To enter some countries, your passport expiration date must be at least 6 months away. But if your passport is expiring soon, you still have options. Here are 12 popular destinations where that rule doesn’t apply.
One of the annoying things about passports is that the expiration date you’ll find printed inside isn’t necessarily the date up to which you can use the passport for international travel.
It depends on where you’re headed. Many countries require your passport to show validity well beyond the dates of your visit—in some cases, up to 6 months beyond. So although your passport has not expired, you may not use it to enter countries that follow that rule. As the U.S. State Department explains, the airline will likely block you from boarding your flight in those circumstances.
A lot of the countries that follow the 6-month passport validity rule are in Asia, Africa, the South Pacific, and parts of Central and South America. If you plan to visit those regions (or, really, any other part of the world), search for entry and visa requirements for tourists and read that stuff carefully.
For the most up-to-date information, consult the government website of your destination country, if possible. Cross-reference what you find with the listings at the State Department’s travel site. If you find a discrepancy, go with what you see at the destination country’s site (just make sure it’s a website from the official government).
To be on the safe side, you should start a renewal of your U.S. passport before you reach the 6-months-till-expiration mark—at around, say, 9 months, to allow for processing time. At long last, you can now renew online.
But if you miss the 6-month cutoff, you can still travel overseas. Plenty of the world’s popular tourism destinations require visitors’ passports to remain valid just 3 months beyond a stay or less—even, in some places, for the duration of the stay only.
We’ve assembled a dozen enticing options for passport-renewal procrastinators below.
Countries that require passports to be valid for the duration of your stay only
Countries that require passports to be valid for 1 to 3 months
Does the 6-month passport validity rule apply to Europe?
Well, it’s tricky.
Technically, any visitor to a country in the Schengen Area—which includes 29 European nations—must have a passport that’s “valid for at least 3 months” after the intended date of departure, according to the European Union.
But individual nations can opt for a 6-month validity requirement. Or, since it’s possible for many non-European tourists to stay in a European country as a tourist for up to 90 days, border officials could theoretically calculate passport validity from that date (regardless of the actual length of your vacation), which would mean you’d need a total of 6 months before your passport expires anyway.
For those reasons, the U.S. State Department advises Americans to have passports valid for at least 6 months when traveling to Europe’s Schengen Area.