We learned back at WWDC25 that US passport support would be coming to Apple Wallet. It hasn’t yet arrived in iOS 26, but the company yesterday confirmed that it is on the way.
An update to the Apple website last month told us to expect it by the end of the year, and Apple’s VP of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, Jennifer Bailey, confirmed in a conference keynote that it is still happening …
How US passport support will work
US passport support will work in much the same way as making an Apple Pay transaction. You’ll be invited to tap your iPhone to a reader and your digital passport information will be transmitted by NFC in the same way as your card details when making a payment. The secure protocol used allows the TSA system to verify that your passport details are genuine.
It’s important to understand what you will and won’t be able to do with your digital passport. In particular, you will not be able to use it to travel internationally: that will still require your physical passport. The primary function will be to confirm your identity at TSA checkpoints for domestic flights.
As always, there is important small-print, with Apple saying that the option to present digital passports will be available only at “select TSA checkpoints.” We don’t yet know which airports will offer support, but based on past rollouts of other digital travel initiatives, we can likely expect the option to be restricted to a relatively small number of airports at launch.
Privacy concerns
Some have expressed concerns that this requires you to unlock your iPhone, making the contents potentially available for inspection.
This is not the case. Exactly as with Apple Pay, Face ID only unlocks the ability of the Apple Wallet app to transmit details to the terminal; it doesn’t unlock the phone itself.
But the argument is largely irrelevant anyway. The rights that government officials do or don’t have to inspect the contents of your phone are determined by law, not by the technicalities of this type of feature.
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