How to replace a lost or stolen UK passport

GOV.UK's instruction is to cancel a lost or stolen passport as soon as possible, to reduce the risk of someone else using the document or your identity. That advice is sound and you should follow it once you are confident the passport is genuinely gone. What the public-facing page does not spell out is how final the act is, and that is the piece worth understanding before you press the button.

HM Passport Office's guidance for its lost, stolen and recovered team explains the mechanics. When a report comes in, the passport must be cancelled in HM Passport Office's records to stop it being used fraudulently, and an LS record — a record of the loss — is created on the LSR database. Reports made through the GOV.UK digital service can be processed automatically, with the reporting system creating and passing the LS record without a human step in between. Paper reports are reviewed manually and usually involve contacting you before cancellation.

The record does not stay inside HM Passport Office. The same guidance states that HM Passport Office shares LSR database information daily with some United Kingdom government departments — Border Force is the example it gives — and with Interpol. Interpol's Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database holds around 138 million records of documents reported stolen, lost, revoked, invalid or stolen blank, and Interpol reports that it was searched 3.6 billion times in 2023, producing 232,423 positive matches. A cancelled British passport presented at a border is one of those matches waiting to happen.

Withdrawal of a cancellation is possible but narrow. The LSR team guidance says a customer may ask for the report to be withdrawn where they have found the passport at home, or where it has not been out of their possession, and that the officer must confirm the passport was not reported to third parties such as the police or the FCDO before allowing it. If you rang 101 before you rang the Passport Adviceline, or reported it at a consulate, that route is generally shut.

Even where a passport turns up physically intact, an electronic cancellation is not undone by finding it. HM Passport Office's examination policy for replacing lost, stolen and recovered passports is blunt on the point: the passport cannot be renewed if the old one has been electronically cancelled, and the service type on the application has to change to a replacement. The document in your hand becomes evidence of your past identity, not a travel document.

A passport you previously declared lost or stolen and have since found is what HM Passport Office calls a recovered passport. Its guidance asks for recovered passports found in the UK to be sent back using Freepost, where the LSR team creates an R record and the document is normally destroyed in confidential waste unless there are fraud concerns attached to it. If you find a British passport that is not yours, the standard instruction is to cut off the top right-hand corner and send it to HM Passport Office with a note of where you found it.

So the sequence matters. Search first, report second. An hour spent emptying coat pockets costs an hour; an unnecessary cancellation costs a full replacement application, a new passport number, and attention to every visa, travel authorisation and booking reference tied to the old one.

The main route is the online service on GOV.UK, reached from the 'Cancel a lost or stolen passport' page. It asks for a phone number, and it asks questions about the document. If you have a photocopy or a photograph of the passport, GOV.UK says you can use it to help answer those questions — which is the single best argument for keeping a scan of the data page somewhere that is not the same bag as the passport.

HM Passport Office's LSR team guidance lists the full set of channels it receives reports through: the GOV.UK digital system, an assisted digital service operated on its behalf, paper LS01 forms, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office at overseas posts. The LS01 is the Lost or Stolen British Passport Notification form, and it has historically been available through the Passport Adviceline, Post Offices, travel agents, immigration officers at UK ports and police stations as well as online.

You can report a lost or stolen passport on behalf of somebody else if they cannot do it themselves — GOV.UK states this directly, and it matters for people in hospital, abroad, or otherwise unable to deal with it. Children's passports are treated more restrictively: HM Passport Office's guidance limits who may report a child's passport lost or stolen to authorised individuals, which in practice means a person with parental responsibility rather than any adult who happens to notice it missing.

Report it even if you do not intend to replace it. The public guidance maintained for police enquiries is explicit that the notification form should be completed whether or not you want a new passport, because the point of the exercise is to take the document out of circulation and combat identity fraud. A British passport that is missing and uncancelled is a usable identity document for as long as it remains valid.

There is one deliberate exception to reporting first, and it is easy to miss. GOV.UK's lost and stolen passport page says that if you are applying for an emergency travel document, you do not need to cancel your passport at that point. The emergency travel document process handles it, and cancelling in parallel can complicate an application you are making under time pressure at a consulate.

Reporting the loss does not get you a replacement. This is the most common misunderstanding of the whole process, and the notification form has carried a warning to that effect for years: completing it removes the old passport from use, and nothing more. The replacement is a separate application, with its own fee, its own photo and its own identity checks, and it does not start until you make it.

Once you have reported it, write down the date and time and keep any confirmation reference. If a dispute later arises about a transaction, an account opened in your name, or an insurance claim, the timestamp of the cancellation is the line that separates your liability from someone else's.

A crime reference number is not a requirement for a replacement passport. HM Passport Office removed guidance on reporting to the police from its cancellation guidance in March 2025, and the customer-facing GOV.UK service does not ask for one. What a crime reference number is for is everything else: travel insurance claims, home contents claims, disputes with banks, and evidence that you treated the loss as a theft rather than carelessness.

