The State Department announced on Wednesday that its new online passport renewal system is now fully available to the public – a service it estimates up to five million Americans a year will be able to use.
Instead of sending documents and a check through the mail, eligible Americans can now head to travel.state.gov to pay, upload a photo, and apply for a passport renewal completely online.
The new system – which is the result of months of testing – is available to those who are seeking to renew an adult 10-year passport that has expired within the last five years or will expire in this coming year.
“We’ve been getting very good customer reviews. We’ll continue to seek customer feedback as people use the service, but as of now it’s open to all Americans, and we’re really excited about that,” Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs Rena Bitter told reporters Wednesday.
Currently, the service is not available to children, those who want expedited service, or those who are changing details such as their name or gender. However, Bitter said that the goal is to eventually have as many Americans as possible be able to use the online system.
“This is a first step in what we hope will be a much longer-term process to be able to modernize the systems that we’re using,” Bitter said.
“We will expand this. This is not going to be the last thing that we do,” she added. “We want to see how this goes and then we’ll start looking at ways to continue to make this service available to more American citizens in the coming months and years.”
Last year, Bitter said the State Department renewed about 9.6 million passports, which make up about 40 percent of its overall workload.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the online passport renewal system is “an important example” of how the department is working to modernize its government services in alignment with President Biden’s customer experience executive order from December 2021.
“By offering this online alternative to the traditional paper application process, the Department is embracing digital transformation to offer the most efficient and convenient passport renewal experience possible,” Blinken said in a statement.
“Thanks to increased staffing, technological advancements, and a host of other improvements, the average routine passport is being processed today in roughly one-third the time as at the same point last summer, and well under the advertised six to eight weeks processing times,” he added.
