How Much Is a Passport (2026 Data)

How much is a passport? A first-time US adult passport book costs $165¹ in 2026 - a $130 application fee to the State Department plus a $35 execution fee paid at the acceptance facility.¹ That single number splits many ways once the details matter: a passport card instead of a book, a renewal instead of a first-time application, a child's passport instead of an adult's, and rush service instead of the routine wait, each carry a different price.¹

This page lays out every version of that fee, its full history back to 2000, how many passports the country issues and holds each year, where in the country passports are issued most per resident, and how the US fee compares with 13 other countries once everything is converted to a single currency.

How much a US passport costs in 2026

The basic fee schedule

How much does a passport cost? A first-time adult (16 and older) passport book runs $165¹ total, and adults who qualify to renew by mail or online pay only $130¹, with no execution fee.¹

How much is a passport for adults: $165 the first time, $130 every renewal after that.¹

Where the money goes

How much is the government fee for a passport? The $165 total is actually three separate regulatory charges: a $50² application fee, an $80² "passport book security surcharge," and a $35 execution fee - so $130³ goes to the federal government itself, and only the remaining $35 stays with the local acceptance facility.²

How much is a passport application? Officially, the base "Passport Book Application Services" fee is just $20² for a minor or $50² for an adult (Form DS-11) - the security surcharge is billed as a separate line item, even though both go to the State Department together.²

How much is a passport at the post office? A post office is one of several kinds of acceptance facilities - alongside some clerks of court, public libraries and other public agencies - authorized to collect the same $35 execution fee and forward a DS-11 application; the fee is identical wherever it is filed.⁴

Passport book

How much is a passport book? $165¹ the first time, valid 10 years for an adult, and the only US passport document accepted for international air travel.¹

Passport card

How much is a passport card? The wallet-sized card, valid only for land and sea travel to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda - never for flying - costs $65¹ for a first-time adult applicant and $30¹ to renew, in each case $100 less than the equivalent book; unlike the book, the card carries no security surcharge.² Applying for a book and a card together costs $195¹ for a first-time adult - a $160¹ combined application fee plus the $35 execution fee, charged just once - $30 more than the book alone, not double the price of two separate applications.¹

The card's cost structure differs from the book's in one more way beyond the missing surcharge: because a card carries no security surcharge at all, its $65 first-time total is built from just two pieces - a $30 application fee and the same $35 execution fee the book pays - rather than three, which is also why a card renewal, at $30, has no execution fee and no surcharge to strip away.²

Children, replacements and rush service

Passport for a child

How much is a passport for a child? Every applicant under 16 pays the minor rate: $135¹ for a first-time book or $50¹ for a card, both valid only 5 years instead of an adult's 10, and both requiring both parents' consent.²

How much is a passport for a 16-year-old? At 16 the State Department already treats the applicant as an adult - the fee jumps to the full $165 book / $65 card rate, valid the full 10 years, not 5.²

Replacing a lost, stolen or damaged passport

How much it costs to replace a lost passport: the same as a first-time application, $165⁵ for a book, since a lost, stolen or damaged passport is reported (loss and theft only, on the fee-free Form DS-64) and then reapplied for on Form DS-11, just like a first-time applicant.⁵

Renewing an expired passport

How much it costs to renew an expired passport: the regular $130¹ renewal fee still applies by mail as long as the prior book was issued as an adult and is not too old or damaged to submit; otherwise the full $165 first-time process applies instead.¹

Name changes

How much it costs to change your name on a passport: within a year of issuance, a free amendment (Form DS-5504, under 22 CFR 22.1 item 2(d)) covers it; after a year, a name change requires the standard renewal fee, $130² for a book.² How much is a first-time passport, compared with a later renewal: $165 against just $130 - the $35 difference is the one-time execution fee a renewal skips.¹

A family applying together feels these differences at scale: two adults and two children, each getting a first-time book, together owe $600 ($165 x 2 for the adults, $135 x 2 for the children), before any add-on such as expedited service or extra photos is chosen.³

Emergency, expedited and same-day service

How much is an emergency passport? Expedited service and, for imminent travel, an in-person Passport Agency appointment are the two rush options.⁴

Expedited service adds $60¹ to any application and, per the current advertised service commitment, shortens the routine wait to about 2 to 3 weeks⁴, not counting mail time.⁴ Faster return shipping, 1-to-3-day delivery instead of standard mail, adds $22.05¹ more.¹ For travel within about 14 calendar days, the fee chart directs applicants to book an in-person Passport Agency appointment instead of relying on expedited mail service.¹

The total cost of a passport, every rush add-on included, is $247.05³: the $165 book, the $60 expedited fee and the $22.05 delivery fee together.³

A file-search fee of $150¹ is charged when an applicant cannot present evidence of US citizenship and asks the State Department to search its own records for an earlier passport or a Consular Report of Birth Abroad to establish it.² How much are passport pictures? An optional photo taken at an acceptance facility costs $15⁶ more, on top of whichever fee applies.⁶

Set beside State's own advertised commitments for the same period, the difference between a measured average and a published target becomes clear.

