National Records of Scotland (Scottish Gaelic: Clàran Nàiseanta na h-Alba) is a non-ministerial department of the Scottish Government. It is responsible for civil registration, the census in Scotland, demography and statistics, family history, as well as the national archives and historical records.

National Records of Scotland was formed from the merger of the General Register Office for Scotland and the National Archives of Scotland in 2011; it combines all the functions of the two former organisations. The offices of Registrar General for Scotland and Keeper of the Records of Scotland remain separate, but since 2011 both have been vested ex officio in the Chief Executive of National Records of Scotland, currently Paul Lowe.

National Records of Scotland is based in HM General Register House on Princes Street in the New Town in Edinburgh. The building was designed by Robert Adam for the Register House Trustees; it was opened to the public in 1788.

The first official tasked with the care and administration of the public records was first recorded in the role of Clericus Rotulorum (Clerk of the Rolls) in the Kingdom of Scotland in 1286. Registers, rolls and records were kept in Edinburgh Castle from about the 13th century. The role of the Clerk of the Rolls eventually became known as the Lord Clerk Register, the oldest surviving great offices of state in Scotland. However, records held by the Scottish Crown did not typically include personal data such as birth, death and marriage records. Instead, the clergy and other officials of the Church of Scotland kept parish records, which recorded personal data such as baptisms and marriages, but only for their own church members so parish records were limited in scope. In 1551, a council of Scottish clergy enacted that all parish ministers should keep a record of baptisms, burials and marriages. However, in 1801, the first national Census found that, out of the 850 parishes in Scotland, not more than 99 had regular registers. This was in part due to sporadic recording keeping and accidental destruction of registers.

In 1806, a Royal Warrant established the office of Deputy Clerk Register, effectively reducing the record keeping duties of the Lord Clerk Register to an honorary title with no day-to-day management of the Registers and Records of Scotland. However, personal data continued to be managed by the clergy, now largely ministers of the Church of Scotland. The Industrial revolution radically changed the population demographics of Scotland, with central belt parishes being swamped by migrants from the Highlands and Lowlands which also contributed to the poor record keeping in registers. A bill came before the United Kingdom Parliament in 1829 and several others in subsequent years to introduce a system of state registration, following the similar introduction of public registration in England & Wales in 1837, but the bills were unsuccessful. One of the main reasons they were unsuccessful was the opposition, including the Church of Scotland, to attempts in the bills to reform the Scots laws of marriage, which had historically been very informal as The Scotsman newspaper describes:

Everybody knows that, by the law of Scotland, the marriage ceremony can be performed with as perfect legal effect by a blacksmith as by a clergyman.

However, the proposals for reform were dropped and in 1854, the Deputy Clerk Register's duties were also extended to the care of the records of births, deaths and marriages in the role of Registrar General under the Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Scotland) Act 1854, which established the General Registry Office of Births, Deaths and Marriages. The 1854 Act also provided that the Registrar General should produce an annual report to be forwarded to the Home Secretary to be laid before Parliament, containing a general abstract of the numbers of births, deaths and marriages registered during the previous year. The first general abstract (relating to 1855) was submitted in 1856. By the time of his first annual detailed report, published in 1861, the first Registrar General for Scotland, William Pitt Dundas, claimed that: "there is good reason for believing that very few births indeed now escape registration."

In 1855 and 1860, two further Acts, the Registration (Scotland) Act, 1855 (18 & 19 Vict., c.29) and the Registration (Scotland, Amendment) Act, 1860 (23 & 24 Vict., c.85), were passed which amended some of the sections of the 1854 Act. The 1854 Act had placed considerable burdens on the sheriffs of the Scottish counties, who had already played a role in the taking of decennial censuses. The amending Acts reduced their responsibilities by appointing registration district examiners to inspect the registers. They also made revised provision for the transmission of the parochial registers up to the year 1820 to the General Register Office Scotland (GROS), and the registers for the years 1820–1855 to the custody of the local registrars. These registers were to be retained by the local registrars for 30 years, after which they were to be sent to the GROS.