Request Military Records From the National Archives
Almost every guide to this subject explains where to mail the form. Very few explain the thing that actually decides the outcome: a service file spends most of its life as Department of Defense property, and then, sixty-two years after the servicemember leaves the military, it stops being theirs and becomes a record of the National Archives. That single change of ownership sets who may ask, whether a signature is needed, what it costs, and which building you deal with. And it collides with a second date. The records that have just opened to the public are, very largely, the same records the 1973 St. Louis fire reached first. This page treats a records request as two questions rather than one: are you allowed to have it, and does it still exist.
The Short Version
Work out the ownership question first, because everything else follows from it. Under a schedule the National Archives and the Department of Defense signed on 8 July 2004, a military personnel file transfers from Defense ownership to National Archives ownership sixty-two years after the servicemember’s separation, and separation means discharge, retirement, or death in service. Once transferred, the file is archival: anyone may order a copy, no relationship to the veteran is required, no signature is required, and a published copying fee applies. Before that point the file is still in the legal custody of the Department of Defense, and only the veteran, a qualifying next of kin, or someone holding the veteran’s written authorization can obtain the full record. Then ask the second question, which most guides skip. The National Archives records that the 1973 fire at its St. Louis center destroyed roughly sixteen to eighteen million Army and Air Force personnel files covering discharges from 1912 to 1964, and that no duplicates, microfilm, or indexes existed beforehand, so no complete list of what burned has ever existed. Those discharge years overlap almost exactly with the years that are now archival. A file can be intact, damaged but readable, too fragile to produce, rebuilt from other sources, or simply gone. People Locator Skip Tracing works out which of those you are facing before you spend a fee, assembles the identifiers a search actually needs, and locates the living people the record points to.
Watch: Why the File May Not Exist
The ownership line, the burned window, and what actually arrives.
Watch Overview
A File Does Not Just Open. It Changes Owner.
The sixty-two-year line is a transfer of property, not a privacy setting.
People tend to picture the sixty-two-year threshold as a lock that clicks open on a shelf somewhere, with the same file sitting in the same box under a new rule. That is not what happens, and the difference matters for anyone filling in a form. On 8 July 2004 the National Archives and Records Administration and the Department of Defense signed a records schedule that made Official Military Personnel Files permanent records of the United States. The Archives describe what that schedule does in plain terms: it mandates the legal transfer of these files from Defense ownership to National Archives ownership sixty-two years after the servicemember’s separation from the military.
Read that again with the word ownership underlined. Before the line, the file belongs to the military service department that created it, and the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis is holding it on that department’s behalf under the Federal Records Center program. After the line, the Archives are blunt about the change: archival records are no longer the property of the agencies that created them, but are records of the National Archives, open to the general public. The Archives state the same point from the other direction on their archival-request page, noting that records of people who left service less than sixty-two years ago are non-archival and remain in the legal custody of the Department of Defense.
That is why the two request paths feel so different in practice. A request for a non-archival file is a request to a federal agency for a protected record about a named living or recently deceased person, and it is policed accordingly. A request for an archival file is a request to a national archive for a document in its permanent holdings, in the same way you would ask for a ship’s manifest or a land patent. The clerk is not being more generous in the second case. They are answering to a different statute about a different thing they own.
The transfer happened in blocks, not all at once
The 2004 schedule is still being worked through, and the sequence is worth knowing because it explains why a Navy file from a given year may already be open while an Air Force file from the same year is not. The Archives record that the first transfer opened the records of 1.2 million Navy and Marine Corps veterans in July 2005. In November 2007 they opened 6.3 million files covering the Army, including the Army Air Corps and Army Air Forces, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard. Air Force records came later still: the Archives note that they accepted the first block of Air Force files in September 2009, on the sixty-second anniversary of the creation of the Air Force itself. If a request for one branch behaves differently from a request for another in the same era, that history is usually the reason.
One narrow exception that opens a file early
The same 2004 schedule permits an early transfer for what the Archives call Persons of Exceptional Prominence, and the trigger is different in kind: a PEP file may move across as soon as ten years after the individual’s date of death, rather than sixty-two years after separation. The category covers presidents, members of Congress and the Supreme Court, well-known military commanders, decorated servicemembers, and cultural figures who served. It is a genuinely small program and it will not help with an ordinary family search, but if the person you are researching was publicly notable it is worth asking about before assuming the ordinary clock applies. We do not publish a figure for how many PEP files are open, because two pages on the Archives’ own site give two different counts, and picking one would mean asserting something the source does not settle.
Do the Arithmetic Yourself
The rule is a subtraction. The worked examples you will find are older than the rule.
