Antenuptial contracts are registered at the Deeds Office, not at Home Affairs. If you signed one and no longer have your copy — or you are an executor, an attorney or a spouse who needs to prove the marital regime — we retrieve it from the registry where it was registered and email it to you.
An antenuptial contract (ANC) is the agreement signed before a marriage that puts the couple out of community of property, with or without the accrual system. It is executed before a notary and then registered at a Deeds Office — which is why Home Affairs cannot give you a copy, and why the marriage certificate does not tell you what the matrimonial property regime is.
The copy we retrieve is the registered contract itself, under Section 66 of the Deeds Registries Act, marked for information purposes. It shows the parties, the date, the notary, and the terms — including whether the accrual system applies and what assets were excluded from it.
An ANC is indexed by the parties, not by a property, so we search on people:
Names change and are recorded as they were at the time. If a search on the current surname finds nothing, the maiden name is usually the answer.
A "not found" result is a completed search and is charged for. That is not a technicality — for many customers it is the answer they are paying for, because confirming that no antenuptial contract was registered establishes that the marriage is in community of property, which is exactly what an executor or a bank needs in writing.
If the Master of the High Court, a court or a foreign authority requires a certified copy rather than an information copy, we can obtain one — that is a Section 70 certified copy, produced and stamped by the Deeds Office, and it takes weeks rather than days. The order panel above shows both options.
All eleven South African Deeds Offices are covered. The contract is emailed to you as a PDF.
No. Home Affairs registers the marriage; the Deeds Office registers the antenuptial contract. They are separate records held by separate departments, and your marriage certificate does not state the matrimonial property regime. The contract itself is the only document that does.
Then there is no antenuptial contract to find — marriage in community of property is the default and requires no contract. A search that returns nothing is the documented confirmation of that, which is often exactly what an executor, an attorney or a bank has asked you to produce.
Yes. Registered antenuptial contracts are kept permanently. Older ones are held on microfilm and have to be retrieved and scanned, so they take longer than recent ones. Give us the wife's maiden name and the approximate year — both matter more the further back the contract goes.
