UK Passport Photo Size: Every Measurement, Explained

What size is a UK passport photo?

A printed UK passport photo must measure 45 millimetres high by 35 millimetres wide, and the image of your head — measured from the crown of your head to the bottom of your chin — must be between 29mm and 34mm. Those two numbers are set by HM Passport Office and they are the specification that photo booths across the UK are built to. A digital photo submitted online is governed by a different rule entirely: at least 600 pixels wide by 750 pixels tall, and between 50KB and 10MB.

This guide covers the measurements in depth; for the rules as a whole — expression, background, glasses, what gets photos bounced — start with the complete guide to UK passport photos.

Most people who get rejected on size do not get the outer dimensions wrong. Booths and print shops handle the 45 × 35 automatically. They get the head height wrong, because that measurement depends entirely on how far you stood from the camera and how the image was cropped — and nothing about a photo tells you at a glance whether it falls inside a 5mm window.

The two specifications, side by side

The single most common source of confusion is treating "UK passport photo requirements" as one set of rules. There are two, and which one applies depends on how you are applying.

Sources: GOV.UK, printed photo requirements and digital photo requirements.

Note the background row. The printed specification says cream or light grey; the digital specification says "plain light-coloured background." These are not contradictory — HM Passport Office's own examiner guidance describes an acceptable background as "any light colour (for example different shades of white (cream, ivory or vanilla) and light grey)" — but the printed wording is narrower, and if you are posting a paper form it is the wording you should work to.

What the 29mm to 34mm head height actually means

The head height rule measures from the crown of your head to the bottom of your chin. Crown means the top of your skull, not the top of your hair. On a 45mm-tall photo, a 29mm head occupies about 64% of the frame and a 34mm head occupies about 76%. That is the whole tolerance: roughly a tenth of the picture's height.

Three practical consequences follow.

Distance from the camera sets it, not zoom. If the camera is too far away, your head lands under 29mm and the photo looks like a holiday snap with a lot of background. Too close and you exceed 34mm, with the crown of your head clipped by the top edge. Around 1.5 metres between subject and camera is a workable starting point for a phone.

Hair volume counts against you. Big or tall hair pushes the crown measurement upward. The examiner guidance notes that if hair on the top of the head has been cropped from a photo, it may still be accepted — the measurement is to the crown of the head, not the highest strand of hair — but a very tall style still makes a compliant crop harder to find.

Cropping is not free. You cannot fix a too-small head by cropping in on a low-resolution image, because you lose the pixels that made it sharp. HM Passport Office requires photos "in sharp focus, showing a strong definition and contrast between face and background." A heavily upscaled crop fails that before it fails anything else.

Where your eyes need to sit in the frame

Here is a measurement almost nobody outside the passport office knows about, and it explains a whole class of rejections that look inexplicable.

HM Passport Office's examiner guidance states that its system "will have problems finding correct eye positions, unless the customer's eyes are in the top 40% to 70% of the photo (vertical eye band)." On a 45mm photo, that band runs from 18mm down from the top to 31.5mm down from the top.

This is a vertical position rule, not a size rule, and it is why two photos with identical, perfectly legal head heights can produce different outcomes. If you sat low in the frame — common when someone photographs you from slightly above — your head can measure a lawful 31mm while your eyes fall below the band. Facial recognition then struggles to locate them, and the photo is bounced.

The fix is to centre your head horizontally and position yourself so your eyes land a little above the middle of the frame, with a small margin of space above your crown.

Digital photo dimensions: what 600 × 750 really requires

The online specification asks for a minimum of 600 pixels wide by 750 pixels tall. That is a 4:5 ratio, which is the same proportion as 35mm × 45mm(ish) — 35:45 is 1:1.286, and 600:750 is 1:1.25, so they are close but not identical. The digital frame is very slightly wider relative to its height.

Two things worth knowing about that minimum:

• It is a floor, not a target. Any modern phone produces images far larger than 600 × 750. You do not need to shrink anything. You need to make sure that after cropping to the right proportion, what remains is still at least that size — which it will be unless you cropped a tiny region out of a large photo.
• The file size floor matters more than the ceiling. The rule is "at least 50KB and no more than 10MB." Nobody accidentally exceeds 10MB with a phone photo. People do drop under 50KB, by running an image through an aggressive compressor or a messaging app that recompresses it. A photo sent to yourself over WhatsApp and saved from the chat can land well under 50KB and be rejected on file size alone, while looking perfectly fine on screen.

