I raised three kids mostly on my own while building this practice, which means for a lot of years, "business hours" and "hours I was actually free" barely overlapped. I'd get the kids to bed, and then I'd drive out to notarize a document for someone in exactly the same spot I was in — a shift worker, a single parent, someone with two jobs and no daytime hour to spare. That's not a side note to my business. It's most of the reason I structured it the way I did.
The problem with banker's hours
Most notary services, and most banks that offer notarization as a courtesy, operate roughly nine to five, weekdays. That's precisely the window a huge number of working people can't access without burning a vacation day or asking a boss for time off — for a fifteen-minute appointment. It's a mismatch that's existed forever and mostly gone unaddressed, because the people setting those hours usually aren't the ones affected by them.
Who this actually serves
- Single parents juggling childcare with everything else — evenings, after the kids are settled, are often the only realistic window.
- Shift workers — nurses, factory workers, retail and restaurant staff — whose "business hours" might be someone else's overnight shift.
- Two-income households where coordinating one shared daytime hour off is its own project.
- Caregivers already stretched between work and looking after a family member — Walt and I both write about this specific squeeze in his caregiver's guide and notarizing for homebound family members.
This isn't just about convenience
I want to push back a little on the word "convenience," because it undersells what's actually at stake. A closing date doesn't move because your shift schedule is inflexible. A court filing deadline doesn't care that you couldn't get Tuesday afternoon off. When a notarization only happens on banker's hours, the real cost isn't inconvenience — it's missed deadlines, delayed closings, and sometimes real financial consequences for people who had no realistic way to make a 2 p.m. Wednesday appointment work.
Nobody chooses to work nights because they don't need a notary during the day. They work nights because that's the job. The scheduling should bend around that reality, not the other way around.
Need an appointment outside the 9-to-5?
Evenings and weekends are exactly what we're built for. Tell us your schedule, not the other way around.
What this actually looks like
In practice, it means booking works the way it should: you tell us what you need signed and when you're actually free, and we build the appointment around that — including evenings and weekends, at your home or office instead of ours. Desmond gets into the full range of advantages a mobile notary offers in his article on what mobile notary actually saves you, but for working families specifically, the schedule flexibility is the part that matters most. You can see how the whole process works, start to finish, on our process page, and our coverage and hours are on the service area page.
Twenty-seven years in, this is still the part of the job I'm proudest of — not the paperwork, but the part where someone who genuinely couldn't have made a weekday appointment work gets their document signed anyway, on a Tuesday night at their own kitchen table, kids finally asleep down the hall.
What a Tuesday evening actually looks like
To make this concrete: a typical evening might have me leaving the house around 5:30, after my own dinner, to meet a nurse coming off a twelve-hour shift who needs a power of attorney notarized before her mother's surgery next week. From there, maybe a stop at a small business owner's home office to notarize an operating agreement amendment before her partners sign it too. By 8, I'm usually done, and every person I saw that evening got exactly the same unhurried, careful process they'd have gotten at 10 a.m. — just without needing to ask anyone for time off to get it.
Weekends work a little differently
Saturday mornings tend to fill up with closings and family paperwork — the stuff that needs everyone in a household present at once, which weekdays rarely allow. I keep weekend availability lighter than weekday evenings, mostly because that's when my own family time matters most to me too, but it's there for anyone who genuinely can't make a weekday work.
Common questions
Is there an extra charge for evening or weekend appointments? Sometimes, depending on timing — ask when you book, and we'll be upfront about it rather than surprising you afterward. See our fees article for the full picture of what goes into a quote.
How late is too late to schedule? Later than you'd probably guess. Tell us your actual availability and we'll tell you honestly whether we can make it work, rather than assuming a cutoff on your behalf.
Do you take same-day evening requests? Often, yes, especially for a single document — though the earlier you can give us notice, the more flexibility we have to fit you in exactly when you need it.
The math people don't usually run
Taking a half-day off work to get one document notarized costs more than most people account for. If you're hourly, it's a direct hit to your paycheck. If you're salaried, it's often a chunk of PTO spent on a fifteen-minute task, or a favor asked of a manager for something that shouldn't require asking at all. Add gas, parking, and the simple friction of coordinating a mid-day errand around childcare or a shift schedule, and a "free" bank notarization starts looking a lot less free than the sign in the lobby suggests. I'm not saying a travel fee is always the cheaper option in every single case — sometimes a lunch-break trip to a bank really is easier. I'm saying it's worth doing the actual math for your specific situation instead of assuming evening or weekend service is automatically the more expensive route, because it frequently isn't once you count everything.
Who ends up choosing this option
In my experience it's rarely about income level. I've done evening signings for surgeons and for warehouse workers, for the same underlying reason: their schedule during standard business hours belongs to someone else, and mine, in the evening, belongs to them.
What to expect from the booking process itself
You don't need to call during business hours to arrange an evening or weekend appointment — most of my scheduling happens by phone message or online form, whenever the person reaching out actually has a free moment, which is often itself outside a nine-to-five window. I try to confirm within a day, and I'll tell you plainly if your requested time doesn't work rather than leaving you guessing. The goal is that booking the appointment is exactly as convenient as the appointment itself.
If you've put off getting something notarized simply because you couldn't picture how it would fit into your week, that's the exact problem this kind of scheduling is meant to solve. Tell us your actual week, not an idealized version of it, and we'll find the slot that fits — even if that slot is nine o'clock on a Tuesday night, kids finally down, coffee gone cold on the counter.