Marriage Celebrant Record-Keeping Requirements: What the Law Actually Requires

Most celebrants know they have to lodge a Notice of Intended Marriage and issue a Form 15. Fewer know that failing to keep a compliant record of that Form 15, for years after the wedding, is its own offence, one that doesn't care whether you meant to get it wrong. That gap is easy to have missed. Training covers lodging the Notice and issuing the certificate; what happens to that certificate for the next six years gets far less airtime, and the rule that governs it doesn't forgive not knowing it was there. This page sets out exactly what the law requires, then, unlike most of what's written about this, an honest answer on how to actually meet it.

Quick answer: what you must keep, and for how long

Every Australian marriage celebrant must keep a record of what happened to each Form 15 marriage certificate they're issued: the serial number, and the date and details of how it was used, transferred or destroyed. That record has to be kept for six years from the date of the event it relates to, most often the wedding date. Getting it wrong is a strict-liability offence under the Marriage Regulations 2017: intent doesn't come into it, the gap in the paperwork is the offence itself.

What "record-keeping" actually means for a celebrant

This isn't a vague idea about running a tidy filing system. It's one specific legal duty: a register, kept by you, of what happened to every Form 15 certificate you've ever been issued (Marriage Regulations 2017, reg 73(5)). If your current system already tracks a Notice of Intended Marriage and a Form 15 through to the wedding day, this page is about what comes after, the part of the job that keeps running for years once the ceremony itself is long done.

If you want the background on what a Notice of Intended Marriage actually is, our state-by-state guide covers that ground; we won't repeat it here.

It's also worth separating this duty from one it's often confused with: forwarding a copy of the completed certificate to your state or territory's Births, Deaths and Marriages registry within 14 days of the wedding (Marriage Act 1961, s50(4)(a)(i)). That's a real, separate obligation: sending a copy. This page is about the other half, keeping your own record of what you did with your copy, and proving it for years afterward.

What you must record for every Form 15

Regulation 73(5) sets out exactly what has to go in the register, and it varies by what actually happened to the certificate:

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The Regulations also cover any other event that happens to a certificate you hold (reg 73(5)(e)), a catch-all for anything outside the four cases above. For almost every working celebrant, those four cases are the whole job.

How long you must keep it, the six-year rule

The six-year clock doesn't start when you're handed a blank certificate. It starts the day after the event that actually triggers a record: the date of the wedding if you used it, the date of the transfer if you passed it on, the date of the destruction if you destroyed it (Marriage Regulations 2017, reg 73(6)).

Worked example: you marry a couple on 12 March 2026. The record for that certificate needs to be kept until at least 13 March 2032, six years from the wedding, not six years from whenever the blank certificate first landed in your stationery.

Treat it as a rolling duty across a whole career, not a box you tick once. Every certificate you issue starts its own six-year clock on its own date. A celebrant doing twenty ceremonies a year is, in effect, always holding open several years' worth of overlapping deadlines at once, not one deadline that eventually goes away.

There are three situations where the duty switches off early: if you die, if you become permanently incapacitated, or if your registration as a celebrant ends, before the six years are up (reg 73(6)(b)(i)-(ii)). Outside those, the full six years apply, every time.

What happens if you get it wrong, the strict-liability offence

Breach reg 73(5) and you commit a strict-liability offence under reg 74(1). Strict liability means what it sounds like: it doesn't matter whether the gap was deliberate, an oversight, or something you genuinely didn't know the rule required. The gap in the record is the offence itself. The penalty is 2 penalty units, and because penalty units are indexed, the dollar figure moves over time.

There's a second offence most celebrants have never heard of. Under reg 73(7), the Minister, in practice the Registrar of Marriage Celebrants, can write to you and request a copy of your records within a stated period, most often as part of a celebrant's performance review. Not producing them is its own offence under reg 74(2), also carrying 2 penalty units. The Attorney-General's Department's own guidance is blunt about what's at stake: failing to produce the records on request "is a serious matter that would be taken into account in assessing the celebrant's performance."

