Can You Get a Passport If You Haven’t Filed Taxes?

Yes, you can get a U.S. passport even if you haven’t filed your taxes. Not filing a return, on its own, is not something the State Department checks for or acts on. The only tax-related reason a passport gets denied or revoked is a specific, assessed federal tax debt above $66,000 in 2026 (including penalties and interest) that the IRS has certified to the State Department.¹ Unfiled returns don’t create that kind of debt by themselves.

Filing and Owing Are Two Different Things

The passport rule targets debt, not paperwork. The IRS can only flag you to the State Department once it has formally assessed a balance against you — meaning it has calculated what you owe and posted it to your account. A return you never filed produces no assessment. Even an estimate the IRS suspects you might owe doesn’t count until the agency runs it through its assessment and collection process.

So a person with several years of missing returns and no assessed balance is in a different situation than a person the IRS has already billed. The first person is out of compliance with filing rules, which carries its own consequences, but is not at risk of losing a passport for that reason alone.

What Actually Blocks a Passport

The FAST Act, passed in 2015, gave the IRS authority to certify taxpayers with a “seriously delinquent tax debt” to the State Department, which then refuses to issue or renew passports for those taxpayers and can revoke existing ones.² Two conditions have to be met:

Your total assessed federal tax liability, with penalties and interest, exceeds the annual threshold. For 2026 that figure is $66,000; in 2025 it was $64,000. It adjusts each year for inflation.¹
The debt is legally enforceable, which means the IRS has filed a federal tax lien and your appeal rights have lapsed or been exhausted, or the IRS has issued a levy.³

Both have to be true. Most people who are behind on filing owe nothing close to $66,000, and even those who do are protected while they’re in an installment agreement, an accepted Offer in Compromise, a pending Collection Due Process hearing, an innocent spouse request, or Currently Not Collectible status.¹ Child support obligations and FBAR penalties also don’t count toward the threshold.

How Unfiled Returns Can Eventually Become a Passport Problem

Doing nothing about missing returns doesn’t trigger the passport rule today, but it can set up a chain of events that does. If the IRS prepares a substitute return on your behalf, it will assess a balance using the information it has (usually without any of the deductions or credits you would have claimed). That inflated balance then accrues penalties and interest. If it grows past the threshold and the IRS moves to a lien or levy, you are now in territory where certification becomes possible.

The whole sequence takes time, often years. The point is that it is avoidable. Filing your overdue returns, even late, resets the picture: you either owe nothing, or you owe a real number you can plan around while it is still small.

What to Do If You’re Behind on Filing

File the missing returns. If you owe once they’re filed, the balance is almost certainly well below the certification threshold, and payment options are available before collection ever escalates. If you don’t owe, filing simply closes the loop and removes the risk of a substitute return down the line.

Apply for or renew your passport in the meantime if you need to. The State Department has no line of sight into your filing history. It acts on IRS certifications, and there is no certification without an assessed debt that meets the statutory conditions.

If You Already Received a CP508C Notice

A Notice CP508C means the IRS has already certified your debt to the State Department.⁴ At that point, unfiled returns are not really the issue anymore — there’s a certified balance, and you need to resolve it. Paying in full, entering an installment agreement, or getting into one of the protected categories will trigger reversal, and the IRS will send a Notice CP508R confirming it.¹ One trap worth knowing: paying the balance down below $66,000 does not undo certification. The certified modules have to be fully satisfied or fall under an exclusion.⁵

If travel is imminent, ask about the expedited decertification process for taxpayers traveling within 45 days or living abroad; it generally runs 9 to 16 days instead of the usual 30.⁵ The Taxpayer Advocate Service can help if you aren’t getting movement through regular channels.⁶

1
Internal Revenue Service. Revocation or Denial of Passport in Cases of Certain Unpaid Taxes
2
Taxpayer Advocate Service. Don’t Let a Passport Revocation Ruin Your International Travel Plans
3
GovInfo. 26 USC 7345 – Revocation or Denial of Passport in Case of Certain Tax Delinquencies
4
Internal Revenue Service. Understanding Your IRS Debt and Passport Certification
5
Internal Revenue Service. IRM 5.19.25 Passport Program
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Internal Revenue Service. Understanding Your CP508C Notice