DV Lottery 2027: A Passport Is Now Required — and the Photo Rules to Prepare

If you planned to enter the Diversity Visa (green card) lottery this autumn, two things changed before the entry form even opened: you now need a valid passport to enter, and the entry period itself has not been announced. Both affect how early you should prepare — and the photo is the part you can prepare today.

What changed: a passport is required to enter

On 11 March 2026 the State Department published a final rule in the Federal Register that adds a passport requirement to the Diversity Visa program. The rule is effective 10 April 2026, and the Department states that it is implementing it with the DV-2027 program.

In practice the entry form now asks the principal entrant for details of a valid, unexpired passport (number, issuing country, name and expiry date) and for a scan of the passport’s biographic and signature page. The rule sets the scan as a JPEG of no more than 5 MB.

The rule allows limited exemptions for people who are stateless, nationals of Communist-controlled countries who cannot obtain a passport from their government, and beneficiaries of a case-by-case waiver. If you do not fall into one of those groups and you do not hold a passport, getting one is now step one — passport processing times differ widely from country to country.

The State Department’s stated reason is anti-fraud: requiring passport data at the entry stage makes it harder for third parties to submit fraudulent or unauthorised entries on someone’s behalf.

When does DV-2027 open?

Not yet, as far as we can tell. On 5 November 2025 the Department said it was changing the DV entry process and would announce the start date “as soon as practicable”. The visa application period for people who are eventually selected for DV-2027 is still 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2027. We found no announced registration window at the time of writing (30 September 2026), and U.S. embassies have published warnings that pages claiming DV-2027 entry is already open are scams. The only places to trust are travel.state.gov and dvprogram.state.gov.

Don’t assume the calendar of earlier years. Previous registration windows ran for roughly a month in the autumn, but this year the schedule is genuinely open — so the sensible move is to have every document ready before it opens.

The DV entry photo: the numbers

Every person on the entry needs their own photo, children included. The DV instructions also warn against using the same photograph as in a previous year’s entry, and against manipulated pictures, so avoid filters, heavy retouching and cut-out backgrounds.

Why the photo is the easy part to get wrong

• Wrong shape. Most people have a 35x45 mm or 3x4 photo from a passport or visa application. The DV photo must be a square. Cropping a portrait photo to a square usually cuts the head or leaves the head too small.
• Head too small. The head should fill 50–69% of the frame. A full-body selfie cropped down often lands under 50%.
• Too many kilobytes. A phone photo can be several megabytes; the limit is 240 kB, so the file has to be resized and compressed, not just cropped.
• Old picture. A photo older than six months is not accepted, even if it looks fine.
• Shadow or texture behind you. A wall with a pattern, or a shadow from your head on the wall, is the most common technical failure for home photos.

What to do this week

1. Check that your passport is valid and note its expiry date. If you do not have one, start the application now.
2. Scan the biographic and signature page as a JPEG under 5 MB, without glare on the laminate.
3. Take a fresh portrait in daylight, facing a window, in front of a plain light wall.
4. Produce the square file (600x600 px, under 240 kB) so it is ready the moment the window opens.

You can build the square 600x600 file in a couple of minutes with our DV lottery photo tool, which uses the same 600x600 px, 240 kB specification described above.