Form DS-160: Filing, Photo Rules, and the Interview

Form DS-160 is the online nonimmigrant visa application that every foreign national must complete before interviewing at a U.S. embassy or consulate. You fill it out through the Department of State’s Consular Electronic Application Center, and the consular officer uses your answers, together with a personal interview, to decide whether you qualify for the temporary visa you are seeking.¹ The form is entirely digital, submitted once, and produces a barcoded confirmation page you bring to your appointment.

Who Has to File One

Anyone applying for a nonimmigrant visa needs a DS-160. That covers B-1 business travelers, B-2 tourists and medical visitors, F academic students, M vocational students, and J-1 exchange visitors.¹ Employment categories use the same form after USCIS approves the underlying petition: H-1B specialty workers, L-1 intracompany transferees, O extraordinary-ability visas, P athletes and entertainers, and H-2 seasonal workers.

The K-1 fiancé(e) visa surprises people. It carries immigrant intent but is processed on the DS-160, not the DS-260 immigrant application.¹

Every traveler files individually. Infants, toddlers, teenagers, adults, spouses traveling together: each person gets their own form and their own barcode. There is no combined family filing.

What to Gather Before You Start

The form asks about nearly every part of your personal history, and the session times out after roughly 20 minutes of inactivity. Pull your documents together first. It is the single biggest thing you can do to keep the process moving.

Have this ready on your desk:

Your passport. It generally must be valid for at least six months beyond your intended stay, and you will need the number, issuance date, expiration date, and issuing country.²
Your travel itinerary, including planned arrival and departure dates and the U.S. address where you will stay.
Dates of your last five trips to the United States, if any, plus a list of every country you have visited in the past five years. Old passport stamps are your best reference.³
Schools you have attended beyond the elementary level, with names, addresses, and dates.
Your current employer and the two previous ones, with job titles and duties. Military service or work for a foreign government requires dates and details as well.³
A U.S. point of contact: the name and address of a person or organization who knows you or is sponsoring your visit.
Both parents’ full names and dates of birth, whether they are living or not.

If You Have a Petition or a SEVIS Record

Work-visa applicants need a copy of the approved Form I-129 and the 13-character USCIS receipt number.³ F, M, and J applicants need the SEVIS ID printed on their Form I-20 or DS-2019.

Social Media Handles

The form requires you to list your usernames on selected social media platforms used in the past five years. It provides a drop-down of platforms, and you disclose all handles for each one.⁴ If you have never used social media, select “None.” Do not leave it blank. Consular officers can review applicants’ online presence, and a gap between what you disclose and what they find is the kind of thing that raises questions.

Photo Requirements

Your digital photo has to clear an automated check before the form will accept it, and the specs are unforgiving:

Color, taken within the last six months, showing your current appearance.⁵
Plain white or off-white background with no patterns or shadows.
Head height between 50% and 69% of the image, measured from chin to crown.⁵
No eyeglasses, unless you cannot remove them for medical reasons and have a signed statement from a medical professional.⁵
JPEG, square, 600×600 to 1200×1200 pixels, no more than 240 KB.⁶

An older headshot or a face cropped out of a group picture will usually fail. Images that are too dark, unevenly lit, or show you looking away from the lens get rejected. Sort the photo out before you sit down to the form.

Working Through the Form

You start by picking the U.S. embassy or consulate where you will interview. The system then generates a unique Application ID. Write it down right away. Along with the security question you choose, it is your only way back into a saved form. You have 30 days to return to a partially completed application; after that, the saved data is deleted unless you downloaded a backup .dat file to your computer.³

On the Personal Information screen, enter your name exactly as it appears in the machine-readable zone of your passport. Even small differences between the form and your passport can cause delays or force you to redo pages. Names that do not fit neatly into the surname/given-name convention should follow whatever the passport’s machine-readable zone uses.

From there the sequence is predictable: contact details, passport data, travel purpose and dates, who is paying, travel companions, prior U.S. visas and refusals, and any petitions filed for you. Answer the U.S. travel history questions carefully. Consular officers already have your immigration record on their side of the screen, and inconsistencies get flagged fast.

Save at the bottom of every page. The system does not auto-save, and losing twenty minutes of work to a timeout is the mistake you only make once.

The Security and Background Questions

Near the end you hit a block of yes-or-no questions covering criminal history, health conditions, prior immigration violations, and security topics. Most applicants answer “no” throughout. Any “yes” opens a text box for a detailed explanation.