The Archives state the calculation without any ambiguity: take the current year and subtract sixty-two. Separation, for this purpose, is defined as discharge, retirement, or death in service, and the date rolls forward every January. So in 2026 the subtraction lands on 1964, and a separation in or before that year should be on the archival side of the line.
Here is the part that trips up careful readers, and it is worth saying out loud rather than pretending the source is tidier than it is. The Archives’ own pages illustrate the rule with concrete cutoff years, and those illustrations have not all been refreshed in step with the rule. One page works the example using 2014 and arrives at 1952. The archival-requests page frames itself as applying to people who separated before 1960. A third page lists archival as a discharge date of 1962 or prior and non-archival as 1963 or after. The stated rule is stable and consistent everywhere; only the worked examples drift, because a rolling date needs annual editing and a written rule does not.
The practical consequence is simple. Do the subtraction yourself from the year you are actually in, and treat any printed cutoff year as an illustration rather than as the boundary. If the separation date you are working with sits within two or three years of the line, ask the Records Center where that specific file stands before you pay for anything, because you may be requesting under the wrong framework entirely and the difference determines whether a signature is required.
A separation date is not a service date
The clock runs from the day the person left, not the day they joined, and that catches people out constantly. Someone who enlisted in 1942 and stayed in until 1968 has a service history that feels thoroughly historical, but their file will not be archival until 2030. A career of twenty or thirty years pushes the opening date decades past what the war years would suggest. If you have a discharge document in hand, the separation date printed on it is the number that governs, which is one of several reasons a DD-214 discharge paper is worth reading closely before you write to anyone.
One disambiguation, because search engines conflate them
If you are researching a British serviceman, the institution you want is The National Archives at Kew in England, which holds United Kingdom service records under an entirely separate legal regime with its own fees and its own release periods. It is a different organization from the United States National Archives and Records Administration, and nothing on this page applies to it. Search results for phrases like “request a military service record” mix the two constantly, so check which country’s archive you have landed on before filling anything in.
Who May Ask, and What It Costs
Three request paths, with genuinely different rules attached.
Once you know which side of the ownership line a file sits on, the request path picks itself. There are three, and confusing them is the single most common reason a request comes back with less than the requester expected.
An archival file, requested by anyone
Separated sixty-two or more years ago. The Archives are explicit that the veteran’s or next-of-kin’s signature is not required on a request for copies of archival records, and no relationship to the veteran is needed. You buy a complete photocopy of the file under the Archives’ published fee schedule, which is authorized by 44 U.S.C. 2307 and 44 U.S.C. 2116(c).
A recent file, requested by the veteran or next of kin
The Archives define next of kin narrowly: the un-remarried widow or widower, son, daughter, father, mother, brother, or sister of the deceased veteran, and they state that veterans and next of kin have the same access rights to the record. Next of kin must also supply proof of death, such as a death certificate, a funeral home letter, or a published obituary.
A recent file, requested by everyone else
You count as general public if you are not the veteran, or you are a relative who is not the next of kin. Without consent the Records Center can release only limited information from a non-archival file, and the Archives describe that limit as striking a balance between the public’s right of access under the Freedom of Information Act and the veteran’s privacy under the Privacy Act.
The signature rule is statutory, and it expires
For non-archival records the requirement is not an internal preference. The Archives cite the source directly on their Standard Form 180 guidance: federal law at 5 U.S.C. 552a(b) requires that all written requests for federal, non-archival records be signed and dated within the last year. A photocopied signature from an old file, or an authorization the veteran signed several years ago, will not carry the request. That single detail sends more forms back than any other.
What a request has to contain to be findable at all
The Records Center is looking for one file among tens of millions, and it needs enough to disambiguate. The Archives ask for the veteran’s complete name as used in service, the service number, the Social Security number where one applies, the branch, the dates of service, and the date and place of birth. Where a file falls inside the burned window they add three more that most requesters never think to supply: place of discharge, last assigned unit, and place of entry into service. Those three are not bureaucratic padding. They are the fields a reconstruction is built from when the original file is not there to answer.
What the copies actually cost
Archival requests submitted online, by mail, or by fax require the purchase of the complete photocopy, not a selection of pages. The Archives publish a set charge of $25 for a routine file of five pages or less and $70 for one of six pages or more, and note that most files fall into the second category. Files of Persons of Exceptional Prominence are charged per page instead, at $0.80 with a $20 minimum. Visiting in person changes the economics substantially: there is no fee to request and review an archival record in the Archival Research Room, and copies made there run $0.80 per page by an attendant or $0.25 per page self-service. For non-archival records requested by a veteran or next of kin, the Archives state that there is generally no charge for basic personnel and health record information.