The two kinds of figures measure different things: GAO's 5.2/2.4 and 10.5/6.1-week readings are averages the office itself measured from application data for May through July of the fiscal year named; the State Department's ranges are advertised service commitments, not measurements of actual average wait.⁷ State's advertised routine commitment fell in four steps across 2023 and 2024, from 10-13 weeks in March 2023 to 4-6 weeks currently.⁸

How much time it takes to get a passport, from application to delivery, today: about 4 to 6 weeks routine, 2 to 3 weeks expedited, per the current advertised commitment.⁴

How the fee has changed since 2000

The adult first-time passport-book fee has moved in six steps since 2000, each one set by a specific regulatory change to 22 CFR 22.1 or its predecessor text, not by a gradual increase.¹⁰ It began the period at $60¹⁰ (a $45 application fee plus a $15 execution fee, per the 2000 annual edition of the regulation).¹⁰ By the 2007 annual edition it stood at $85¹¹ ($55 application plus a $30 execution fee), the same total already in force by the 2003 annual edition.¹¹ The 2009 edition shows $100¹² ($55 application, a $20 surcharge and a $25 execution fee).¹²

A June 2010 rule then added a $35 security surcharge, taking the total to $135¹³ effective July 13, 2010 - the largest single jump in the whole history, $35.¹³ A January 2018 rule raised the execution fee itself from $25 to $35, taking the total to $145¹⁴, effective April 2, 2018.¹⁴ An October 2021 rule raised the security surcharge from $60 to $80, taking the total to today's $165¹⁵, effective December 27, 2021.¹⁵ The fee has not changed since; because it is set by regulation rather than by an index, it changes only when the State Department publishes a new rule, not on any fixed schedule.²

The security surcharge, introduced in 2010¹³, did not exist before that year and is now the single largest of the fee's three components.¹³

Our calculation, not a forecast: splitting that same $60-to-$165 history by component shows the execution fee has risen the least in dollar terms (from $15 to $35) while the security surcharge, which did not exist before 2010, is now the largest single piece of the total ($80 of $165).³ Because the fee changes only by regulation, not on a fixed timetable, this page does not project it forward.

The application fee itself has barely moved - $45 in 2000, $50 or $55 at every point since - while the execution fee more than doubled, from $15 to $35, and the security surcharge went from nonexistent before 2010 to $80 by 2021.¹⁰

How many passports the US issues and holds

The government issued 27,348,416⁴ passports in fiscal year 2025, a record - up from 24,021,257⁴ in fiscal 2023 and far above the pandemic-era low of 11,711,945⁴ in fiscal 2020.⁴ Of the fiscal-2025 total, 22,804,394¹⁶ were passport books and 4,544,022¹⁶ were passport cards.¹⁶

Every one of those issuances added to the stock of valid passports in circulation, which reached 183,170,240¹⁶ at the close of fiscal 2025 (Sept. 30, 2025), up from 169,915,821¹⁶ a year earlier and just 74,000,000¹⁷ as of April 2007.¹⁶

The share of Americans who hold a valid passport has moved just as fast: 5%⁴ in 1990, up to 46%⁷ by 2023 (GAO's reading) and 48%⁴ most recently (CRS's reading, dated 2024).⁴ The two most recent figures come from different bodies measured close together in time, not a single tracked series, so they are shown separately rather than as a year-over-year change.⁷

Listed with the year and the body behind each reading, the two recent figures sit close enough to reflect measurement differences rather than a real one-year jump.

Passport issuance by state

Passport ownership by state - the total stock each state's residents hold - is not published as a single official figure. Fiscal-2025 passport issuance, a one-year flow, mapped against each state's population, is the most complete state-level breakdown available.¹⁶ The District of Columbia is left unshaded on the map because its rate is far higher than any state's and not comparable to one; it is still listed in the table.¹⁸

New Jersey issued 99.5³ passports per 1,000 residents in fiscal 2025, more than any state.¹⁶ West Virginia issued the fewest, 29.2³ per 1,000.¹⁶ The District of Columbia's rate, 322.4³ per 1,000, is far above any state and is not comparable to one.¹⁸ Ranked side by side, the highest states stand out more clearly.

Seven of the 8 highest-issuing states have an ocean coastline; Minnesota is the only landlocked state among them.³ The lowest-issuing states run the other way, concentrated inland and in the South.³

What the fee costs in a state's own minimum-wage hours

The $165 first-time adult book fee is the same in every state, but a state's minimum wage changes how many hours of work it represents. At the $7.25 federal floor, which still applies in 13 states, it takes 22.8³ hours; at the District of Columbia's $18.40, the highest in the country, it takes just 9.0³ hours.¹⁹

What a passport costs, country by country

How much is an international passport, once every country's fee is converted to the same currency? The passport fee by country spans a wide range even among wealthy, well-traveled nations, each cited from its own government's fee page and converted to USD at a single Federal Reserve H.10 exchange-rate reading (2026-09-18).²¹

How much is a Mexican passport: MXN 4,280²² for a 10-year adult passport, $248.18³ at the 2026-09-18 rate.²²

How much is a Canadian passport: CAD 163.50²³ for a 10-year adult passport applied for inside Canada, $116.72³.²³

The UK's standard online adult fee, GBP 102²⁴, converts to $136.39³.²⁴ Germany's 10-year Reisepass costs EUR 70²⁵ for an applicant issued it domestically at 24 or older, or $80.25³;²⁵ the same document issued by a German mission abroad costs EUR 106.00 instead.²⁶ Japan's, cut sharply in a July 2026 reform, now costs JPY 9,300²⁷ in person, $59.28³.²⁷

