Fact-check: Has Pakistan increased the passport fee to Rs70,000?
The service fee for a new or renewal of a Pakistani passport has not been hiked, confirms the government-run Directorate General Immigration and Passport department
Updated Tuesday Feb 07 2023
Messages circulating on WhatsApp groups and posts on social media allege that there has been a hefty rise in the fee for machine-readable and electronic Pakistani passports.
This claim is incorrect.
Claim
On January 30, a verified Twitter account posted a short clip which showed people rushing to a passport office in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The caption read: “Rumours of passport fee being Rs70,000, as a sea of passport makers reach Peshawar’s passport office.”
The tweet had been liked over 20 times and retweeted six times, at the time of writing.
On January 29, another Twitter user urged people to get their passports made quickly.
“After five days, the fee will increase from Rs3,300 to Rs9,900 and from Rs7,000 to Rs21,000,” the user wrote, attaching a notification purportedly showing the price uptick.
Fact
The service fee for a new or renewal of a Pakistani passport has not been increased, confirmed the government-run Directorate General Immigration and Passport department.
Yawar Hussain, the director general of the Islamabad-based Directorate General Immigration and Passport, told Geo Fact Check that the news circulating on social media was incorrect.
“We do not plan to increase the fee right now either,” Hussain added.
As per the official document shared with Geo Fact Check, the charges for a machine-readable 36-page passport, valid for five years, is Rs3,000 and for 10 years is Rs4,500.
Even for a 100-page passport, made on an urgent basis, the amount does not exceed Rs18,000.
“Due to these rumours, people are rushing to our passport offices in large numbers,” Hussain said, “Earlier, around 22,000 people would visit our offices in a day, these days the numbers have increased to 56,000 per day.”
Separately the amount being charged for electronic passports is between Rs9,000 and Rs40,000, depending on the number of pages and the time required to be printed.
The new charges for e-passports were notified in 2020 and remain unchanged to date. A cropped version of this notification is misleadingly being shared on social media. Below is the complete notification:
The official account of the Directorate General Immigration and Passports also posted a statement on January 30, dismissing the rumours of a fee hike.
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