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 encounter a discrepancy, go with what you see at the destination country's site (just make sure it's an official website from the 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.
Places that require passports to be valid for the duration of your stay only
Places that require passports to be valid for 1 to 3 months
- Hong Kong (1 month)
- New Zealand (3 months)
- Panama (3 months)
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Turks & Caicos (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.
However, the U.S. State Department advises Americans to have passports valid for at least 6 months when traveling to Europe's Schengen Area.
When asked to explain this seeming contradiction, a State Department spokesperson clarified that since U.S. citizens with valid passports can stay up to 90 days in the Schengen Area for tourism or business (during any 180-day period), some Schengen countries could require the passport to be valid for 3 months beyond that theoretical date of departure (rather than when you're actually planning to leave). Hence the guidance for U.S. travelers to those European countries to have at least 6 months of validity at the time of entry.
So basically Europe is in the 3-month club but with an asterisk. Out of an abundance of caution, then, you might as well think of those nations as 6-monthers.
