How long must your passport be valid for the Schengen area?

Two separate conditions, and your passport has to satisfy both. It must have been issued less than 10 years before the day you arrive, and it must be valid for at least three months after the day you plan to leave. A passport can pass the second test and still be refused on the first.

By Code Majesty Tech LLC Last reviewed October 13, 2026

“Your passport must: have a ‘date of issue’ less than 10 years before the date you arrive […] have an ‘expiry date’ at least 3 months after the date you plan to leave the Schengen area (the expiry date does not need to be within 10 years of the date of issue)”

GOV.UK — France travel advice, entry requirements (Schengen area rules) · checked 2026-10-13

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The 10-year issue-date rule, and why it catches people

Most passports are valid for ten years, so "issued within the last ten years" and "not expired" sound like the same sentence. For a long time they were not.

Passports renewed before October 2018 could carry unused months over from the old document — up to nine of them. That pushes the expiry date past ten years from the issue date. Such a passport can have months of validity left, satisfy the three-month requirement comfortably, and still be refused at the Schengen border, because the issue date is more than ten years old.

If you renewed before October 2018, look at the date of issue, not just the expiry date. It is the field nobody checks.

Three months beyond departure, not arrival

The expiry condition is measured from the day you intend to leave the Schengen area — unlike Thailand, Indonesia and the UAE, which all count from arrival.

On a long stay this changes the answer materially. Three months beyond a departure date that is itself three months away means your passport needs six months of validity at the point you arrive.

The two conditions are independent

This is the part worth being precise about, because the failure mode is counter-intuitive: satisfying the expiry rule tells you nothing about the issue-date rule, and vice versa. They are checked separately and either one can stop you.

The checker above tests both and tells you which one failed, because "invalid" on its own is useless information to someone holding a passport with eight months left on it.

Do these rules apply to EU citizens?

No. Both conditions apply to visitors from outside the EU. As an EU citizen you can travel within the Schengen area on a passport or a national ID card, and the only requirement is that it is valid on the day you travel — there is no three-month margin and no ten-year issue-date test.

The official source for this is the European Union's own Your Europe service, linked below alongside the GOV.UK page the other two rules come from.

Which countries this covers

The Schengen area is a single travel zone rather than a country, and the rules are the area's rather than any one member's. It covers most of the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland — and not every EU member is in it.

Because it is a zone, your "departure date" is the day you leave the area entirely, not the day you move between member countries.

Passport validity for other destinations

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