The rest of the digital specification — format, colour, orientation and how to check a file before uploading — is set out in digital passport photo file requirements.

Related: the photo must be "unaltered by computer software." That rules out filters, beauty modes, and background replacement done for cosmetic reasons. Standard cropping and resizing to meet the specification is what the requirement is about — it exists to stop people changing their appearance, not to ban resizing.

Printed photos: paper, borders and the back of the print

If you are applying on a paper form you need two identical printed photos, and the physical print itself is specified as tightly as the image on it. GOV.UK requires them to be:

• "printed to a professional standard"
• "clear and in focus"
• on "plain white photographic paper with no border"
• "without any creases or tears"
• "unmarked on both sides (unless a photo needs to be countersigned)"

That last point catches people out regularly. The instinct to write your name on the back of a photo is a sensible one for almost every other form in British life, and here it invalidates the print. The only writing permitted on the back is a countersignature, where one is required.

"No border" is the other quiet one. Home printers and consumer photo services frequently add a thin white margin by default, and a bordered print is not a 45 × 35 photo — it is a smaller photo inside a 45 × 35 rectangle, which throws the head height measurement out too.

For the mechanics of getting a compliant print out of a home printer, see our guide to printing UK passport photos at home.

How the size rules differ for children and babies

The dimensions do not change. A baby's passport photo is still 45mm × 35mm with a 29mm to 34mm head height, which is precisely what makes infant photos difficult — a small head has to fill the same proportion of the frame as an adult's.

What does change is everything else. Children under 6 do not have to look directly at the camera or hold a plain expression. Children under 1 do not need their eyes open, and GOV.UK explicitly suggests laying them "on a plain light-coloured sheet" and taking the photo from above. You may support a baby's head with your hand, "but your hand must not be visible in the photo."

We cover the practicalities in full in UK baby and newborn passport photo rules and child passport photo requirements by age.

How long a correctly sized photo stays usable

Your photo "must have been taken in the last month" when you submit it. After HM Passport Office receives it, the examiner guidance gives it a shelf life of 12 months for an adult and 6 months for a child.

That one-month rule is about your appearance being current, not about the file's timestamp, and it is the reason reusing a photo from a previous application does not work. More on this in how long a UK passport photo is valid.

Measuring head height by eye is the part people get wrong most often. Our UK passport photo service does the measurement and returns the compliant crop.

Check your photo before you submit

If your photo is the wrong size or framed too loosely, the passport photo resizer sets it to the UK passport size of 35 by 45 millimetres, and the passport photo checker then reads the result against the requirements.

Frequently asked questions

Is a UK passport photo 45mm × 35mm or 35mm × 45mm?

Both describe the same photo. GOV.UK states it as "45 millimetres (mm) high by 35mm wide" — so it is portrait orientation, taller than it is wide. Writing it as 35 × 45 (width × height) is equally correct as long as you keep the orientation portrait.

What is the head size for a UK passport photo in pixels?

There is no official pixel head-height figure. GOV.UK specifies head height in millimetres for printed photos (29mm to 34mm) and specifies only the overall minimum dimensions for digital ones (600 × 750 pixels). If you want a working equivalent, 29–34mm of a 45mm frame is 64%–76% of the image height, which on a 750-pixel-tall image is roughly 483 to 570 pixels.

Can I crop a normal photo down to passport size?

Yes, provided the result still meets every rule: at least 600 × 750 pixels, at least 50KB, sharp, correct head height and eye position, plain light background, no shadows, and no other people in frame. Cropping a group photo almost never works, because the background and the lighting were never right to begin with.

Are UK passport photo dimensions the same as for a driving licence?

The photo standard is the same — DVLA asks for "a recent printed passport type photo" and links to the same HM Passport Office requirements — but the application processes differ, and when you renew online DVLA can reuse the photo already held on your passport. See can you use the same photo for your passport and driving licence.

Does the 45mm × 35mm size apply to the digital photo too?

No. The millimetre measurements apply to printed photos submitted with a paper form. A digital photo uploaded during an online application is judged on pixel dimensions and file size instead. Applying the printed rules to a digital file — or vice versa — is one of the more common ways people talk themselves into a rejection.

Sources

• GOV.UK, Get a passport photo: printed photo requirements
• GOV.UK, Get a passport photo: digital photos
• HM Passport Office, Photo standards (accessible)