Who Really Prints the World’s Passports?

The Secretive Companies That Print Every Passport on Earth

Have you ever held a passport and wondered who actually made it? Not the government office that issued it to you, but the company that printed the polycarbonate data page, wove the security fibers into the paper, and embedded the chip that now sits in nearly every travel document on earth. It’s a question almost nobody asks, and the answer involves a small, tightly controlled group of firms most travelers have never heard of.

Printing a Passport Is Nothing Like Printing a Book

A passport isn’t really a document, it’s a security product, and that changes everything about how it’s made. Holograms, security fibers, tamper-evident laminates, and embedded electronic chips all have to work together so the finished booklet is extraordinarily difficult to forge. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) sets the baseline: passport dimensions, the machine-readable zone, and the data structure for biometric chips all trace back to ICAO Doc 9303. What ICAO does not do is dictate which specific security features a country uses. That decision, and the substantial cost that comes with it, is left to each government.

The Paper Trail Behind the Paper Trail

Before a printer ever wins a national passport contract, it typically has to prove itself against ISO 14298, the international standard for managing security printing processes. ISO 14298 covers logical security (how digital design files and production data are protected), physical security (control over the plant itself, the substrate, and the finished documents), and supply chain assurance (making sure nothing walks out the door between raw material and delivered passport). For a government handing over the design of its national identity document, that certification is the baseline proof that a printer can be trusted with the job.

The Short List of Companies That Actually Print the World’s Passports

A remarkably small number of firms handle the overwhelming majority of the world’s national passports, and most people could not name a single one. The list includes IDEMIA, Bundesdruckerei, De La Rue, Thales, Giesecke & Devrient, IN Groupe, Canadian Bank Note, Gemalto, and Veridos. Between them, these companies design and print the biometric passports carried by billions of people, and a handful of them, like Thales, publish their own detailed breakdowns of the security printing process for anyone who wants to go deeper.

ℹ️ I keep a running, a DETAILED LIST of exactly which printer produces which country’s passport, current for 2026. If that’s useful for your own research or business, GET IN TOUCH and I’ll share it.

Why the List Keeps Shifting

The passport security printing business isn’t static. Forged identity documents, counterfeit currency, and fraudulent birth certificates used to build fake identities are a persistent problem, and every advance on the security side gets tested against a corresponding advance on the counterfeiting side. That’s why the same handful of printers keep investing in new substrates, new chip technology, and new anti-tamper features rather than resting on a design that worked five years ago. It’s also worth remembering that the fee you pay for a passport varies enormously by country, for reasons that go well beyond who printed it. I’ve broken that down separately in my 2026 global passport fees comparison, and if you’re curious about how the physical design itself has evolved, the design philosophy behind passports is a good next stop.

For industry leaders, identifying the manufacturer behind a passport is far more than an academic exercise. It is often the most direct path to determining a document’s security generation, pinpointing its precise production timeframe, and staying at the forefront of cutting-edge anti-counterfeiting technology.

Now, you may be curious about the fees of obtaining a passport in different countries > Passport Fees Global 2026.
Read more > The design philosophy behind passports, High-security printing for passport

 

Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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