Your ketubah is not a marriage license, and the ceremony by itself doesn't marry you.

Someone in your family has asked whether you still need to go to city hall, and neither of you was sure. Your officiant mentioned a ketubah (the Jewish marriage contract), the county website mentioned a license, and it isn't obvious which one is the thing that actually makes you married. Marriage law is set state by state and sometimes county by county, so treat what follows as orientation rather than legal advice.

Is a Jewish wedding legally binding?

The ceremony by itself, no. What makes you legally married in the United States is a valid marriage license from the right government office, an officiant your state recognizes, and in most states a witness or two who sign. The Jewish ceremony sits on top of that. Do both and you're married religiously and civilly in the same afternoon.

This trips couples up because the ceremony is so obviously the wedding. You stand under a chuppah (the canopy a couple stands under), people cry, a glass breaks, everyone says "Mazel tov!" (congratulations, roughly). The legal part is a piece of paper signed off to the side and mailed to a county office by someone you met four months ago. Both things happened. Only one of them is what the state is tracking.

Is a ketubah a marriage license?

No. A ketubah is a Jewish document, traditionally setting out a husband's obligations to his wife and now often written as a mutual statement of what two people promise each other. It has no standing with any American government office, and no county clerk will take one. The two documents do different jobs, and you need both.

They can be signed twenty minutes apart. A lot of couples sign the ketubah before the ceremony with their witnesses in the room, then sign the civil license at the same table once the guests have moved on to cocktails. If you want to know what the text can say and who signs it, here's what a ketubah actually contains.

Who can legally sign your license?

It depends on your state, and sometimes on your county. Ordained clergy generally qualify, so a rabbi or cantor is straightforward almost everywhere. A friend ordained online is legal in many states and not in all of them, and a few jurisdictions, notably parts of New York and Virginia, have stricter registration rules an officiant has to satisfy before your signed license counts.

The reliable move is to call your county clerk's office, or read its website, and ask who may solemnize a marriage there. That takes ten minutes and answers the question for your actual address, which no wedding website can do for you. If you're marrying somewhere with registration rules, ask the officiant whether they're already registered in that county. Most of the officiants in New York City deal with this every season and will answer in one sentence.

What do you actually have to do?

Get the license from the office your state requires, usually in the county where you're marrying or where one of you lives. Bring whatever identification that office asks for, and check two dates: whether there's a waiting period before the license becomes usable, and when it expires. Have your witnesses present on the day. Then make sure somebody returns the signed license to the issuing office, which is the step couples forget and the one that turns the wedding into a matter of record.

Three questions for your officiant, early:

• Are you authorized to solemnize a marriage in this county?
• Do you file the signed license, or do we?
• How many witnesses should we line up?

Most officiants file it themselves and will say so before you ask. Some don't, and that difference matters in the week after the wedding, when you're on a plane and nobody is thinking about paperwork. The rest of the questions worth asking early fit in the same first conversation.

Does a religious ceremony without a license mean you're married?

Not to the state. Without a license there's no marriage on the record, which means no joint tax filing, no spousal insurance, no automatic inheritance, and no default authority in a hospital room. What it does mean is not nothing, though. Under halacha, Jewish religious law, a traditional ceremony performed with valid witnesses can create a marriage a Jewish court would recognize, which is why ending one can call for a get, the Jewish divorce document.

So a couple can be married religiously and single legally at the same time. Some people arrange that on purpose, usually for reasons involving benefits, immigration timing, or an earlier marriage that isn't fully unwound. If that's your situation, talk to a lawyer and a rabbi, and tell each one what the other said.

What if you want a Jewish ceremony and a civil one?

Common, and nothing about it is a downgrade. Plenty of couples sign the license at a courthouse or a kitchen table on a Tuesday, then hold the Jewish ceremony weeks or months later with everyone in the room. Some do it in the other order where their state allows. No officiant worth hiring will find this odd.

Couples split it up because a parent can't travel until spring, because a visa clock is running, because the venue's only open date was one the rabbi couldn't take. The Jewish ceremony doesn't turn into a re-enactment. The chuppah, the blessings, the glass, the ketubah signing all happen once, on the day you chose, and the county copy went in earlier.

Where this actually goes wrong

Almost never during the ceremony. It goes wrong afterward: a license that expired the week before, witnesses who left before signing, an envelope that sat in a tote bag until March. All of it is fixable and all of it is a headache. Ask the clerk what they need, ask the officiant who files it, and then put it down.