Reading the Loss Table
The 1973 fire is usually quoted as a mood. It is actually a table with boundaries.
The fire began just after midnight on 12 July 1973, on the sixth floor of the Records Center’s military personnel building in St. Louis. Firefighters were inside within four and a half minutes of the alarm and were driven back out by heat and smoke before dawn; forty-two fire districts were eventually drawn in, one pumper truck failed after forty hours of continuous running, and the blaze was not declared out until the sixteenth. Investigators were never able to establish a cause. The National Archives put the destruction at approximately sixteen to eighteen million Official Military Personnel Files, and we quote their figure rather than any of the larger or more precise-sounding numbers that circulate, because those do not appear anywhere in the agency’s own account.
What most retellings leave out is that the Archives publish the loss as a bounded table rather than as a general catastrophe, and the boundaries are the useful part:
- Army — personnel discharged 1 November 1912 to 1 January 1960 — an estimated 80 percent destroyed.
- Air Force — personnel discharged 25 September 1947 to 1 January 1964, with names falling alphabetically after Hubbard, James E. — an estimated 75 percent destroyed.
Two branches, two date ranges, and in the Air Force case an alphabetical break partway through the surnames. A Navy, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard file does not appear in that table at all. Neither does an Air Force file for someone whose surname sorts before that break. Before you conclude that a search is hopeless, check the person against the table rather than against the general reputation of the fire.
The Department of Veterans Affairs adds a carve-out that the Archives’ own fire page does not state, and it rescues a meaningful number of searches: on its guidance for reconstructing records, the VA writes that the fire did not involve records for retirees and Reservists who were alive on 12 July 1973. Someone who had retired from the Army in the 1950s and was still living on the day of the fire is therefore in a different position from someone with an ordinary discharge in the same year.
Why nobody can tell you whether one specific file burned
The Archives are unusually direct about this. No duplicate copies of the records were ever maintained, no microfilm copies were produced, and no indexes existed before the fire. In addition, millions of documents had been lent to the Veterans Administration before it happened and were elsewhere. Their conclusion follows: a complete listing of the records that were lost is not available. So a percentage is the most honest answer anyone can give you about an individual, and any service promising certainty about whether a named person’s file survived is telling you something the record does not support.
The two windows sit almost exactly on top of each other
Now put the two halves of this page together, which is the step most guides never take. The Archives summarize the fire as having damaged or destroyed Army and Air Force records documenting service for personnel discharged from 1912 to 1964. Separately, the sixty-two-year rule means that as of 2026 the files open to the general public are those of people who separated in 1964 or earlier. Those are very nearly the same span of years.
The overlap is not a coincidence, it is arithmetic, but the consequence is real and it is uncomfortable. The moment a mid-century Army or Air Force file becomes something anyone may order without permission is roughly the moment you discover it may not be there to order. Public access arrived for this generation of records at the same time as the highest probability of loss. That is the actual shape of this subject, and a page that only explains the form would leave you to find it out by paying a fee.
Five Conditions a File Can Be In
Survival is not a yes or a no. There is a gradient, and each rung produces a different envelope.
1. Intact, never touched
The person served in a branch the loss table does not cover, or separated outside the burned date ranges, or their surname sorts before the Air Force alphabetical break. The file is ordinary. What comes back is the complete photocopy you paid for.
2. Burned, recovered, still readable
Roughly 6.5 million burned and water-damaged records were pulled out and indexed into what the Archives call the B registry, a temperature-controlled holding for damaged files. These exist and can usually be copied, though what survives of an individual file may be partial and scorched at the edges.
3. Recovered but too damaged to hand over
The Archives state that fire-damaged records must be examined by preservation staff and treated where necessary for mold or other damage, that severely damaged files may need lengthy conservation before they can be handled or copied, and that in some cases a record cannot be produced for review at all. Where possible, photocopies are supplied instead of the original.
4. Gone, but the service rebuilt from elsewhere
In April 1974 the Archives established an R registry for reconstructed files, built from auxiliary sources they name: Veterans Administration claims files, state records, Multiple Name Pay Vouchers from the Adjutant General’s Office, Selective Service registration records, Government Accounting Office pay records, military hospital records, entrance and separation x-rays, and organizational records. What arrives is a documented outline of service, not the original file.
5. Gone, with nothing to rebuild from
The fifth condition is the one nobody writes a page about. The file burned, the alternate sources have no entry for this person, and the answer is that the service cannot be documented from federal holdings. It is a real outcome and it is worth knowing it exists before you build a plan on the assumption that persistence always wins.