India's 10-year, 36-page passport costs INR 2,500³⁰, $26.08³ - the cheapest of the 14 compared countries.³⁰ Australia's, at $300.08³, is the priciest, about 11.5³ times India's fee.³

How much is a passport to go to Canada: the same $165 US book works for any destination, including Canada; no separate document or fee applies uniquely there, though a US passport card also suffices for a land or sea crossing.⁶

Grouping the 14 countries roughly by region shows no single pattern: the two North American neighbors, Canada and Mexico, sit on opposite ends of the range from each other, and the four largest Western European economies compared here - the UK, Germany, France and Switzerland - span $80.25³ to $175.93³ themselves.³

Mexico's own fee, by validity length

Mexico's own fee scales with how long the passport lasts, but the validity lengths are not an open choice for every applicant: the 1-year option is issued only to children under 3 and in limited consular-protection cases, and the 10-year option only to applicants 18 and older.²²

Who actually qualifies for each validity length matters as much as the price difference between them.

What the fee buys in travel freedom

Price is only one side of a passport's value; the other is how many places it opens visa-free. On the Henley Passport Index, the most-traveled ranking of its kind, the compared countries spread from Singapore's top rank to India's 80th.³⁶

Applying from the Philippines

How much for a passport in the Philippines: a Philippine citizen applying at home pays PHP 950³⁷ for regular processing or PHP 1,200³⁷ for expedited processing, plus a PHP 50 payment-center convenience fee.³⁷ A US citizen applying from the Philippines, by contrast, pays the identical US schedule as someone applying inside the US - the same $165¹ first-time adult book fee - through a US embassy or consulate instead of a domestic facility.¹

Validity, and what the fee buys per year

How often a passport needs to be renewed depends on age and country. Passport validity by country runs mostly on a 10-year cycle for adults: all 14 countries compared on this page issue a 10-year adult document.²⁴

How much is a 10-year passport, spread over its own lifetime? A US adult book's $165³ fee works out to $16.50³ a year, and a renewal's $130 works out to $13.00³ a year.³

The US adult card, at $6.50³ a year, is the cheapest first-time US option per year, though several other countries' documents cost less per year still.³ Measured against the federal minimum wage, unchanged at $7.25 an hour since 2009, a first-time adult book costs the equivalent of 22.8³ hours of minimum-wage work.¹⁹

At a state's own effective minimum wage rather than the federal floor, the same $165 fee ranges from just 9.0³ hours in the highest-wage state or district to 22.8³ hours in the lowest-wage states.¹⁹

A few things that changed along the way

How much is a standard passport, since the page-count rules changed? Since January 1, 2016 there is no price difference for domestic applicants: the standard 28-page book and the larger 52-page book cost the same $165, after the State Department discontinued the paid 24-page visa-page insert it had previously sold to travelers who filled every page.³⁸

The cost of staying current over three decades

Because a US adult book must be renewed roughly every 10 years, the fee an owner actually pays over time is the first-time charge plus one renewal charge for every decade after it, not a one-off $165.³

Adult fee vs the fee for a minor or young applicant, where both are published

A minor's or young applicant's fee is not simply a discount on the adult one - it also comes with shorter validity or an entirely separate age bracket, and not every country publishes a distinct rate.³

Everything above answers what a US passport costs today, in the terms most applicants actually ask about: the book, the card, a child's document, a renewal, a rush order. The rest of this page goes further back and further outward: a longer view of the fee itself once inflation is stripped out, a longer history of how many passports the country issues and how many it prints, what it actually costs to run the system behind that fee, and, further out still, how the same basic questions play out in dozens of other countries once their own fees are converted to the same currency.³⁹

The fee, adjusted for inflation

Nominal dollars hide how much of the fee's rise is just general price growth rather than a real increase in what a passport costs to obtain. Converting each historical fee level to constant 2025 dollars, using the government's own consumer price index, answers that.³⁹ A regulatory fee like this one does not move on any fixed schedule, so comparing it only in nominal terms can make a long stretch without a rule change look like a bigger real-terms increase, or decrease, than it actually was.

Nominal and constant-dollar figures rarely tell the same story, as the chart below shows. A fee that looks flat in the news, or even rising, can still be losing ground to inflation, and a fee that looks like it jumped can turn out to be roughly where it always was once prices generally are accounted for.

Set against inflation, the fee's real cost actually peaked in 2010³, at the equivalent of $199.32³ in 2025 dollars, and has since drifted down to today's $165 even though the nominal number has not fallen once.³⁹

A longer view of how many passports get issued

The fiscal-2019-to-2025 issuance series above is itself only the most recent stretch of a much longer climb. A full decade earlier, annual issuance had already grown from under 7 million to more than 18 million in a single surge year.⁴⁰ That earlier run-up shows the current record is not the first time the system has had to absorb a sudden jump in demand, even if the causes behind each surge were different.

Between the 2007 surge and the fiscal-2019 figure already shown earlier on this page, annual issuance leveled off in the low-to-mid teens of millions before climbing again toward the 2025 record.⁴⁰

Where and how applicants actually apply

Every application is filed at one of two kinds of location: a nationwide network of acceptance facilities that only forward paperwork, or a smaller set of government-run agencies that can also issue in person.⁴⁰ Most applicants never see the difference, since a routine application filed at either kind of location ends up costing the same fee either way; the distinction mostly matters for anyone who needs an in-person, urgent appointment.

