Apple to Roll Out Digital US Passports on iPhone ‘Soon’
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One of the few promised features conspicuously missing from last month’s iOS 26.0 rollout was support for US passports in Apple Wallet. Following the public release of iOS 26 in mid-September, Apple quietly updated its website to indicate that the feature wasn’t here yet — but that it would be coming in a software update.
Later that month, Apple quietly clarified that digital passports were still on track to arrive by the end of 2025 by adding “later this year” to that same footnote. Still, the timeline remained vague — until this past weekend.
During a keynote at the Money20/20 USA conference on Sunday, Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s VP of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, hinted that the new feature is just around the corner, telling attendees that iPhone users will “soon” be able to add US passports to their Digital IDs in Wallet.
This will not only fulfill the promise Apple made during its June Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but also help it catch up to Google, which pulled ahead in the digital ID space when it added support for US passports last year — an ironic twist, considering Android entered the game nearly two years after Apple rolled out Digital IDs on the iPhone in late 2021.
More significantly, this new capability will bring iPhone digital IDs to a much wider audience. So far, only 12 states and Puerto Rico have embraced digital driver’s licenses; as a federal document, US passports will be available to holders in all 50 states — and likely even expatriates. They’ll be usable in the same way as state-based digital IDs: at selected TSA airport checkpoints and for age and identity verification at businesses set up to handle them, both in-person and online.
This is one of those rare situations where rolling out a feature isn’t entirely under Apple’s control. The company undoubtedly hoped to have support for US passports ready to go when iOS 26.0 shipped, but the wheels of bureaucracy don’t always turn as fast as we’d like. Even though Google already blazed a trail for digital passports, Apple still needs to cut the red tape on its own, including paperwork, compliance checks, operational testing, and certification by the US State Department and the TSA.
The Apple Wallet ‘State of the Union’
Bailey didn’t provide a more detailed timeline, aside from saying the new digital ID was coming soon. However, she did have some interesting things to say about the other technologies that come under her purview: Apple Pay and the broader Apple Wallet features:
- Apple Pay has stopped more than $1 billion in fraud over the past year — a reduction of 60–90% over traditional physical card payment methods.
- Apple Pay is now accepted by over 90% of retailers in the United States, and available in 88 other countries and regions, across 11,000 banks and payment networks.
- Apple’s Digital Car Keys are now supported on more than 300 vehicle models across 29 brands.
- Apple’s Digital Hotel Keys are available for over 65,000 hotel rooms, and more than two million hotel room keys have been provisioned.
- Tap to Pay on iPhone is now available in 48 countries and regions, supporting up to 15 million merchants.
However, it’s probably fair to assume that Apple’s VP is putting the best spin on some of these stats. For example, 65,000 hotel rooms sounds like a lot, when you consider the number of rooms in higher-end hotels — those most likely to support digital keys in Apple Wallet — it’s probably only around 250–350 hotels. That suggests Apple’s hotel key support, while expanding, remains relatively small when compared to the hundreds of thousands of hotels and resorts around the globe.
That said, Apple’s 90% retail penetration for Apple Pay in the US is quite impressive, considering it started at around 2% when Apple Pay launched in 2014. While many other countries — including Canada and most of Europe — were already swimming in NFC contactless payments with physical cards, the idea hadn’t caught on in the US. In a landscape where most folks were still swiping cards and signing transaction slips, Apple Pay seemed quite magical when it first launched, and there’s little doubt that Apple deserves much of the credit for driving contactless payment adoption in that country.
Today, Apple Wallet is versatile enough that as long as you buy a compatible door lock, drive the right car, stay in the best hotels, and live in a supported state, you can almost leave your wallet and keys at home. It’s the digital driver’s licenses that still have the longest road ahead; getting them into your iPhone is only half the battle — the other half is ensuring they’re accepted widely enough that the physical plastic card becomes little more than a nostalgic backup.
