The U.S. State Department is reportedly struggling to keep up with increased passport demands ahead of the holiday travel season.
According to the State Department, travelers who applied for a passport earlier this year have been backlogged due to increased demand. The department, however, assured that the long delays have eased and is now processing routine passport applications in seven to 10 weeks.
“Our processing times only include the time your application is at one of our passport agencies or centers. Mailing times are not included in processing times. The total time to get your passport includes both processing and mailing times,” the State Department said on its website.
“It may take up to 2 weeks for applications to arrive by mail at a passport agency or center, and up to 2 weeks for you to receive a completed passport in the mail after we print it,” it continued.
The State Department has instead recommended travelers apply at least six months ahead of planned travel or passport expiration to avoid any delay on personal plans.
“Passport processing times are definitely shorter than they were,” said Sally French, a travel expert at NerdWallet. ”[But] it’s still a really long period of time if you’re trying to jump on some sort of last-minute airfare deal” such as the ones offered on “Travel Tuesday,” which falls on Nov. 28 this year.
The State Department has issued more than 24 million passport books and cards between October 2022 and September 2023—a record amount for a government fiscal year.
The department has made an effort to reduce the backlog by hiring and recruiting “aggressively” across passport agencies and centers, requiring passport employees to put in “tens of thousands” of overtime hours each month, and setting up a satellite office to assist with application processing.
“We are addressing the increased workload through a number of efforts. We are aggressively recruiting and hiring across our passport agencies and centers. Our passport team members nationwide contribute tens of thousands of hours of overtime a month to issue the millions of passports sought by traveling Americans. We have opened a satellite office to help process the large number of applications we are receiving,” it said in a statement.