Two practical notes about the fourth condition. First, the Archives were able to preserve the machinery of reconstruction because of a decision made eleven days after the fire: on 23 July 1973 the government issued a Federal Property Management Regulations bulletin, FPMR B-39, halting federal agencies from disposing of records that might be useful in documenting military service. Material that would otherwise have been routinely destroyed over the following decades is still available because of that freeze.
Second, where a claim depends on medical evidence the VA directs requesters to a specific instrument, NA Form 13055, the Request for Information Needed to Reconstruct Medical Data, and asks for as much organizational detail as the requester can supply: unit, company, battalion, regiment, squadron, group, wing. That list tells you what reconstruction actually runs on. It is not searching by name through a rebuilt file, it is finding the person inside records that were organized around units rather than individuals. If the purpose of your request is a benefits question rather than a family history one, our guide to tracing benefits owed to a deceased veteran covers the adjacent ground.
Side by Side, Before and After the Line
The same physical file, two entirely different legal objects.
| The question | Archival (separated 62+ years ago) | Non-archival (more recent) |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns it | A record of the National Archives; no longer the property of the creating service department | Remains in the legal custody of the Department of Defense, held under the Federal Records Center program |
| Who may get a full copy | Anyone. No relationship to the veteran required | The veteran, a qualifying next of kin, or a third party holding the veteran’s written authorization |
| Signature on the request | Not required | Required, signed and dated within the last year under 5 U.S.C. 552a(b) |
| Proof of death | Not required | Required when next of kin is asking: death certificate, funeral home letter, or published obituary |
| Cost of a mailed copy | $25 for five pages or less, $70 for six or more; PEP files $0.80 per page, $20 minimum | Generally no charge for basic personnel and health record information |
| Reading it in person | Archival Research Room, by appointment, no fee to view | A separate Federal Records Center research room; the general public has no direct access |
| Exposure to the 1973 fire | High for Army and Air Force files inside the burned windows | Largely outside the burned windows, which end at 1 January 1964 |
| Where we come in OURS | Confirm the file is archival, assemble the identifiers, and pursue the living people the record names | Establish who actually holds standing, and be honest about what the limited public release can and cannot answer |
The Envelope Is Not the Archive
What arrives, how long the queue is, and why an appointment beats a mailed copy.
The Records Center is not a slow website. It is a working archive with a physical queue, and the Archives put its volume at approximately four to five thousand requests per day. They ask requesters to allow about ten days simply for a request to be received and entered into processing before checking on it, and they say plainly that response times vary greatly with the complexity of the request and the availability of the records. We do not publish a turnaround estimate here, because the Archives do not publish one and the figures that circulate come from commercial ordering services rather than from the agency.
Requests that need reconstruction sit at the slow end by design. The Archives explain that they can sometimes rebuild a service history promptly from alternate records already in their own holdings, but that other times they must go out to external agencies for material, which is why a reconstruction case can take considerably longer than a straightforward copy.
Why serious researchers go to St. Louis
For an archival file, the Archival Research Room changes what is possible in a way the fee schedule alone does not convey. Reviewing a record there costs nothing, where a mailed request obliges you to buy the complete photocopy sight unseen. More importantly, a damaged file is a physical object with a condition, and the Archives are candid that the efficiency of available finding aids varies and that identifying and locating a requested record can take considerable time. Someone standing at the table can see what state a file is in and decide what is worth copying. Appointments are required, seating is limited, and archival and non-archival records are read in two separate research rooms, so a researcher who needs both must book both.
What the file will not tell you
A personnel file documents an individual’s administrative service history. It is not a battle narrative and it is not a unit history, and requesters who arrive hoping to read what happened on a particular day are usually disappointed. It is also a snapshot of the person as they were when they left the service, which is the practical limit that brings most people to us: a file can confirm who someone was, and it will not tell you where they are now. That gap is ordinary skip tracing work, and it starts where the archive stops. The same is true in reverse for people who arrive holding an artifact rather than a name, whether that is a set of military dog tags found in an old house or a medal that needs to go back to a family, which is the situation behind our guide on returning a Purple Heart to the veteran’s family.
How We Work a Records Request
Four steps, in an order chosen to stop you paying for the wrong thing.
Fix the separation date
Everything hinges on it, so we establish it from a document rather than from family memory, then run the subtraction against the current year to determine which side of the ownership line the file sits on.
Check the person against the loss table
Branch, discharge date, and where relevant the surname against the Air Force alphabetical break. This tells us the realistic probability of survival before a fee is spent, and whether the VA’s retiree and Reservist carve-out applies.
