ISLAMABAD:
The cost of obtaining a new passport has nearly doubled as the authorities have discontinued machine-readable passports and shifted exclusively to e-passports for new applications nationwide.
The normal fee for a five-year, 36-page passport has risen from Rs4,500 to Rs9,000, while the urgent fee has increased from Rs7,500 to Rs15,000.
The change applies to Lahore and the rest of the country, although machine-readable passports already issued to citizens will remain valid until their expiry dates.
Under the new fee structure, a five-year, 36-page e-passport costs Rs9,000 under normal processing and Rs15,000 under urgent processing.
The supplied report puts the former fast-track fee for a machine-readable passport at Rs12,500 and gives the corresponding e-passport fee as Rs22,000. It says fees for 72-page passports will also increase in the same proportion.
Passport and Immigration Department sources said 5,572,130 passports were issued nationwide in 2025. Of these, 3,275,263 were issued under the normal machine-readable category, 1,839,487 under the urgent category and 276,789 through fast-track service. Close to 180,000 e-passports were also issued during the year.
The figures cited for previous years show that 6,596,520 passports were issued in 2024 and 6,717,938 in 2023.
A combined total of 13,314,458 passports were issued during those two years, averaging approximately 6.7 million annually. The report describes the 2025 total as the highest in the country’s history for a single year, although the figures it provides for both 2023 and 2024 are higher.
The shift to e-passports is part of a wider move towards modern travel-document technology, with many countries adopting electronic passports. The Directorate General of Immigration and Passports has introduced the system in Pakistan using modern technology and additional equipment.
For the project, the department has installed 10 additional modern printing machines and six laminators. It has also established round-the-clock services at 232 offices, alongside 93 window counters at Pakistani missions abroad that operate day and night.
According to the figures cited in the report, passport fees generated Rs47,645,523,500 for the national exchequer in 2024, while collections in 2023 were approximately Rs50 billion.
The report further says that an average of Rs40 billion a year was deposited into the government treasury during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 fiscal years, roughly twice the amount collected in earlier years.
Based on an average fee of Rs7,000 to Rs15,000 per passport, the report estimates that passport issuance generates between Rs40 billion and Rs50 billion in annual net revenue for the government, separate from the federal excise duty (FED) collected by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR).
Passport authorities maintain that e-passports cost more to produce than machine-readable passports because they incorporate modern technology. The department says the new fees have been fixed in line with those higher production costs. Existing machine-readable passports will remain usable until their validity expires.