Beyond the wider acceptance-facility network, a smaller set of government-run agencies handles in-person, urgent cases. An acceptance facility only forwards a completed application; an agency can adjudicate it on the spot, which is why the two counts moved so differently over the same years.

Put side by side, the two kinds of locations and the book-printing facilities form a single infrastructure picture. Every application eventually funnels through one of a few thousand acceptance points, a much smaller set of full agencies, and, at the very end, one of just two printing plants that physically produce the book.

All US passport books are printed at just two facilities, one that opened in Hot Springs, Arkansas in March 2007 and a second in Tucson, Arizona in May 2008, still the two named as of the most recent reading.⁴⁰ The passport card program, a lower-cost land-and-sea alternative introduced alongside that infrastructure, began accepting applications in February 2008 and had issued more than 40,000,000⁴¹ cumulative cards by 2025.⁴¹

The 2007 processing backlog, in numbers

Before the 2023 processing crisis already covered above, the country lived through an earlier, sharper one: a 2007 surge in demand, driven partly by new travel-document rules for Western Hemisphere travel, overwhelmed the system for months.⁴⁰ The response to it, in staffing, spending and processing time, offers a useful point of comparison for how the system behaved the next time demand outran capacity.

Demand for passports is not spread evenly across the year. Spring travel planning pulls a disproportionate share of applications into just a few months, a pattern that shapes when backlogs tend to form and when processing times are likeliest to stretch out.

That staffing and infrastructure had to be funded, and the requested budget tells its own story. A program built for steady, predictable volume needed an emergency mid-year revision once volume spiked well beyond what the original request assumed.

Behind both surges sat a real staffing effort, measured differently each time. The 2007-2008 figures come from a workforce built up over months to meet a predictable new travel-document rule; the 2023 figures come from a faster, shorter response to an unexpected post-pandemic rebound in travel.

The people answering phones and processing payments grew just as fast as the specialists adjudicating applications. A surge in applications does not only strain the office reviewing paperwork; it strains every step behind it, from the first phone call to the facility that deposits the check.

That emergency spending broke down into five specific categories, and not evenly: staffing-related costs, whether contract labor or overtime for existing employees, made up the overwhelming majority of the total, while equipment, travel and telecommunications together were a much smaller share.

A surge like the one the country lived through in 2007 does not resolve itself just by hiring more people; it takes money spent quickly, often on contracts and overtime rather than the slower, cheaper path of permanent staff, which is why contract-related costs and overtime pay together made up the overwhelming majority of the emergency total.⁴⁰ The 2023 backlog followed a broadly similar shape, even though the two crises had different root causes: the 2007 surge traced back to a specific new travel-document rule that suddenly required far more Americans to hold a passport for trips that had never needed one before, while the 2023 surge traced back to a rebound in travel demand after years of pandemic-era suppression, met by a workforce that had shrunk during the low-demand years in between.⁴ In both cases, the response was the same in outline: authorize overtime, bring in temporary staff, and let processing times climb for months before capacity finally caught back up with demand, a cycle the historical record on this page shows happening at least twice in under two decades.⁷

What each fee rule was projected to raise

Every fee change starts as a projection: before a rule takes effect, the government publishes its own estimate of how applicant volume and total fee revenue will move under it.⁴² Those projections are also where the government explains, in its own words, why a particular fee is going up or down, rather than leaving the reader to guess at the reasoning behind each change.

Each of those dollar projections rested on its own projected application volume, published in the same rule.

The 2015 rule's two application-fee cuts and its surcharge increase were designed to offset each other: the total fee an applicant paid did not change, even though the projected dollar swings inside it, above, look large on their own.⁴²

A decade later, a different rule change had its own, itemized cost drivers, this time reported per passport product rather than as a lump sum. Rising labor costs for the people who adjudicate applications, not materials or printing technology, accounted for the largest single piece.¹⁵

Passport ownership, a fuller series

The two most recent ownership-share readings shown earlier are themselves only the latest points in a longer climb, with two more official readings from 2008 filling in the gap after 1990.⁴⁰ Filling in that gap shows the rise was not a steady, even climb from one end to the other, but was already well underway by the middle of the period.

The two 2008 figures, 28% and 30%, are separate official readings rather than a single tracked number, the same reason this page keeps the 2023 and 2024 figures shown earlier as separate readings rather than a one-year change.⁴⁰

Circulation, one more reading

A February 2008 reading sits between the April 2007 and recent circulation figures already shown above, and adds a detail the later readings do not: how many of the passports in circulation at the time were due to expire soon.⁴⁰ A circulation total on its own says nothing about how much of that stock will need replacing soon after the reading is taken, which is exactly what this extra detail supplies.

The near-term-expiration figure matters for a reason the raw circulation total alone cannot show: more than 24,000,000 of the passports counted as valid in early 2008 were due to expire within the next five years, meaning a sizable share of the stock at any given moment is not a permanent holding but a document already on a renewal clock.⁴⁰ That built-in churn is one reason issuance figures rarely fall to zero even in years when very few first-time applicants come forward: a meaningful share of any year's issuance total is renewals replacing documents that were always going to expire on schedule, not new demand from people obtaining a passport for the first time.⁴

The card program and online renewal

Two changes since 2008 shifted how many applicants interact with the process at all: the passport card's launch, and, far more recently, a shift toward renewing entirely online.⁴⁰ Both changes were aimed at the same goal from opposite directions: the card gave travelers a cheaper document for nearby destinations, while online renewal aimed to make the paperwork itself faster for everyone who already qualifies for one.