One question catches people. Federal law makes an applicant inadmissible if they admit to violating any controlled substance law, and marijuana is a controlled substance under federal law regardless of whether it was legal where you used it.⁷ Consular officers apply the federal standard. An admission can trigger a finding of inadmissibility, though a nonimmigrant waiver may be available depending on the facts. If this could apply to you, talk to an immigration attorney before you answer.

Signing and the Confirmation Page

After you review everything, you reach the Sign and Submit screen. Clicking “Sign Application” is a legal act. Your electronic signature binds you to every statement on the form under penalty of perjury.⁸ A false statement made to obtain a visa can bar you permanently from entering the United States for fraud or willful misrepresentation, and the statute has no built-in expiration.⁹

When you submit, the system generates a confirmation page with a 10-digit alphanumeric barcode. Print it. The consular officer uses that barcode to pull up your application at the interview, and without it the consulate may not be able to process your case.³ Use a printer that produces a clean, scannable barcode. You do not need to print the full application; the officer sees your answers on screen.

Paying the Fee and Booking the Interview

With the confirmation page in hand, you move to a separate system to pay the non-refundable Machine Readable Visa fee and schedule your appointment. The fee depends on the visa category:¹⁰

$185 for non-petition-based visas, including B-1/B-2, F, M, and J.
$205 for petition-based work visas: H, L, O, P, Q, and R.
$265 for K fiancé(e) and spouse visas.
$315 for E treaty trader/investor visas and Australian professional specialty visas.

Blanket L-1 applicants owe a separate $500 fraud prevention fee.¹⁰ Your DS-160 confirmation number links the application to the scheduling system, so keep it handy when you pay.

Who Can Skip the Interview

Assume you will interview in person. As of October 1, 2025, the Department of State narrowed the categories eligible to waive the interview to a short list:¹¹

Diplomatic and official visa applicants in A-1, A-2, G-1 through G-4, NATO, and similar classifications.
B-1, B-2, or B-1/B-2 renewals, if the previous visa was issued for full validity, you were at least 18 when it was issued, and you apply within 12 months of its expiration.
H-2A renewals on the same conditions: full validity, at least 18 at issuance, applying within 12 months of expiration.

Even in these categories, you must apply in your country of nationality or usual residence, have no prior refusals (unless overcome or waived), and no apparent ineligibility. Consular officers can require an in-person interview from any applicant at their discretion.¹¹ First-time applicants, H-1B, L-1, and F-1 applicants should plan on going in person.

Fixing Mistakes and Reusing a Saved Application

Before submission, fix errors by navigating back to the page and editing. After submission, you cannot edit the form yourself. The embassy or consulate can reopen your application and ask you to correct it, which may mean a new appointment or a return visit to the facility.³ Minor typos flagged at the interview can sometimes be handled on the spot; anything substantive, like a wrong passport number or the wrong employer, usually means reopening the form.

For a later trip, you do not have to start from scratch. If you saved the earlier application as a .dat file to your computer within the 30-day window, the system lets you upload it to pre-populate a new form.¹² Select “Upload a Previous Application,” pick the file, answer your security questions, update whatever has changed, and submit. You get a fresh barcode on the new application.

When Someone Else Fills Out the Form

A parent or legal guardian can complete the DS-160 and sign it for an applicant who is under 16 or physically unable to do so.³ If no parent or guardian is available, any person with legal custody of or a legitimate interest in the applicant may sign.⁸

Adults who use a travel agent or attorney to help prepare the form should be clear on one thing: the applicant is legally responsible for every answer, even ones a preparer typed. Your electronic signature attests you are familiar with and bound by every statement in the application. If the preparer enters something inaccurate and you submit it, the consequences fall on you. Review every page before you sign, and never submit a form in a language you cannot read.

1
U.S. Department of State. DS-160: Online Nonimmigrant Visa Application
2
U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Six-Month Passport Validity Update
3
U.S. Department of State. DS-160: Frequently Asked Questions
4
U.S. Department of State. FAQs on Social Media Identifiers in the DS-160 and DS-260
5
U.S. Department of State. Photo Requirements
6
U.S. Department of State. Digital Image Requirements
7
U.S. Department of State. 9 FAM 302.4 – Ineligibility Based on Controlled Substance Violations
8
eCFR. 22 CFR 41.103 – Filing an Application
9
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 8 USC 1182 – Inadmissible Aliens
10
U.S. Department of State. Fees for Visa Services
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U.S. Department of State. Interview Waiver Update
12
U.S. Department of State – Consular Electronic Application Center. Opening an Application Saved Locally