United States passport photo: 2 × 2 inches
The specification below is taken from travel.state.gov — Passport Photos, and Uploading a Digital Photo. The tool crops your photo to it.
Drop an image here, or click to choose one
You can also paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V. JPG, PNG, WebP.
Every byte of that work happened on your own machine. Verify it: open DevTools → Network, and use the tool. No request carries your image, because none is made.
The specification
- Photo size
- 2 × 2 inches (51 × 51 mm)
- Head height
- 1 to 1⅜ inches (25–35 mm) from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head
- Background
- plain white or off-white
- Digital file
- Square. At least 600 × 600 px, at most 1200 × 1200 px.
- Accepted formats
- JPG, JPEG, PNG, HEIC or HEIF
- Age of photo
- taken within the last 6 months
Source: travel.state.gov — Passport Photos, and Uploading a Digital Photo. Verified 30 July 2026. Requirements do change — if the figure on the official page differs from the one here, the official page is right and we would like to know.
What trips people up here
The square aspect ratio is the rule people most often break: a 4:3 phone photo will be rejected outright no matter how good it looks. Crop to a perfect square first.
The square is the whole problem
The United States is the significant outlier in world passport photography, and the reason is that 2 × 2 inch square. Every camera ever made produces a rectangle — 4:3 on a phone, 3:2 on a dedicated camera — so an American passport photo can never be simply the frame you shot. It always requires a deliberate crop, and that crop has to satisfy the head-height rule at the same time.
That interaction is where most rejections come from. Crop square around a face shot at a comfortable distance and the head lands too small; crop tightly enough to make the head 25–35 mm of a 51 mm frame and you discover the top of the head is missing. Shoot with headroom to spare and crop inward, checking the head measurement rather than the composition.
Online renewal versus a paper application
The two routes have genuinely different requirements and it is worth knowing which you are on. A paper application wants a physical 2 × 2 inch print, and the print shop will handle the sizing. Online renewal wants a digital file — square, between 600 × 600 and 1200 × 1200 pixels — and there is no print shop between you and the validator. The upload path is where people get stuck, and the pixel bounds are checked strictly.
Getting one taken
Post offices, pharmacy chains and shipping stores all offer passport photos in the US, typically for around fifteen dollars. They will produce a compliant print. They will not always give you a digital file, and if you are renewing online that file is the thing you actually need — ask before you pay.
General advice on lighting, distance and expression — which is the same everywhere — is on the passport photo overview.