You Can Now Renew A U.S. Passport In Less Than A Month

05.01.2024 - 14:13 / forbes.com

Travelers, rejoice! Getting your U.S. passport renewed now takes less time that at any point since the Covid-19 pandemic darkened the globe.

As of now, the turnaround time for a standard passport renewal currently is six to eight weeks, according to the State Department website. For $60 more, an expedited renewal application can take two to three weeks. Don’t want to wait two weeks to receive your blue book in the regular mail? You can pay $19.53 extra for rush delivery in one to two days.

That’s a far cry from the first summer of the pandemic, when many travelers were waiting up to 18 weeks to get their passport renewed. Even this time last year, the processing time for a standard passport renewal was eight to 11 weeks, with an expedited renewal application taking five to seven weeks.

The ultralong passport wait times of recent years were caused in large part to the overwhelming demand for international travel since Covid restrictions were lifted. “As Americans are traveling internationally again, we are seeing unprecedented demand for passports,” a State Department official told Forbes last year.

In 2023, the United States processed a record 24,021,257 passports—breaking the previous record of 21,995,760 passports processed in 2022. The number of passports issued in 2023 was up 78% compared to just a decade earlier.

Interest among Americans in international travel has soared in the recent decades. Roughly 46% of Americans possess passports today—more than any time in history—compared to just 30% in 2008, according to the State Department. Note that, prior to June 2009, U.S. citizens could travel to Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean with just a driver’s license.

In the first nine months of 2023, Americans made over 74 million international trips, according to data from the National Travel & Tourism Office (NTTO), the agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce that tracks tourism statistics. About half of those trips were to our North American neighbors—Mexico (26.7 million trips) and Canada (10.1 million). Among overseas trips, Europe (15.8 million) and the Caribbean (8.2 million) were the top regional destinations.

Meanwhile, eight months after the official end of the pandemic, the U.S. tourism industry is still in recovery mode. In 2019, 79.4 million international visitors to the U.S. injected roughly $239 billion into the national economy, accounting for nearly 10% of America’s total exports and services. In the first nine months of 2023, the U.S. welcomed 49.3 million international visitors, according to the NTTO.

When full-year numbers for 2023 are calculated, the U.S. expects to have welcomed 62.8 million foreign visitors—a 21% year-over-year jump but still 21% below pre-Covid numbers.