Checked 19 September 2026 — and that date matters
This programme has changed twice in ten months. Treat any DV guidance without a visible date, including this one if you are reading it much later, as possibly out of date. Confirm everything against the State Department's own entry instructions before you submit.
As of the date above: the Diversity Visa programme was paused in December 2025, and the State Department has not announced when DV-2027 registration opens or closes. The historic early-October opening is no longer a safe assumption, and we will not print a month here. If you see a site confidently giving you DV-2027 dates, check whether it cites an official announcement.
The entry now asks for two files, not one
This is the change most likely to catch people out. For years the entry form wanted a photograph and nothing else. From DV-2027 it wants a photograph and a scan of your passport.
- Your entry photo — square, 600×600 to 1200×1200 pixels, JPEG, 240 KB or under, taken within the last six months, on a plain light background.
- A JPEG scan of your passport's biographic and signature page — the page carrying your photo, passport number and signature. PDFs are rejected.
- Your passport number, country of issuance and expiry date, typed into the form.
The passport scan: what we can and cannot tell you
It must be a JPEG. The entry system rejects PDF files, which is the single most common way people try to submit a document scan, so converting a PDF you already have is a real and avoidable failure.
We are not going to tell you its file size limit. Secondary sources give two different numbers for the same field, and we could not confirm either against the official entry instructions. Read the limit off the form you are actually submitting to, and prepare your scan to that number. A guide that guesses at this is guessing with your one attempt this year.
Practically: lay the passport flat and open, in even light, with no shadow across the page and nothing covering the machine-readable lines at the bottom. Photograph it straight on if you can. A phone photo taken at an angle can be flattened afterwards, but a photo with a corner cropped off cannot be repaired.
The $1 fee, and what it is not
A $1 registration fee applies at the point of submitting the entry, with no waiver. It is the government's fee, paid to the government, and it is separate from the much larger visa application fee that only becomes relevant if you are selected.
Nothing else about entering costs money. You do not need to pay anyone to fill in the form, you do not need a lawyer to enter, and you do not need a paid service to prepare your photo — this site prepares both files for free, in your browser.
Nothing improves your odds. Be careful who you pay
Selection is a random draw among qualified entries. No preparation service, agent, lawyer or website can increase your chance of being selected, and anyone who says otherwise is describing something that does not exist.
What preparation can do is stop your entry being disqualified on a technicality — a photo outside the size rules, a duplicate entry, a missing passport scan, a PDF where a JPEG was required. That is worth getting right, because a disqualified entry is not reconsidered and the window does not reopen for you.
Two practical cautions. The official results check is on the State Department's own site and is free; you are notified there, not by email. And entering twice disqualifies you, so if someone offers to submit on your behalf after you have already entered, that is not a favour.
Preparing both files privately
A passport biographic page is the most sensitive image most people will ever upload: it carries your photograph, full name, date of birth, nationality and passport number on one page. It is worth thinking about where that file goes before you hand it to a website.
Everything on this site runs inside your browser. Your photo and your passport scan are processed on your own device — they are not uploaded, not stored, not sent to a server, and nothing on them is read. That is not a marketing line about our data policy; there is no upload, so there is nothing for us to hold.
One more thing worth knowing: from 1 January 2026 the State Department no longer accepts digitally retouched photos — no background editing, no skin smoothing, no filters, no AI. Automated checks flag altered photos before a person sees the application. Our tools crop and resize; they do not retouch faces or replace backgrounds, which is exactly what this rule now requires.