In England and Wales the distinction the police draw is between loss and theft. Forces have largely stopped taking reports of lost property, and the public guidance for police enquiries directs people who have lost a passport to HM Passport Office rather than to a police station. If the passport was stolen — taken from a bag, a car, a hotel room or your person — that is a crime, and it is reported to your local force online through police.uk or by calling 101, with 999 reserved for an emergency in progress. The report generates a crime reference number.

Scotland runs its own service. Police Scotland's guidance on how to report a crime sets out three routes: 999 where someone is in danger or an incident is happening now, 101 for non-emergencies, and secure online forms for a defined list of non-urgent matters. A textphone service operates on 18001 101, BSL users can call 999 BSL, and Contact Scotland BSL covers non-emergency contact. Police Scotland states that it might create a crime record with a crime reference number, and that you can ask for your crime reference number after reporting — so ask, rather than assume one will arrive.

In Northern Ireland the Police Service of Northern Ireland takes non-emergency reports on 101, with 028 9065 0222 as the alternative number for callers on some mobile networks, and 999 for emergencies. PSNI accepts non-emergency crime reports online at psni.police.uk/report, from victims, witnesses or third parties. nidirect's guidance adds that you do not have to report immediately, that someone else can report on your behalf, and that Crimestoppers takes anonymous information on 0800 555 111.

Anonymous reporting exists in all four nations on the same 0800 555 111 Crimestoppers number, and Police Scotland points to Crimestoppers Scotland. That route matters where a passport has been taken by someone you know and you do not want to make a named report.

Where a passport has been taken as part of a wider fraud — a stolen wallet used to open accounts, or documents taken to impersonate you — the fraud itself is reported to Action Fraud, the national reporting centre run by the City of London Police, rather than to your local force. The passport cancellation still has to be done separately with HM Passport Office; one report does not stand in for the other.

Keep the crime reference number with the cancellation confirmation. Travel insurers routinely ask for a police report made within twenty-four hours of discovering a theft, and a claim for the cost of an emergency replacement is one of the few ways the several hundred pounds this can cost is recoverable.

The replacement is applied for through the same GOV.UK passport service as any other application, but the route is 'replace a lost, stolen or damaged passport' rather than 'renew'. GOV.UK is explicit that if your passport is lost or stolen you must cancel it before applying for a replacement. Damaged passports are the exception: they do not need cancelling, but they do need replacing.

Damage has a definition, and it is broader than people expect. HM Passport Office treats a passport as damaged if any of your details cannot be read, if pages are ripped, cut or missing, if the cover has holes, cuts or rips, if the cover is coming away, or if there are ink or water stains on the pages. A passport through the washing machine is a replacement application, not a renewal, even though it is sitting on the table in front of you.

The fees are the standard passport fees rather than a penalty rate. GOV.UK lists an adult 34-page passport at £102 online or £115.50 on a paper form, and a child passport at £66.50 online or £80 on paper. The 54-page frequent traveller versions cost £116 and £129.50 for adults, £80.50 and £94 for children. Applying online is £13.50 cheaper than applying by post in every category.

Here is the difference that catches people. A straightforward adult renewal needs nobody to vouch for you. A lost or stolen replacement does: GOV.UK's replacement guidance states that people replacing a lost or stolen passport must have someone confirm their identity online. For a paper application, the form and one of the two identical printed photographs must be signed by that person instead.

The eligibility rules for the person confirming your identity are strict and worth checking before you nominate anyone. They must be 18 or over, live in the UK, hold a current UK or Irish passport, have known you personally for at least two years as a friend, neighbour or colleague rather than purely professionally, and work in — or be retired from — one of the recognised professions GOV.UK lists. They cannot be related to you by blood or marriage, be in a relationship with you, live at your address, work for HM Passport Office or UK Visas and Immigration, or be your doctor unless they are also a close personal friend.

The mechanics are digital for an online application. HM Passport Office emails the person you have nominated, they follow a secure link, enter their own passport details to verify who they are, view the photograph you uploaded, and confirm both that it is a true likeness and that they have known you for the required period. If they do not act, the application does not move — so tell them it is coming, and check they are not about to go on holiday themselves.

Your new passport will carry a different number from the old one. GOV.UK repeats the warning across the passport pages: do not book travel until you have a valid passport, precisely because the number changes. Anything keyed to the old number — a US ESTA, an unexpired visa in the lost document, a stored airline profile, a residence permit reference — needs to be revisited, and unexpired visas issued in a lost passport are a matter for the issuing embassy rather than for HM Passport Office.

HM Passport Office's published service standard is that you will usually get your passport within three weeks, timed from when your documents are received rather than from when you pay. The same page carries the qualification that matters here: it may take longer than three weeks if more information is needed, or if you have to be interviewed, and that you will be told about that within three weeks. Lost and stolen applications are disproportionately the ones that attract both.

The reason is set out in the examination policy HM Passport Office publishes for the staff who handle these applications. On a replacement, the examiner must establish the customer's identity from the information provided using passport records and internal search tools, review the full passport history for discrepancies or undeclared names, check whether the customer holds more than one valid passport, confirm that personal details are consistent across all records, and compare the photograph on the current record with the photograph submitted on the application.

