Replacing a Lost Citizenship or Naturalization Certificate

If your certificate of citizenship or naturalization is lost, stolen, destroyed or damaged, the replacement is requested from USCIS on Form N-565. The same form handles a certificate that carries the wrong name after a court-ordered change, a gender marker update, or a typographical error. This is federal territory from start to finish: certificates are issued under federal law by a federal agency, and no county clerk, state vital records office or city hall can replace one, amend one, or issue a certified copy of one.

What the form covers, and what it does not

N-565 covers four situations that look similar and are handled slightly differently. Two of them are simple losses. The other two involve changing what the document says.

What the form does not do is prove citizenship on its own, replace a lost U.S. passport, or produce a certified photocopy. USCIS does not issue certified copies of certificates at all, and photocopying a certificate for your own records is permitted even though the printed warning language on older certificates makes people nervous about it.

Derived and acquired citizenship cases sometimes need a first certificate rather than a replacement. If you became a citizen automatically through a parent and never held a document in your own name, the filing is a different one, and USCIS refuses the wrong form rather than redirecting it — which is why people in that position often confirm which application applies with immigration legal counsel before paying a filing fee they cannot get back.

Worth knowing: A certificate that is simply worn, faded or torn at the edges is still valid. USCIS asks for a replacement when the document is mutilated to the point that the information or the photograph cannot be read, not merely because it looks old.

Proving you are a citizen in the meantime

Replacement takes a while, and most of what people actually need the certificate for can be done with a U.S. passport or passport card instead. The passport is issued by the Department of State, a different agency with a different queue, and it is accepted for employment verification, travel, benefits applications and almost every routine identity purpose.

• A valid U.S. passport or passport card, which is accepted as standalone proof of both identity and citizenship.
• An expired passport, which still shows citizenship for many purposes even though it no longer works for travel.
• A U.S. birth certificate, if citizenship came by birth in the country rather than by naturalization.
• A Consular Report of Birth Abroad, for people born to U.S. citizen parents overseas.
• The USCIS receipt notice for the pending N-565, which proves a request exists but proves nothing about status.

Tip: If you still have any copy or photograph of the missing certificate, it will carry the certificate number and the date and place of naturalization. Those details make the request far easier to process, and they are the first things the form asks for.

Filing the request

Agency errors versus changes you made

The distinction matters because it decides who pays and what evidence is persuasive. If the certificate was printed with a misspelling that does not match the application you filed, that is the agency's error and USCIS treats correction as its own to fix. If your name on the certificate matches the application exactly but you have since married, divorced or changed it by court order, that is a change you made, and the request is a replacement rather than a correction.

A third category causes the most trouble: information that was wrong on the original application. Where a date of birth or a place of birth was recorded incorrectly years earlier and carried through into the certificate, USCIS will usually want the underlying foreign civil record — a birth certificate, a passport issued at the time — before it will change what the certificate says.

Careful: Never alter a certificate yourself, not even to cross out a misspelling. A physically altered certificate can be treated as invalid, and in the wrong context an altered federal document raises questions no one wants to answer.

If the certificate never arrived at all

Occasionally someone completes the naturalization interview and the oath ceremony but never receives the certificate, or receives it and surrenders it to a passport agency that does not return it. Those are not N-565 situations in the ordinary sense; the first step is contacting USCIS about the ceremony record, and the second is checking with the passport agency, since certificates submitted with a passport application are generally returned separately and can take a different route through the mail.

Common questions

Do I lose my citizenship if I lose the certificate?

No. Citizenship is a status, not a piece of paper. Losing the certificate does not affect it in any way, and nothing about your rights changes while a replacement is pending. The document exists to prove the status to employers, agencies and foreign governments, which is why replacing it matters practically even though it is legally irrelevant to whether you are a citizen.

Can I use a photocopy while I wait?

A photocopy is not accepted as proof by employers completing an I-9, by the Social Security Administration, or by most benefit agencies, because they need to examine an original or a listed acceptable document. Keeping a photocopy is still worth doing, since it preserves the certificate number and issuance details you will need on the replacement form. For proof in the meantime, use a passport.

My relative died and we cannot find their certificate. Can we get a copy?

USCIS does not reissue a certificate to anyone other than the person named on it, and the form is not available to survivors. What families can request instead is a copy of the immigration file through the agency's records request process, which often contains the naturalization record and can establish the fact of naturalization for probate, pension or dual nationality purposes abroad.

Does a replacement certificate keep the original naturalization date?

Yes. The replacement records the same date and place of naturalization as the original, because it documents an event that already happened. What changes is the issue date printed on the new document and, where relevant, the name. That matters for anything that depends on how long you have been a citizen, such as passing citizenship to a child born abroad under the transmission rules.

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