I stood at the DHL counter, speaking halting Spanish to the clerk as I slipped each passport and its accompanying documents into the prepaid envelope.
“You do a lot of these?” I asked.
“Muchísimos,” he said, not even requiring the address for the U.S. embassy in Madrid.
We’d just gotten back from our visit to the U.S. I planned to renew our passports when we returned to Spain, knowing we had a couple of upcoming trips in Europe and that they were set to expire in February 2027. Many airlines—and some countries—require at least six months’ remaining validity on a passport, and I didn’t want to take any chances on missing that deadline.
Having never done this before, I had no idea how to renew a passport from overseas. Instead, I kept hearing from other people how easy and fast the new online renewals are, which didn’t help me one bit because you can’t use that method from abroad.
So I sat down to figure it out.
Passport photos
The first step in renewing a passport is, of course, a passport photo.
U.S. passports use 5 x 5 cm photos. Spain’s standard passport photo size is 32 mm x 26 mm. You can see how this could become a problem.
I used a cheat code. Will and I went to Walgreens in the U.S. to get our passport photos taken, but any photo shop in Spain can adjust the photo size to fit 5 x 5 cm. The El Corte Inglés at the Colón metro stop here in Valencia has a photo shop inside called Wonder Photo Shop that can take them for you if you’re looking for an easy-to-get-into place (but not the cheapest).
You don’t have to pay for a passport photo. It just has to meet U.S. passport specifications. There are apps that can help you do this, or you can attempt to do it yourself. I prefer to pay for it to ensure the photo is accepted the first time around.
Requirements
The U.S. embassy in Madrid lays out these guidelines pretty clearly for an adult passport renewal.
Fill out the DS-82 form.
Send one U.S. passport-sized photo with your application.
Include your current passport. (This is the item that made me twitchy.)
Make an online payment using pay.gov for your passport fee. They do not accept any other form of payment.
A DHL Express return label must be included with all of the above so that the embassy can return your old passport and your new one to you.
The waiting game
Once you’ve gathered all of these pieces of the process together, it’s time to send the passport off.
I sent both passports via DHL to the Madrid embassy, but you do have the option to place them in drop boxes in Barcelona or Madrid. But since this entire process can be completed with DHL and I don’t live near Madrid or Barcelona, I chose to use DHL to send them as well.
Occasionally, the embassy sends out information about passport waiting times. Just after I sent our passports to Madrid, the embassy posted an update that with summer travel season approaching, if you need a renewal, go ahead and submit because the wait is currently 4-5 weeks.
Ours were sent on April 19th. By May 12th, I had them both back in my hands.
This all sounds rather simple, and it is. But what made me nervous wasn’t the process itself.
Living abroad means you’re entirely reliant on a passport to get you where you need to go. If there’s an emergency in the U.S.—a relative dies, a parent is sick, or a sibling is having a baby weeks before it was supposed to happen—and you don’t have your passport, you’re not going anywhere until it’s back in your hands.
Things to remember
If you’re living abroad, there’s a good chance you’re doing at least a moderate amount of travel, often outside your country of residence. If that’s the case, consider opting for the U.S. passport with extra pages rather than the standard size. It doesn’t cost extra, and if a country decides they want an entire page for an entry stamp, you have the pages to cover it for quite a while.
It’s worth noting that the European Union is moving toward a digital entry and exit system, which means you will no longer receive a passport stamp. However, when we took our U.S. trip in April, all four of our passports were stamped both leaving and reentering the EU. I’m not sure if that’s because we’re residents of Spain or the system hasn’t yet been fully implemented. But as residents of the EU, even though we do not hold EU citizenship, we will not be required to register for EES.
While this process was intimidating to me, it really wasn’t bad at all. It was quick, simple, and relatively painless (despite my anxiety about having no passports for a few weeks). Kids’ passports work differently, but those don’t expire until 2028. Watch this space for that process.
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