Do Passport Photos Expire? What Each Country Actually Requires

Nothing is stamped on a passport photo. There is no expiry date printed on the back, and no country runs a clock that starts the moment the shutter closes. What every passport authority actually asks is a different question: does this photo still look like you, today? The date is how they answer it cheaply — and each country picks a different number.

Here is what the official rules actually say, and where a photo you already have is likely to fail.

The short answer, by country

• United States — taken within the last six months.
• United Kingdom — taken within the last month, and you must get a new one even if nothing about you has changed.
• Canada — taken within the last six months.
• Germany — no statutory age limit, but since 1 May 2025 the question barely applies to passports and ID cards. More on that below.

United States: six months, but the real test is likeness

The State Department's own manual for passport staff, 8 FAM 402.1-2, tells the specialist to reject a photo unless it "should be taken within six months of submitting the application, be a good likeness of and satisfactorily identify the applicant at the time of the application".

Notice the structure of that sentence. The regulation it cites, 22 CFR 51.26, says only that the photo must be "a good likeness of and satisfactorily identify the applicant". Six months is the working rule the Department applies to get there — not a legal expiry. The same paragraph makes the point explicitly: "A photograph showing a change in hairstyle or facial hair from the identification document submitted is acceptable if it still is a good likeness of the applicant."

So a five-month-old photo taken before you shaved a beard is fine. A four-month-old photo of someone who has since changed a great deal is a judgement call that will not go your way.

There is one trap the manual calls out by name. People re-use the photo printed on their Certificate of Citizenship or Naturalization, assuming a recently issued certificate means a recent photo. The FAM warns that "even if the certificate itself was recently issued, because of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services processing times, the photograph may not have been taken within six months of submitting the application".

United Kingdom: one month, and re-use is banned outright

The UK is the strictest of the big four, and it is the only one that removes the judgement entirely. From gov.uk: "You must get a new photo when you get a new passport, even if your appearance has not changed. Your photo must have been taken in the last month."

That is unusually blunt. The leftover photos from your last application are not eligible, however good they look. The UK also publishes hard file limits for the online route — at least 600 pixels wide and 750 tall, "at least 50KB and no more than 10MB" — and it asks for the photo "unaltered by computer software".

Do photo codes expire?

This is the newer version of the question, and it deserves a separate answer, because a code and a photo are not the same thing.

In the UK you can get a digital photo from a booth or shop and "choose the option to get a code with your photos", then type that code into your application. gov.uk does not publish a separate expiry for the code itself — but the underlying photo still has to have been taken in the last month, so the code is effectively bounded by that one-month window no matter what the booth tells you.

Germany works on the same principle for a different reason. Since 1 May 2025, photos for the Reisepass, Personalausweis and eAT have to reach the authority digitally, from a certified photographer or a terminal at the office — you cannot walk in with a print. Photo providers commonly quote around six months of usability for the resulting code. Treat that as their figure rather than a legal one: it is not in the Pass- und Personalausweisgesetz, and the safe move is simply not to take the photo months before your appointment.

Germany's driving licence is the exception that keeps confusing people: the Fahrerlaubnis-Verordnung has no digital route, so a Führerschein still runs on a printed photo.

The date is rarely what actually gets a photo rejected

In practice, an old photo usually fails for something other than its age. It was cropped for a different country, it was printed at the wrong size, or it has drifted outside the file-size window a portal will accept.

If you are reaching for a photo you already have, check the geometry before you check the calendar:

• 2 × 2 inches for the United States — 600 × 600 pixels at 300 DPI.
• 35 × 45 mm for the UK, Schengen and most of the world.
• 50 × 70 mm for Canada.
• The DS-160 visa photo is a separate spec again: square, 600 × 600 minimum, under 240 KB.

Our photo checker will measure dimensions, aspect ratio, file weight, background evenness and sharpness in your browser, and it says plainly what it cannot judge — expression, glasses, whether your eyes are open. It also cannot tell you whether a photo is recent enough, because nothing in the file proves when the shutter fired. Only you know that.

One thing we will not do, and neither should any tool: retouch an old photo to make it pass. The FAM is explicit that "Digital manipulation and/or retouching of the facial image on photographs is not acceptable. The use of beauty filters or other photo filter tools from social media websites and mobile applications (also known as 'apps') are also not acceptable." An edited photo is a worse outcome than an old one.

If you are re-using a photo, check three things

1. When it was taken — not when the file was saved. Copying a photo does not reset its age, and the date on the file often has nothing to do with the date of the shoot.
2. Whether you still look like it — this is the actual standard in the US, and the one a clerk applies everywhere else in practice.
3. Whether it is the right country's crop — a 35 × 45 mm print is not a US photo, and cropping a 2 × 2 out of it usually throws away the head-size margin.

None of this guarantees acceptance. The person at the counter, or the software behind the portal, makes that call. What you can control is that the date, the crop and the file size are all defensible before you submit.