More recently, the process itself has started moving online for people who already hold a passport. A renewal that once required mailing a paper form and waiting for it to reach a processing center can now, for many eligible applicants, be submitted and tracked entirely on a government website.

The 2026 proposal is a meaningful expansion of who can use the online channel at all, not just a technical update. Under the earlier rules, an applicant's most recent passport had to be less than a year past its own expiration to qualify for online renewal, and the option was available only to people applying from inside the country; the 2026 proposal would drop both limits, opening the channel to eligible applicants living overseas and to people whose previous passport lapsed further back than a single year.⁴³ For a program that started as a pilot limited to a handful of million eligible Americans, that is a large widening of who the system is built to serve, even though the underlying fee for using it stays exactly the same as it would be by mail.⁴

A historical fraud and security snapshot

Passport security has also been measured directly: a 2007 audit counted how many fraudulent travel documents border inspectors actually intercepted, and how much of the circulating passport stock still used an older, less secure design.¹⁷ Both readings come from the same audit and the same year, giving a single, consistent snapshot of where the security picture stood before the newer, chip-based design became the norm.

Fraud-case investigations followed a similar pattern in the two years measured: over 3,500 new cases and over 500 arrests in fiscal 2005, and 3,703 confirmed cases in fiscal 2006, about 65% of which involved imposters using fraudulently obtained identification rather than counterfeit passports themselves.¹⁷

Taken together, the government's own historical record tells a more layered story than the current fee alone can. The dollar amount charged today is the endpoint of six separate regulatory changes, each one tied to a specific rule and a specific reason, not a single steady climb.¹⁰ The infrastructure behind that fee grew and shrank with demand rather than growing steadily on its own: a network of acceptance facilities ballooned during the mid-2000s surge, settled back down once that surge passed, and a much smaller set of full-service agencies grew more gradually and permanently over the same two decades.⁴⁰ Staffing followed the same pattern twice, once during the 2007-2008 backlog and again during the 2023 backlog, each time with its own emergency response and its own price tag.⁴⁰ None of that history changes what an applicant pays today, but it explains why the fee looks the way it does: less a single number set once and left alone, and more the accumulated result of two decades of the government adjusting its own costs, its own staffing and its own capacity to match a demand curve that has rarely stayed flat for long.⁴

What a passport photo and full first application actually cost

Away from an acceptance facility, retailers each set their own price for the same two-print 2x2-inch passport photo set, and the range between them is wide.⁴⁴ None of these prices are part of the federal fee schedule at all; they are set independently by each retailer or membership organization, which is exactly why they vary so much from one to the next.

Membership-based photo pricing works differently from a flat retail price. Where a retailer charges the same amount to every customer, a membership organization can price the same service at three or four different levels depending on which tier the customer already pays for.

That discounted or free pricing is not free to access - it is bundled into an annual membership fee that has to be paid regardless of how many photo sets, if any, a member actually uses in a given year.

Laid out as a full matrix, every adult combination of product and speed is visible at once, rather than scattered across separate mentions of the book, the card and each add-on fee individually.

The same matrix applies to a minor applicant, at the minor rate, though every cell in it is lower than its adult equivalent by exactly the difference in the base application fee.

Renewing instead of applying fresh changes every cell of the same matrix, since a renewal skips the execution fee that a first-time application always carries, no matter which speed or product is chosen.

A family applying together shows the same matrix at scale: two adults and two children, each getting a first-time book, owe $600³ at routine speed, or $840³ if every one of the four applications is expedited.³

Spread over each document's own validity period, the ranking changes again, since a document that costs more upfront but lasts twice as long can still end up cheaper per year than a shorter-lived one.

Adding a photo and a birth certificate to the base fee gives a more realistic total for a first-time applicant who does not already have either document on hand, rather than the bare government fee alone.

How the passport compares with other US identity credentials

A passport is not the only federally relevant identity credential an American might need. REAL ID-compliant driver's licenses, name changes and Enhanced Driver's Licenses each carry their own, separate cost.⁵¹ None of them replaces a passport for international travel, but several can substitute for it on a domestic flight or a short land crossing, which is exactly why travelers so often end up holding more than one.

Set next to a REAL ID, the two passport products' relative value becomes clearer: a REAL ID costs less upfront but cannot substitute for a passport on any international trip, while the card sits in between, cheaper than the book but still usable for a specific set of nearby destinations.

A fifth credential, the Enhanced Driver's License, exists only in a handful of states, and where it does exist it is usually sold as an add-on to an existing driver's license rather than a separate document altogether.

Most travelers do not buy just one credential; they buy a bundle, pairing a passport with a trusted-traveler program or a REAL ID to cover both international and faster domestic travel at once.

Trusted traveler programs, a related but separate fee

Several US border-crossing programs charge their own separate application fee, on top of (not instead of) a passport.⁵⁶ Enrolling shortens the line at the border or the airport security checkpoint, but it never removes the need for a valid passport on an international trip.

