The State Department has made its online passport renewal system fully available to the public, saving people the hassle of having to print out and mail in paperwork.
The agency has been testing online renewals for a few months, but it only accepted a limited number of applications each day at 1 p.m. ET. Now, those restrictions are lifted and people can freely renew their passports online as long as they meet the requirements.
"Today, more Americans than ever are traveling abroad, and we’ve seen a huge increase in demand for passports over the last few years," Rena Bitter, Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs, said in a State Department press conference. "Our goal is and has always been to provide Americans a secure and efficient passport service, so we are really excited that we are now making available online passport renewal."
Online passport renewal is available on the State Department's website. You can only renew 10-year passports and you must be 25 or older. In addition, the passport had to be issued between 2009 and 2015 and you can't change your name, gender, date of birth, or place of birth.
The State Department also says that you can't be planning to travel for at least eight weeks since renewal will take six to eight weeks to process. You also can't have it sent to an Army Post Office (APO) or Fleet Post Office (FPO) address. A full list of requirements is available on the State Department travel website.
"We don’t expect to have a different service standard for people who apply online versus people who apply by mail," Assistant Secretary Bitter said. "We just want to make sure that we give the American people a choice to able to do either."
For now, this only applies to passport renewals but there are plans to allow first-time passport applications at a later date.
The effort to roll out an online passport system has been going on for years, however. It's part of a larger State Department modernization effort known as the ConsularOne program and dates back to 2009. But as a 2021 report from the agency's Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed, the online passport renewal portion suffered from serious mismanagement problems.