The State Department wants Americans abroad to renew passports online, and of the $148.7m a year it counts as the benefit, $19m is calculated on them
Two visits to a consulate. That is what renewing a passport costs an American living overseas today, on top of the fee, and the State Department has proposed to remove both.
The proposed rule went on public inspection at the Federal Register on Thursday morning and publishes on Friday. It would amend 22 CFR 51.21 to let citizens abroad apply through the Online Passport Renewal platform, which has been open only to applicants inside the United States since it launched in 2022. It would also delete a second restriction that applies to everybody: the requirement that an applicant's most recent passport have a year or less of validity remaining.
Neither restriction can be lifted any other way. The Department says so plainly in its analysis of the alternatives, and the reason is that both are written into the rule itself.
What the Department says it is worth
The rule is economically significant under section 3(f)(1) of Executive Order 12866, which is the threshold for an impact above $100 million. The preliminary regulatory impact analysis puts the annual saving at $148,685,935 and sets it out in five lines.
Two of those lines are about people overseas. Lost wages avoided come to $18,796,800, being 220,000 applicants at an assumed four hours off work and an hourly rate of $21.36 derived from an OECD figure of $44,439 for the average annual wage of Americans abroad. Savings on locally employed staff at consular posts come to $215,600, being the same 220,000 applicants at $0.98 each.
The other three lines are larger. Postage saved is $72,411,156, calculated on 6,059,511 applicants and the $11.95 price of a Priority Mail flat rate envelope. Travel is $26,358,873, the same 6,059,511 applicants driving six miles round trip at the federal mileage rate of $0.725. Photographs are $30,903,506, being the 34 percent of online applicants, 2,060,234 of them, whom a Department survey found had paid about $15 for one.
Those three come to $129,673,535. The two calculated on the 220,000 overseas applicants come to $19,012,400. Added together they reach $148,685,935, which is the Department's own total to the dollar.
Which population the big lines describe
The document projects 10,509,576 DS-82 renewal applications in the 2027 fiscal year and expects about 60 percent of them, 6,279,511, to arrive through the online platform. The overseas expansion, it says, could add up to 220,000 to that. Subtract the one from the other and 6,059,511 is what remains, which is the multiplicand carrying the postage and travel rows.
So the headline benefit is dominated by the projected online renewal population inside the United States rather than by the applicants this rule newly reaches. That is arithmetic off the Department's own table, not a criticism of it, and the analysis does not claim otherwise anywhere in its fifteen pages.
It is also not the whole picture, because the second half of the rule does widen the domestic pool. Removing the one-year validity limit lets Americans at home renew online earlier than they can now, and any growth from that would land in the 6,059,511 rather than the 220,000. The document does not break out how much of the projection that accounts for.
What was considered and dropped
The Department examined two other expansions and declined both for now. Opening the platform to holders of lost or stolen passports would need major changes to adjudication and, under the current validity limit, would reach only about 300,000 more people a year, which it puts at a 0.1 percent increase. Stretching the issuance gap from 15 years to 18 would reach about 495,000 more, a 7 percent increase, and the Department says it does not have the technology for it yet. It intends to come back with a separate rulemaking when it does.
Comments close 60 days after Friday's publication, at docket DOS-2026-0925.