TSA PreCheck works differently: the government sets the program, but three separate approved vendors each charge their own enrollment fee.⁶⁰ An applicant picks the vendor, not just the program, and that choice alone can change the price paid for otherwise identical screening.

That current fee is itself the result of a single, relatively recent policy change: before October 2024, NEXUS and SENTRI were priced well below Global Entry, and the harmonization brought every CBP program up to the same $120.00 level, its first change of any kind in 16 years.

Spread over the shared 5-year membership term, the ranking shifts once more, since two programs that charge the identical upfront fee still work out to the same per-year cost only because their membership length also happens to match.

Global Entry, NEXUS and SENTRI landing on the identical per-year figure is not a coincidence; all three now charge the same $120.00 application fee and share the same 5-year membership term, so once the fee was harmonized in 2024 their per-year cost was harmonized along with it, even though the three programs cover different border crossings and different application processes.⁵⁶ FAST stands apart precisely because it was never brought into that harmonization: it remains priced, and structured, as its own separate program for commercial drivers rather than the general traveling public the other three mainly serve.⁵⁹

Families traveling with children face a different fee question for these programs, since a minor traveling with an enrolled parent is often covered at no extra cost, unlike an adult applicant.

Global Entry's lack of a minor waiver stands out against the other two land-border programs, which both let a child travel under a parent's own membership at no extra charge, since a family applying for Global Entry has to pay the full fee once for every traveler, adult or child alike, while a NEXUS or SENTRI family only pays for the enrolled adults.⁶²

Other consular fees, and what other countries charge to enter

The passport fee is only one line on a wider consular fee schedule, and the reverse fee, what a foreign government charges a US citizen just to enter, has grown its own list of electronic travel-authorization charges in recent years.² Both sides of that ledger, what the government charges and what other governments charge back, are billed separately from the passport fee itself, even though a traveler often pays both in the same trip-planning process.

A separate set of routine administrative services carries its own, smaller fee schedule, covering the everyday paperwork - notarizing a document, certifying a copy, authenticating a signature - that a US citizen abroad might need for reasons that have nothing to do with a passport at all.

A far rarer, but far pricier, consular service has its own separate history: renouncing citizenship, a one-way, irreversible step almost no passport holder ever takes, but one the government still prices and has repriced more than once.

The 2015 increase to $2,350 was explicitly meant to recover the government's own processing cost, which the rule at the time described as running well above the previous $450 charge; the 2026 cut back to $450 did not claim that cost had fallen, only that the fee should no longer be set at a level intended, in part, to discourage the filing itself.⁶³ Renunciation remains a tiny fraction of the volume any passport fee sees: where the country issues tens of millions of passports a year, the number of people who file to give up citizenship altogether is small enough that this fee's history barely registers next to the passport program's own budget, even during the years it stood at its highest level.⁴

Two of the newest travel-authorization charges have each moved since their own launch, both trending upward as the programs themselves matured from pilot schemes into permanent, fully enforced systems.

Put together, these entry fees are the reverse side of the passport-fee comparison already shown: instead of what a country charges its own citizens for a passport, they show what a country charges a visiting US citizen just to be allowed to enter.

These fees are relatively new as a category. None of the UK, EU or Australian electronic authorizations existed even a decade ago; each was introduced within roughly the last few years as part of a wider shift toward pre-screening visa-exempt travelers before they arrive, rather than checking them only at the border itself.⁶⁴ India's e-visa system is the oldest and most tiered of the group researched here, offering the reader a choice between a short 30-day authorization and options that stretch out to a full year or five years, each priced separately rather than as a single flat charge the way the newer European and Australian systems are.⁶⁸ For a US traveler planning several trips abroad in the same year, these charges add up in a way that rarely shows up in the sticker price of a flight or a hotel: a visitor stopping in the UK, the EU and Canada in a single itinerary would owe three separate authorization fees, on top of whatever visa fees, if any, a further destination outside this comparison might also require.⁶⁶

Private expediting services, on top of the government fee

No official price list exists for private companies that handle passport paperwork and expediting; each company sets, and publishes, its own service fee, always added on top of the government's own fees.⁷⁰ A traveler who wants extra hand-holding through the paperwork, or a company willing to walk a form-in-person to the counter, pays for that convenience on top of, never instead of, the government's own charges.

Applied to the same family-of-four scenario already shown, the book-vs-combo choice has one clear cost: adding a card for every family member on top of a book raises the total by a fixed, predictable amount, regardless of which service speed the family also chooses.

The US fee schedule does not exist in isolation, either. A traveler assembling a full identity-and-travel toolkit, a passport, a REAL ID, a Trusted Traveler Program membership, a birth certificate to start the whole process, ends up paying several separate government bodies at several separate prices, none of which shows up on the passport fee chart itself.⁵¹ A retail photo, a private expediting service and a rush shipping fee add a further, purely optional layer on top, set by the private market rather than by any regulation.⁴⁴ Seen this way, the headline $165 figure is really just the entry point to a much larger, layered system of related costs, most of them avoidable, a few of them not, that together determine what a first-time applicant actually spends before ever boarding a flight.⁷⁰

What a passport costs in other countries, region by region

Grouping more countries by region shows how much national policy, not just geography, drives the price: Western Europe's five compared countries alone span roughly $34 to $133.⁷² Neighboring countries with broadly similar costs of living can still set very different fees, which is one reason a single, continent-wide average would hide more than it reveals.

