Staples Won't Refund a Passport Photo, But It Will Retake One

Picture the situation the guarantee is for. The application came back, the photo was the problem, and you are trying to work out whether the place that took it owes you anything.

At Staples the answer is yes, and it is a retake rather than money. What it costs you to collect is two documents and another trip, so it is worth reading the policy before you need it.

What Staples charges in 2026

Three separate items, not one, with the prices shown on the order pages on 8 September 2026:

• $19.99 for prints only, which is two 2x2 photos (item 24631139)
• $21.99 for the digital file on a USB drive (item 24634493)
• $24.99 for the bundle, two prints plus the digital file (item 24634494)

Photos are ready in about ten minutes, no appointment, at any Staples store, and there is a limit of five per customer.

The one that catches people out is the digital file. Renewing online through the State Department’s portal needs a digital photo, not a paper one, and the digital option is a separate purchase rather than an extra copy of what you already bought. Going in for prints and discovering afterwards that the form wants a file means paying twice or paying $24.99 up front.

An earlier version of this page quoted $17.99 for the prints. That number is stale and has been corrected throughout.

What the acceptance guarantee asks you to produce

Staples publishes the policy in full, which is more than many retailers do. It reads:

Staples guarantees that the passport photos you purchase from a Staples Store will meet the U.S. Department of State’s passport photograph requirements. In the event that the passport photos you purchase from Staples are not in compliance … Staples will retake the photos free of charge.

To collect, you bring two things: the sales receipt showing the original purchase, dated within the last six months of the retake request, and a “letter from U.S. Department of State stating that your passport photo does not meet their passport photograph requirements.” The person being re-photographed has to be the person originally photographed, and Staples reserves the right to verify all of it and may decline if it cannot. The policy can also be suspended or modified at any time.

So the gate is documentary. Not “did the photo fail,” but “can you produce an official letter saying it failed, and the receipt, inside six months, in person.”

The non-refundable line on the order page

Sitting just above the guarantee on the product page is a sentence that changes how to read it: “This service is a non-refundable service.”

Taken together, the position is consistent rather than contradictory. Staples does not offer your money back on a passport photo under any circumstance. What it offers is to keep working the problem until the photo is right, at no further charge, provided you can document that it was wrong. For somebody who mainly wants a usable photo, a retake is arguably the more useful remedy. For somebody who wants out, there is no exit.

Printing your own for about $1.35

One Dollar Passport Photo charges $1 for the photo. Upload a picture, the background is replaced and the frame is cropped to the 2x2 inch specification, and you see the finished result watermarked before paying. What comes back is a six-up print sheet, which is about 35 cents at a drugstore photo counter, plus the digital file for online renewal at no extra charge. Roughly $1.35 all in, against $24.99 for the Staples bundle that covers the same two needs. The US passport photo page has the current specification.

The guarantee attached to that is different in shape and smaller in size, and it is only fair to say so next to theirs. If a government agency rejects the photo, the purchase is refunded to the original payment method within three business days, and the accepted proof is a screenshot, an email, or an official notice rather than a letter from the State Department. It also has a condition of its own: rejections caused by user error, such as choosing the wrong document type or starting from a poor source photo, are not covered. Staples gates on documents. This gates on cause. Neither is automatic, and the honest summary is that one returns a dollar and the other returns a photograph. The same comparison across every service that advertises a guarantee is worth a look before buying any of them.

Walking in anyway

There are situations where the store is simply the right answer, and they are not consolation prizes.

If you are not confident photographing yourself, a trained person with a fixed camera and a plain wall removes the whole class of problems that come from doing it badly at arm’s length. If you need the photo today and printing is a hassle, ten minutes in a shop beats any workflow that ends at a drugstore counter. If you are already in a Staples, the marginal cost is minutes. And if a retake in hand is worth more to you than a refund, the guarantee is genuinely built for that preference.

The case for doing it yourself gets stronger with volume and with digital. A family of four buying the bundle is at $99.96, and every one of those photos has the same failure modes as the one you would take at home.