Passport photo head size, explained (crown-to-chin)
Last updated 2026-08-13
"Fill the frame" is not the rule. Almost every authority measures a specific distance — crown of the head to chin — and most rejections come from getting this wrong.
What "crown-to-chin" actually means
It's the vertical distance from the very top of your head — including hair — down to the bottom of your chin, measured as a percentage or a millimetre range of the total photo height. It is not the same as "how much of the frame your face fills," which is a common misreading that leads people to crop too tight or too loose.
Why it's the most common rejection reason
See our guide on the 8 reasons passport photos get rejected — head size tops that list because it's measured precisely, not eyeballed, and because the two failure directions (too close, cropping the crown; too far, leaving the face too small to biometrically match) both look fine to the naked eye at a glance.
Typical ranges
Across the documents we track, the required head height ranges from roughly 44% to 80% of the photo's total height depending on the country and document, though most cluster between 60% and 75%. There is no single universal number — always check the specific document, not a general rule of thumb.
How Pixact measures it automatically
The tool estimates the crown of your head from real segmentation of your photo — not just a face-detection bounding box, which stops at your hairline and would measure the wrong point entirely — then checks it against the exact range for the document you picked.