Italy's fee is itself a composite of two separate government charges rather than one flat number: a revenue stamp and a separate postal charge, both required for the same application, which together make up the total shown here, the same layered structure seen throughout Europe's fee schedules.⁷² Spain sits at the opposite end for a different structural reason: its fee page does not attach the passport to a fixed validity term the way most other countries do, instead renewing on demand under the same flat charge, which is part of why it prices so far below its immediate neighbors.⁷³ Even among five countries that share a currency, a shared land border in most cases, and broadly comparable costs of living, the spread between the cheapest and the most expensive researched fee still runs to nearly a factor of four, a gap that currency alone cannot explain.⁷⁴

The Nordic countries, often grouped together, price their own passports quite differently from each other, and their validity periods differ too, so a lower headline fee does not always mean a cheaper passport once it is measured per year of use.

Denmark's position at the top of this group is worth a second look, since it is also one of the shorter-validity documents researched anywhere on this page once the reduced retirement-age fee and the standard adult term are set aside: a higher headline price paired with a standard term still leaves it among the priciest passports per year of ownership researched anywhere in Europe.⁷⁹ Norway sits well below Denmark despite similar broader economic conditions between the two countries, a reminder that shared regional wealth does not translate into a shared passport fee.⁷⁸

Central and Eastern Europe's fees sit apart from both the Western European and Nordic readings above, consistently lower across every country researched in the region.

Romania's own fee is unusual among the countries researched here in one specific way: it charges the identical flat rate to an adult and a minor applicant alike, rather than the reduced minor rate almost every other researched country offers, even though its own document lasts only 5 years, shorter than most of its regional neighbors' standard terms.⁸³ The Czech Republic sits at the opposite extreme within the same regional group, pairing its low headline fee with a 10-year standard term for adult applicants, the longest validity available among the four Central and Eastern European countries researched here.⁸¹

The rest of the world, region by region

Outside Europe, the spread is even wider: the cheapest researched fee, converted to USD, is well under $20, and the priciest is well over $150.⁸⁵ That gap dwarfs anything seen within Europe alone, a reminder that income levels and government policy, not just distance from the US, shape what a passport costs around the world.

Chile's fee applies specifically to adults using its newest 48-page booklet, introduced only recently; the country's document standard changed at roughly the same time its fee was last set, which is part of why it now reads as the priciest of the four Latin American countries researched here.⁸⁶ Peru's much lower fee, by contrast, was set directly by the national immigration authority and published in the country's own official state gazette, the clearest, most directly sourced reading of any figure in this regional grouping.⁸⁹

The Asia-Pacific region spans the widest range of any researched here, from a fee that converts to just a few dollars to one worth more than twenty times as much, inside the same broad region of the world.

Vietnam's $3.90 fee is temporary rather than a stable baseline: it reflects a government-mandated discount in force only through the end of 2026, after which the underlying, undiscounted fee applies instead, a reminder that a single snapshot reading can miss a scheduled change sitting just past the date it was taken.⁹⁴ Malaysia's own fee tells a related story from the opposite direction: its newest 10-year option is priced well above the 5-year tier it sits alongside, a structure the government adopted specifically to give long-term travelers a longer-lasting document without raising the price of the shorter, cheaper option anyone can still choose instead.⁹¹

The Middle East's three researched fees cluster at very different levels, with no obvious regional pattern connecting them the way currency or cost-of-living differences alone might predict.

Saudi Arabia's fee sits at the top not because of a single expensive component but because the underlying document itself is priced differently from its neighbors': it is the priciest of every country researched across the whole Middle East and Africa grouping on this page, ahead even of several wealthier countries researched in other regions.⁹⁵ The UAE's fee, by contrast, breaks down into three modest components already shown earlier on this page, none of them individually large, which helps explain why the total lands so far below its regional neighbor's.⁹⁷

Africa's two researched fees run similarly wide: Nigeria's $75.19⁹⁸ is roughly double South Africa's $36.81⁹⁹.⁹⁸

Minor passport fees, other countries

Most researched countries charge a separate, lower rate for a minor's passport, though a few, like Brazil, charge one flat fee no matter the applicant's age.⁷⁴ Where a discount does exist, it is usually paired with a shorter validity period too, so a family with young children can end up applying, and paying, more often than an adult traveler would.

Outside Europe, minor pricing follows no single pattern: some governments cut the fee substantially for a younger applicant, others charge the identical adult rate regardless of age, and at least one researched here publishes no separate minor rate at all.

Expedited service, other countries

Several governments researched here sell their own rush tier, at a steep premium over the standard fee.⁷⁵ The premium for speed is not a US peculiarity; it shows up wherever a government offers more than one processing tier, usually scaled to how much faster the applicant wants the document back.

Outside Europe, a handful of governments also sell a same-day or next-day option, again at a steep premium over the routine fee, mirroring the pattern already seen among the European governments above.