Build the identifier set
Name as used in service, service number, branch, service dates, date and place of birth, and for a burned-window case the place of discharge, last assigned unit, and place of entry. A thin request is the most common reason a search returns nothing findable.
Carry the result forward to people
A file gives you a person as they were decades ago. We take the confirmed identity and work it forward through lawful public records to the veteran, or to the family living today, which is the part an archive cannot do for you.
Who Asks Us for a Service File
The request is rarely the goal. It is usually one step in something larger.
Family biographers
Writing a life and needing the service years documented
Grave marker applicants
Needing service proof for a headstone or a burial benefit
Probate filers
Establishing a decedent’s service for an estate matter
Burial benefit filers
Assembling documentation for a national cemetery request
Unit history writers
Confirming that a named individual was where a source says
Documentary teams
Verifying a subject’s service before it goes on screen
What We Promise, and What We Refuse
A records request is one of the easier things in this field to misuse. Here is where we stop.
Nobody here will sign a form as somebody’s next of kin
This deserves naming rather than implying, because it is the specific temptation this subject creates. The fastest route to a non-archival file is a next-of-kin request, and the definition is a short list of relationships that a stranger cannot join. We will not sign a request claiming to be a veteran’s widow, child, parent, or sibling; we will not sign one on a client’s behalf claiming they are; and we will not coach anyone through wording designed to leave that impression with a clerk. The same applies to proof of death: the document exists to establish a fact, not to unlock a shortcut. If you hold standing, we will help you assemble a clean and complete request. If you do not, the honest answer is that the archival route or the limited public release is what is available to you, and we will say so rather than manufacture a relationship.
The request that gets more scrutiny at intake, not less
Consider what a service file can carry. Older records name family members and the addresses they lived at, and a confirmed identity plus a date of birth is precisely the raw material an unwanted search runs on. Some veterans have deliberately put distance between themselves and a former partner, an estranged relative, or someone who frightened them, and a records request is a quiet, official-looking way to start closing that distance. So a request that reads as an attempt to reach a person who has stopped being reachable gets more questions from us, not fewer, and we would rather lose the work than be the reason a person is found by someone they were hiding from. We decline outright where we assess a domestic violence, stalking, or harassment risk, and we do not soften that into a delay or a quiet non-response. If you are the person at risk here, the National Domestic Violence Hotline operates around the clock at 1-800-799-7233, and most states run an Address Confidentiality Program that gives survivors a substitute mailing address for public records. Those are the right resources, and they are not us.
Where the law draws our lines, and where our own judgment does
We are a public records research firm, and we are not licensed private investigators: nobody on this team holds that license and we never let a client assume otherwise. We take a case only where there is a permissible purpose for the research, and we ask what that purpose is before we start, because the answer decides what we may lawfully touch. We do not use pretexting: we do not call an agency, a records clerk, or a family member pretending to be someone else, and we do not misstate why we are asking. We do not reach into the contents of anyone’s private financial accounts. We are not a consumer reporting agency and nothing we produce is a consumer report, so our work cannot be used to decide tenancy, employment, credit, or insurance eligibility, and if that is what you need, a screening company operating under the Fair Credit Reporting Act is the correct provider. Nothing on this page is legal advice; it is general information about a federal records process, and the fee amounts, contact details, and access rules described here are the Archives’ to change without telling us.
We would rather tell you it burned
The easiest thing to sell on this subject is hope, and we will not do it. If the person you are researching sits inside the Army or Air Force loss window, we will tell you the percentage before you spend anything and we will say plainly that no one can promise a specific file survived, because the Archives kept no list of what was lost. Where the record does exist, we assemble the request properly the first time, and for a legitimate matter an initial locate on the living people that record points to typically comes back within 24 hours. Where it does not exist, we say so and tell you what reconstruction can realistically produce. You will always know which of those you are paying for.
Questions Requesters Send Us
The eight that come up before anyone has filled in a form.
Are military service records public?
Can I request someone else’s military records if I am not next of kin?
How do I work out whether a record is archival yet?
Were the records destroyed in the 1973 St. Louis fire?
What does it cost to get an archival military record?
Do I have to sign the request?
What happens if nothing comes back?
What does People Locator Skip Tracing actually do on a request like this?
Find Out Whether the File Still Exists
Before you buy a photocopy of something that may have burned in 1973, let us fix the separation date, check the person against the loss table, and build a request the Records Center can actually act on. If the record is there, we will get it requested correctly the first time. If it is not, we will tell you that plainly and show you what reconstruction can realistically produce. Contact us and tell us the name, the branch, and the year they left.
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