Sources & methodology

• travel.state.gov — U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs: fees, forms, eligibility, processing times, urgent-travel rules.
• The State Department’s published passport acceptance facility dataset, used for facility names, addresses, phone numbers and hours.
• Regional passport agency pages, for appointment-only rules and agency contact details.
• Individual U.S. embassy and consulate websites, for overseas passport services.
• Official PDF forms (DS-11, DS-82, DS-64, DS-5504, DS-3053, DS-5525, DS-4085, DS-60, DS-1504) linked directly from the government.

Coordinates and some public business details come from mapping providers. This data is labeled as third-party, cached with a timestamp, and never allowed to overwrite an official field. Where a provider’s record disagrees with the government dataset, the government dataset wins and the third-party value is discarded.

1. Import the official file and normalize names, addresses, states, ZIP codes and phone formats.
2. Detect duplicates and conflicts against existing records; conflicts go to a human review queue.
3. Attach the source URL and source authority to every record.
4. Run the quality gate (below). Only records that pass become index-ready.
5. Publish, with the source link and a last-reviewed date visible on the page.

A directory page is only submitted to search engines when it carries enough verified substance to be useful. Records that fail render noindex, follow and are excluded from our sitemaps until the gap is filled. We check for:

• a resolvable street address and city/state;
• usable coordinates so the map and distance sorting work;
• a source URL and source authority;
• hours or an explicit statement that hours are not published;
• no unresolved duplicate or conflict flag.

This is why the number of pages in our sitemap is smaller than the number of records in our database. Thin pages are held back on purpose.

Blank means blank. If a facility does not publish a phone number, appointment rule, or set of hours, we say so and link to the operator’s own page instead of estimating. Overseas posts in particular rarely publish machine-readable hours, so we link to the post’s official site for current times and holiday closures.

Every dollar figure used across the site — the fees page, the fee calculator, the cost calculator, and the assistant — is read from a single centralized government-fact record with its own source link and verification status. Changing a fee in one place changes it everywhere, so the site cannot contradict itself. Any estimate we produce (mileage, courier cost, travel expenses) is labeled an estimate.

Each fact carries a verification status and a last-verified date. Facts that pass their review window are flagged internally and re-checked against the source before the page is re-promoted. Pages show their last-reviewed date so you can judge freshness yourself.

• Government data files lag reality; a facility can close between releases.
• We cannot see live appointment inventory, so we link to official booking pages instead.
• Traveler-reported wait times are anecdotes, not statistics.
• Translations are reviewed by a human but the official English source always governs.

Use the report form on the page in question or email corrections@passportoffices.com. See the corrections policy.