A record-keeping breach isn't only a fine, either. Reg 73 and reg 74 breaches are also breaches of the Marriage Celebrants Code of Practice: celebrants must comply with the Marriage Regulations generally (Schedule 2, clause 4(a)), and keep records securely, specifically (Schedule 2, clause 5(b)(iii), the exact sub-clause the Attorney-General's Department's own guidelines cite for this obligation). That can open the door to the Registrar of Marriage Celebrants taking disciplinary action under s39I of the Marriage Act 1961, anywhere from a written caution, through mandatory professional development, to suspension of up to six months or deregistration, separately from, and in addition to, the strict-liability fine. The Registrar's power is discretionary, so a breach can lead to that outcome, not that it will. It's a real possibility, though, not a hypothetical one, and it's the part of this whole picture that rarely makes it into a "keep good records" reminder.

Two penalty units is $728 for an offence committed on or after 1 July 2026. The penalty unit was raised to $364 on that date and is indexed every three years, so the dollar figure moves even though the "2 penalty units" in the regulation never changes. Two separate breaches, the register itself and a failure to produce it on request, are two separate offences.

Related duties people mix up with this one

Two duties get mixed up constantly, and they're genuinely different things. Keeping the reg 73(5) register, the subject of this page, means holding your own record of what happened to each Form 15 certificate. Sending a copy to your state or territory's BDM registry within 14 days of the wedding (Marriage Act 1961, s50(4)(a)(i)) is separate: forwarding a copy, not keeping one.

That distinction answers a question we hear often, too: is this different state to state? The reg 73(5) duty itself isn't. It's Commonwealth law, identical wherever you practise in Australia. What does vary by state is the BDM lodgement process itself: different portals, different quirks, a separate topic to the one this page covers.

Worth knowing while we're here: Form 15 is the only prescribed marriage certificate form in Australia (Marriage Regulations 2017, reg 73(1), Schedule 1). If you've come across a reference to a different numbered form for this exact purpose, it isn't accurate.

Can you keep this on a spreadsheet? Does it have to be digital?

Short answer: yes, and yes. The Marriage Regulations don't specify a format for the reg 73(5) register. All reg 73(6)(a) requires is that records be kept "in a form acceptable to the Minister."

The Attorney-General's Department's own guidance settles the digital question directly, not as commentary but as the government body that administers this: celebrants can keep their Form 15 record-of-use form, and their retained copy of the marriage certificate, electronically.

So a spreadsheet, in principle, is genuinely fine. The catch was never the format. It's whether you actually keep it complete, for every certificate, without a gap, for six years running. A spreadsheet with one missed row is exactly the kind of thing reg 74(1) doesn't care about your intentions when it finds. If you're weighing up whether a spreadsheet is still the right call for your whole practice, not just this one register, our spreadsheets vs CRM comparison goes into where that tips over.

One thing this page won't try to settle: what privacy law says about the identity documents you sight along the way, birth certificates, passports, and the like. That's a different Act, the Privacy Act 1988, with its own small-business rules, and it's a genuinely separate question from anything the Marriage Regulations cover. If you're not sure where you stand, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is the place to check, not a blog post, including this one.

How CelebrantCentral keeps this register for you

CelebrantCentral keeps a Form 15 record-of-use register for you. Every certificate you're issued is logged against the ceremony it belongs to, in one place instead of a separate spreadsheet or folder you have to remember to update.

That's the whole claim for this page: the reg 73(5) register, kept for you, inside the same record as the rest of the ceremony. For the fuller picture, including how purpose-built software for this compares with a spreadsheet or a generic CRM, our Notice of Intended Marriage software guide covers that ground.

What happens to the register if you stop using CelebrantCentral?

You can export everything, including your Form 15 register, for 90 days after closing your account. After that we delete or de-identify it, and residual backup copies are purged within a further 35 days. The part worth being blunt about: closing your account does not discharge your obligation. The six-year duty under reg 73(5) is yours, not your software's, so export the register before you go and keep it somewhere you control. Any tool that implies otherwise is selling you a risk.