State Department shows Dramatic Improvement in Passport Processing

In June, I wrote a post about how bad the situation had become at the State Department and their ability to process passports. My kids both needed passports for our trip to Europe and it was a frustrating experience.

When we sent in the applications, the processing times were 8 to 11 weeks and by the time the applications arrived at the State Department, it had unexpectedly grown to 10 to 13 weeks. We needed the passports within 15 weeks, which should have been enough time, but we cut it too close and I got very nervous and probably overreacted (I most certainly overreacted). Unfortunately, getting information out of the State Department is pretty much impossible and changing anything after the application is submitted literally requires help from the office of your Congressperson or Senator.

The problem that I had the last time basically revolved around one thing – it’s pretty much impossible to speed up the process once you’ve decided which level of service you are paying for. Because the expected processing times grew by 2 weeks while the applications were in the mail, it cut out all of extra time that we left. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to switch to expedited service. The inability to change to expedited service led to the frustrating story that I had in the previous post. None of this would have been a problem if we had left them plenty of time to process the application, however.

This time my passport was expiring and I applied for it with about 16 weeks to spare. This time the State Department was showing a 7 to 10 week processing time for normal processing. I checked in a couple of times out of curiosity but I wasn’t at all worried about it.

To my absolute astonishment, they returned it to me within 3 weeks! That’s completely unexpected considering what happened last time and it appears to be an indication that the State Department hasn’t just caught up on the record numbers of passport applications that they were receiving early in the year, but they are now processing these applications at lightning speed.

Obviously, this could just be an outlier, but the fact that they dropped their expected waits to 7 to 10 weeks as well as my super quick process time indicates that the State Department is over the hump and they and people should expect better service going forward. It looks like the post-Covid passport surge is over and that’s great news for travelers!

You can find the latest expected wait times for the passport processing on the State Department website. You can also check your passport application status by going to this site.