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Passport photo sizes by country: the complete guide
Every passport office publishes its own millimetre rules, and a photo that is two millimetres off is the most common reason a counter clerk sends you back to redo it. Here are the sizes for the countries Passport Room ships presets for, in millimetres and inches, with the head-height ratios that matter just as much as the paper size.
A quick sanity check before the table: passport photo size is only half the requirement. The other half is where your head sits inside that rectangle — the head height, measured from the top of your hair (or head, if bare) to the bottom of your chin. A perfectly sized photo with the head floating too high or too low gets rejected just as fast as a wrongly sized one.
The sizes Passport Room supports
| Document | Photo size | In inches | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States — passport | 51 × 51 mm | 2 × 2 in | Head must measure between 25 mm and 35 mm (1–1⅜ in) from chin to crown. White or off-white background. |
| United Kingdom — passport | 35 × 45 mm | 1.4 × 1.8 in | Head height 29–34 mm from chin to crown. Plain light background, no shadow behind the head. |
| EU / Schengen visa | 35 × 45 mm | 1.4 × 1.8 in | Same rectangle as the UK; face should fill roughly 70–80% of the frame. |
| India — passport | 35 × 45 mm | 1.4 × 1.8 in | White background preferred. The OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) application uses the larger 2 × 2 in size. |
| Canada — passport | 50 × 70 mm | 2 × 2.75 in | Head height 31–36 mm, measured chin to crown. Off-white or plain background. |
| Australia — passport | 35 × 45 mm | 1.4 × 1.8 in | Plain light-coloured background, head centred, neutral expression. |
| China — visa | 33 × 48 mm | 1.3 × 1.9 in | A visa size, not a passport size — easy to confuse with the 35 × 45 mm standard. |
| Bangladesh — passport | 45 × 55 mm and 38 × 48 mm | 1.8 × 2.2 in / 1.5 × 1.9 in | Two sizes in circulation depending on the issuing authority and application type. |
These match the presets built into the Passport Room photo maker, which renders each photo at the exact millimetre dimensions at 300 DPI with the head-height guides drawn on screen. If your form asks for a size that is not in the list, the tool accepts a custom width and height in millimetres or inches — the maths below applies just the same.
Rules change. Passport offices revise their photo specifications more often than you would think, and they are the only authority that decides whether your photo is acceptable. Treat this table as a starting point and confirm the current requirement on your government's own website before you submit anything.
Millimetres, inches and DPI: how the numbers connect
A 35 × 45 mm photo printed at 300 DPI is 413 × 531 pixels — that is the resolution a printer needs to produce a crisp physical copy. Digital-only submissions still want a high-resolution file (most offices specify a minimum pixel count or file size), so there is no downside to exporting at full 300 DPI quality even when the photo will never touch paper. When you resize a photo yourself in any editor, resize proportionally and crop instead of stretching: a 35 × 45 mm canvas filled with a photo squashed from a different aspect ratio changes the shape of your face, and clerks notice.
How Passport Room handles sizing for you
You choose a country preset (or a custom size), and the app places your cut-out portrait inside that exact frame with on-screen guides showing where the head must sit. You drag, zoom and rotate until the guides align, and the export is rendered at the true physical size at 300 DPI — 413 × 531 pixels for a UK photo, 600 × 600 for a US photo. That means the same file works for a digital upload and, via the print-sheet editor, for physical prints.
FAQ
Is 35×45 mm the same as passport size?
For most of the world outside North America, yes — the UK, EU, Australia and India all use 35 × 45 mm. The United States uses 2 × 2 inches (51 × 51 mm) for passports and Canada uses 50 × 70 mm, so the "standard" depends entirely on which document you are applying for.
What size is a US passport photo?
2 × 2 inches — 51 × 51 mm — with the head between 25 mm and 35 mm tall, on a white or off-white background. Digital submissions must be high resolution; the photo maker exports US preset photos at 600 × 600 pixels at 300 DPI.
Can I use the same photo for passport and visa?
Often not without changing the size. A China visa wants 33 × 48 mm while most European documents want 35 × 45 mm. Since the tool re-frames your cut-out into any preset, the same source photo can be rendered at two sizes in two minutes — you just have to export each size separately.
What if my required size is not in the presets?
Enter a custom width and height. The sizing engine works from millimetres, so a custom 40 × 60 mm request gets the same 300 DPI treatment and head guides as a built-in preset.
Where to go next
Pick your size and cut out your background in the free passport photo maker, then follow the home-photo shooting guide to make sure the source picture is worth sizing in the first place. For printing the result at true scale, see the printing guide.