Can You Wear Glasses in a Passport Photo? Ban and Medical Exception

No, you cannot wear glasses in a U.S. passport photo. The State Department banned eyeglasses, sunglasses, and tinted lenses from passport and visa photographs on November 1, 2016, and the only way around the rule is a narrow medical exception that requires a signed note from your doctor.¹ Submit a photo with glasses on and your application will be delayed or rejected.

Why the Rule Exists

The ban was put in place to improve facial recognition accuracy. Lenses produce glare, reflections, and shadows around the eyes, and frames can change the apparent shape of a face. Those distortions raise the odds of a false mismatch when automated systems compare your photo to you. Clean images of the eye area cut misidentification rates, so the State Department took eyewear out of the picture entirely.¹

Which Eyewear Is Banned

Every kind. The prohibition covers prescription glasses, reading glasses, sunglasses, transition lenses, and any tinted lenses. The official photo requirements page states it plainly: take off any eyeglasses, sunglasses, or tinted glasses before your photo is taken.²

There is no exception for style, for looking like yourself in daily life, or for glasses you rarely remove. If it sits on your face and has lenses, it comes off.

The Medical Exception

You can keep your glasses on only if removing them would be medically harmful. The State Department calls this a “rare” circumstance and gives the example of someone who recently had eye surgery and needs glasses to protect their eyes during urgent travel.¹ Needing your glasses in order to see is not a qualifying reason. The exception is about physical protection of the eye, not vision correction.

If you qualify, you have to submit a signed note from your doctor with your passport application explaining why the glasses cannot be removed.² The photo still has to meet the standard visual requirements: your frames cannot cover any part of your eyes, and the lenses must be free of glare and shadow. Hitting both of those with glasses on is hard, which is part of why the exception rarely gets used in practice.

If You Sent In a Photo Wearing Glasses

If your photo doesn’t pass, the National Passport Information Center will send you a letter or email describing the problem. You generally have 90 days to send in a corrected photo without paying anything extra. Miss that window and your application can be canceled, meaning you start over with new fees.³

Glasses still visible in the photo is one of the most common reasons for rejection, along with shadows on the face, wrong head size in the frame, blurry resolution, and digitally edited images. Getting a fresh photo taken without glasses is quick and cheap. Passport photo services at pharmacies and shipping stores generally cost under $20 and handle the sizing and paper for you, which is often faster than fixing the photo yourself and mailing it back in.

A Practical Note Before Your Photo

If you wear glasses every day, plan for a few minutes of adjustment. Take them off before you sit down, not at the moment of the shot, so your eyes have time to settle and you’re not squinting. If you have indentations on the bridge of your nose from your frames, those will show up in the photo but do not cause a rejection on their own. What matters is that your eyes are open, visible, and unobstructed, with no lenses in front of them.²

1
U.S. Department of State. New Eyeglasses Policy for Visa and Passport Photographs
2
U.S. Department of State. U.S. Passport Photos
3
U.S. Department of State. Respond to a Passport Letter or Email