The two passport rules that get people turned away

Passport refusals are rarely about an expired passport. They are about a passport that is still valid but does not satisfy a rule the traveller did not know existed.

For the Schengen area there are two, and they are checked together.

Rule one: three months beyond your departure

Your travel document must be valid for at least three months after the date you intend to leave the territory of the member states.

Note what that is measured from. Not your arrival, not today — your intended departure.

Worked example: you plan to leave the Schengen area on 20 June 2026. Three months beyond that is 20 September 2026. A passport expiring on 1 September 2026 is still valid on the day you fly, and still fails this rule.

Rule two: issued within the previous ten years

Your travel document must also have been issued within the previous 10 years.

This is the one that catches people, because it has nothing to do with the expiry date printed in the passport. Some countries used to add unused months from an old passport onto a new one, producing passports valid for more than ten years from issue. Those passports can be refused even though the expiry date is comfortably in the future.

Check the date of issue page, not just the expiry page. If the issue date is more than ten years before your travel date, the passport fails regardless of what the expiry says.

Both rules apply at once

A passport must satisfy both. Worked through, for a trip departing 20 June 2026:

• Issued 1 May 2016 → more than 10 years before travel → fails rule two, whatever the expiry.
• Issued 1 May 2018, expires 1 August 2026 → issue date fine, but expiry is under three months after departure → fails rule one.
• Issued 1 May 2018, expires 1 January 2027 → passes both.

The Passport Expiry Calculator checks the validity requirement against your intended departure date.

Other countries, other rules

The three-month rule is Schengen's. Elsewhere the requirement differs, and DAYOZA only states it where an official source has been read. For several countries the site shows "information requires verification" on the passport section rather than a number — that is deliberate. A guessed passport rule is exactly the kind of confident wrong answer that leaves someone at a check-in desk.

Where a country page shows a verified requirement, it is linked to the authority that published it. Where it does not, check with that country's authority directly.

Source: European Commission — Short-stay calculator; Regulation (EU) 2016/399 (Schengen Borders Code), Article 6.