Its hours are worth reading twice, because the day is split. Consular services run Monday to Friday from ten until two. Document pick-up runs from two until four. They do not overlap, so the visit that lodges a file and the visit that collects it are two different visits.
One honest caution. The same contact page carries two different opening lines, Monday to Friday ten to four in its header and Monday to Thursday ten to four lower down. We are not going to resolve that for you. Telephone before travelling, and ask which day you are actually being offered.
Fifty-four dollars, for almost everything
Most destinations in these guides publish no fee at all. Sudan publishes one number and then repeats it. Document authentication is $54. Translation of a birth, marriage or divorce certificate is $54. A letter of no objection is $54. The only figure that breaks the pattern is commercial document authentication at $604, which is not a step in a repatriation.
The method is fixed as tightly as the amount, and it is the narrowest we have recorded. The embassy accepts a United States Postal Service money order, a company check or a cashier’s check. It states that it will not accept personal checks. Walk-in applicants may pay cash, and credit and debit cards are not accepted at all. Payments are made out to Embassy of Sudan.
If the file goes by post, the embassy requires a return envelope from USPS, FedEx or UPS carrying a tracking number, with postage paid by the applicant, and warns that without one the processed documents will be delayed.
| Item | What the embassy states |
|---|---|
| Standard document authentication | $54 |
| Translation of a civil certificate | $54 |
| Letter of no objection | $54 |
| Personal check | Not accepted |
| Credit or debit card | Not accepted |
| Cash | Walk-in applicants only |
The sentence about your flight
One line on the no-objection page deserves to be read by anyone arranging a departure, because it answers the question families ask first and answers it in the direction they do not expect.
The embassy states that it needs five to seven business days, that flight itineraries are not considered means to expedite processing, and that it will not bear responsibility for changes to an applicant’s flight arrangements caused by delays in processing. In plain terms: booking the flight does not move the file, and a booked flight is not an argument. Lodge the paperwork first and let it set the date.
That line sits on the no-objection page rather than on a repatriation page, and we quote it as what it is — the embassy’s stated posture on urgency, published for one service. Whether it applies identically to a death case is a question for the consular section, not something to assume from this page.
Outside the apostille system, so three offices instead of one
Sudan does not appear anywhere on the HCCH status table for the Apostille Convention. We read the table in full and searched it; Sudan is absent, while Liberia and Senegal are present, which is how we know the reading worked rather than the page failing to load.
So a Texas death certificate does not travel on an apostille here. It travels on the older chain, and unusually the embassy sets that chain out itself: documents issued by United States authorities must first be authenticated by the Department of State, and it adds, in its own parenthesis, that the Department of State requires the document to be authenticated first by the state in which it was issued. That is three offices in sequence — Austin, then Washington, then the embassy — and the embassy asks to be given a copy of the document the Department of State authenticated.
Texas is the first of the three. It issues a universal apostille certificate that serves as both authentication and apostille, and charges fifteen dollars per document, expressly per document and not per page. Recordable documents must be under five years old, must not be notarised, and the request has to name the destination country.
What the embassy does not publish
We read the consular section of the embassy site in full. It runs to a dozen published services — visas, passport renewal, the national number, birth certificates, powers of attorney, police clearance, emergency travel documents, translation, authentication, appointments and the no-objection letter. None of them is repatriation, transport of remains, or a funeral.
So the honest position is this. The steps above are the ones Sudan publishes for getting a United States document accepted in Sudan, and a death certificate is such a document. What we did not find, and therefore do not state, is any Sudanese requirement list for remains arriving from abroad: no container specification, no burial deadline, no named permit, no arrival procedure and no fee for a transport document. The translation service the embassy does publish runs the other way, translating documents already authenticated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Khartoum, so it is not the route for a Texas certificate.
Nor does this page say anything about conditions inside Sudan, about flights, routes or carriers, or about which airports are receiving. No official source we read addresses any of it, and silence is reported as silence rather than filled from somewhere else.
Questions families ask about a return to Sudan
- Is there a Sudanese consulate in Texas?
- No. The Texas Secretary of State’s directory of consular offices in Texas does not list Sudan, so the file goes to the embassy in Washington.
- Does a Texas apostille work for Sudan?
- No. Sudan is not on the Apostille Convention status table, so a document goes through three offices: the state, then the United States Department of State, then the embassy, which is the chain the embassy publishes itself.
- What does the embassy charge, and how is it paid?
- $54 for standard document authentication. It accepts a postal money order, a company check or a cashier’s check, takes cash only from walk-in applicants, and accepts neither personal checks nor cards.
Sources checked and case confirmation
Sources checked September 22, 2026 on the Texas Secretary of State directory of consular offices in Texas; the Sudanese embassy pages for document authentication, translation services, the letter of no objection and contacts, together with the full published consular menu; the HCCH status table of the Apostille Convention, read in full and searched; and the Texas Secretary of State pages on authentication and on requesting a universal apostille. What this page deliberately does not claim: any Sudanese requirement for remains arriving from abroad, because no source we read states one; that the five to seven day timing or the refusal to expedite applies to a death case, because it is published for the no-objection letter; any resolution of the two different opening-hours lines on the embassy’s own contact page; and anything about conditions inside Sudan, about airports, flights, routes or carriers. No airline, route or crate specification is stated here, and no individual is named. Contact Vargas-London with the state in Sudan and where your relative is now, without sending medical or identity documents through the inquiry form.