Indonesia's same-day fee is the smallest jump of the three shown outside Europe, adding less to the standard fee in dollar terms than either Thailand's or Brazil's rush option does, even though all three promise the applicant a document back on the very same day.⁹³ Thailand's premium is the steepest by dollar amount, more than doubling the standard fee for the same-day guarantee, and it comes with its own hard deadline: the application has to be submitted before 11:00 to qualify at all.⁹⁰

Belgium's very-urgent same-day fee, $401.15³, is more than 5³ times its own standard fee.⁷⁵

How long a passport lasts, and what that costs per year, abroad

Validity length varies by country as much as price does, and dividing each government's own fee by its own validity years shows which passport actually costs the most to own year over year.⁷² A country that looks expensive on the sticker price can still be a bargain over time if its document lasts long enough, and the reverse is just as true.

Outside Europe, the same variety appears, with several governments tying validity to the applicant's own age rather than a single fixed term.⁸⁸

Dividing each fee by its own validity years reorders the whole list: a country with a high headline fee but a long validity period can end up costing less per year than one with a lower fee but a shorter document life.

This per-year view rearranges the earlier headline-fee ranking substantially. Saudi Arabia and Portugal, both mid-pack or lower on the raw fee comparison, rise to the top once validity is factored in, since neither offers a document that lasts as long as the 10-year standard most other researched countries provide.⁹⁵ China falls the other way: its low headline fee, already among the cheapest researched, is stretched over a full 10 years, making it the least expensive passport of the twenty compared here on a per-year basis by a wide margin.⁸⁵ The lesson is the same one the earlier US-only cost-per-year figures already showed: a document's price only tells half the story, and the other half, how long it actually has to last before an owner pays again, can change the ranking as much as the price itself.³

Two of the researched countries price the identical document differently depending only on how long it lasts, letting an applicant trade a lower upfront cost for a shorter-lived passport, or the reverse, within the same country's own fee schedule.

How the UK, Canadian and Australian fees have moved

Three of the countries already compared on this page have each raised their own passport fee at least once in the last few years, each through its own legal process.¹⁰⁰ None of the three moved in lockstep with each other or with the US fee, underlining that each country sets its own schedule on its own timeline.

Canada's own fee moved for the first time in over a decade, and the government's own announcement framed the change as the start of a new, regular adjustment pattern rather than a one-off increase.

Every one of Canada's four rows moved by roughly the same small proportion, whether the applicant was inside the country or applying from abroad, and whether the document chosen was the 5-year or the 10-year book, unlike the step changes seen in the US history where different components moved by very different amounts at different times.²³ The abroad premium itself is untouched by the increase: applying from outside Canada still costs the same roughly $100 more than applying domestically, before or after the March 2026 change, the same kind of abroad surcharge already seen in the earlier domestic-versus-abroad comparison on this page.²³

Australia takes a different approach, indexing its fee to inflation every year rather than waiting for an occasional, larger rule change the way the US and Canada do.

Canada's March 2026 change was its first passport-fee increase since 2013, and the same policy announcement said fees would now be adjusted annually for inflation going forward, the same approach Australia already uses.²³

Applying at home vs at a consulate abroad

A citizen applying for their own country's passport from outside that country often pays more than someone applying at home, the same pattern the earlier Philippines comparison showed for a US citizen.¹⁰⁴ A consulate or embassy abroad carries its own overhead, separate from the domestic office network, which is part of why the fee for the identical document so often runs higher there.

Set side by side instead of split into separate bars, the same 4 countries' domestic and abroad fees show each country's own premium at a glance.

Fee discounts and 2026 fee changes abroad

In the Netherlands, a national ID card substitutes for a passport on intra-European travel at a lower price, $91.83 against $101.63 for the passport itself.⁷⁴ Sweden's own ID card, $40.56, is likewise cheaper than its $50.70 passport.⁷⁷ Several governments also waive or cut their fee for particular groups.⁸⁴ Age is the single most common reason a government waives or reduces its fee among the countries researched here, though a few instead tie the discount to family size or to applying for two documents together.

A few governments also discount the fee for reasons other than age, most often tied to household size, student status, or a willingness to apply for two documents in the same visit rather than two separate ones.

2026 alone brought fee increases in several of the researched countries, at every scale from a modest single-digit percentage adjustment to a fee that doubled outright in the same year.

A few governments also charge a different price by channel: Finland's in-person fee, $55.03, runs $6.88 above its own online fee.⁸⁰ The UK's postal fee, GBP115.50, runs GBP13.50 above its own online fee.¹⁰²

Replacement fees, regional averages and affordability abroad

A lost or damaged passport costs some governments extra to replace, and comparing each region's average fee against local wages shows how differently the same dollar figure can be felt.⁸⁸ A replacement fee exists mainly to discourage carelessness and to recover the government's own cost of reissuing a document outside its normal cycle, not to punish an applicant for a genuine emergency.

The two countries take noticeably different approaches to the same underlying problem. Brazil applies a flat, doubled charge regardless of why the original document is gone, treating loss, theft and damage identically and simply pricing the replacement at twice the standard fee.⁸⁸ Indonesia instead grades its own replacement fee by circumstance, charging close to the standard fee for a lost passport but noticeably less for one that is merely damaged, a distinction that assumes a damaged document is less likely to represent a genuine loss of control over it than one reported missing altogether.⁹³ Neither approach mirrors the US system exactly, where a lost, stolen or damaged passport is replaced through the same standard first-time process and fee no matter which of the three applies, already covered earlier on this page.⁵

Averaging each region's own countries gives a single number for comparing regions directly, though any regional average still hides real country-to-country variation within that same region.