None of that happens on a plain renewal, where the old passport is physically in front of the examiner and the identity chain is unbroken. On a lost or stolen replacement, the document that would have anchored the identity is precisely the thing that is missing, so the examiner rebuilds the chain from records and from the person confirming your identity. That is why the identity confirmation is mandatory here and optional almost nowhere else.

Repeat losses are counted. The examination guidance directs examiners to check risk-indicator guidance where a customer has reported three or more passports lost or stolen in the last ten years. A first loss is unremarkable. A third within a decade moves the application into a category where additional scrutiny is expected, and it is worth being ready to explain the circumstances of each rather than being surprised by the question.

Interviews are more likely than most applicants expect. The guidance records that the application processing system automatically creates an interview task for adult lost and stolen applications made in the UK, and that an examiner can override that requirement provided they document the decision. In other words the default is an interview, and the absence of one is a decision somebody made. GOV.UK's replacement guidance notes that these interviews are conducted online by video, and that you will be contacted to arrange one if it is required.

There is also a category of application that starts as a renewal and becomes something else. Where a customer had reported a passport lost or stolen and later found it, the examination guidance states the passport cannot be renewed because the old one has been electronically cancelled, and the service type must be changed to a replacement. If you are quietly hoping to renew a passport you once reported missing, the system already knows.

The practical consequence is that the three-week figure should be treated as the best case for this application type rather than the expected case. Track the application online where you applied online — you can do so immediately using the PEX reference — and use the Passport Adviceline on 0300 222 0000 for paper applications, quoting the ten-digit barcode or nine-digit receipt number.

There are two urgent services and only one of them is open to you. The 1 Week Fast Track service explicitly covers replacing a lost, stolen or damaged passport, alongside renewals, personal detail changes and child passports. The 1 Day Premium service does not: GOV.UK states that you can only use it to renew an adult passport. That single restriction is the most consequential fact on this page for anyone with a flight in the next fortnight.

Fast Track works through an appointment at a passport office. GOV.UK says the earliest appointment is the day after you apply, appointments can be booked up to three weeks in advance, and each lasts around ten minutes. The new passport is then delivered by courier within a week of the appointment. The current fees are £192 for an adult 34-page passport and £206 for the 54-page version, and £156.50 and £170.50 respectively for a child.

By comparison the Premium service costs £239.50, or £253.50 for 54 pages, with the earliest appointment two days after applying and collection four hours later — and it is unavailable for the lost and stolen case regardless of how much you are willing to pay. Neither urgent service can be used for a first adult passport or for applications made from outside the UK.

You cannot upgrade an application already in the system. GOV.UK warns that applicants who have already submitted a standard application cannot pay to have it processed urgently, and that attempting to do so incurs a £34.50 administrative fee with no reduction in the time taken. Decide which service you need before you apply, not a fortnight later when the standard application has not arrived.

Appointment availability is the constraint that appears in no fee table. In busy periods the limiting factor is whether an appointment exists at a passport office you can reach, not the published turnaround — so Fast Track is not a guaranteed backstop for a standard application that runs late.

There is a separate route for genuine emergencies. The Passport Adviceline on 0300 222 0000 handles cases where someone needs to travel urgently for medical treatment, because a friend or family member is seriously ill or has died, or where the applicant is working for or representing the government. It is open Monday to Friday from 8am to 8pm and from 9am to 5:30pm at weekends and on UK bank holidays, with a Text Relay service on 18001 0300 222 0000 and the same number reachable from abroad as +44 (0)300 222 0000.

The standing advice remains the one HM Passport Office repeats on every relevant page: do not book travel until you have a valid passport in your hand. Where travel is already booked and the passport has gone, contact the airline and any travel insurer early — a claim made before departure for a missed trip is a different and usually better-received claim than one made afterwards.

The rules change entirely once you are outside the UK. You cannot use the urgent services from abroad, and a standard overseas application will not produce a passport in time for a flight home. The instrument designed for this situation is the emergency travel document, applied for through a British embassy, high commission or consulate — all of which are listed by country on GOV.UK.

The eligibility conditions are cumulative. GOV.UK says you can apply if you are a British national, you are outside the UK, you need to travel within six weeks, your passport is lost, stolen, damaged, full, recently expired or held by HM Passport Office or a foreign embassy, you cannot renew or replace it in time before you travel, and you have previously held a UK passport issued after 1 January 2006.

If you have never held a post-2006 UK passport you are not automatically excluded, but the bar rises. GOV.UK describes exceptional circumstances that may still qualify — an unexpected birth, an urgent medical need, attending a funeral — and states equally plainly that emergency travel documents will not be issued for holidays, weddings, family events or job interviews. That is a narrower definition of emergency than most travellers assume.

An emergency travel document is not a passport. It is usually valid for a single or return journey only, and it permits travel through a maximum of five countries, which have to be specified when you apply. Multi-leg routings and open-jaw itineraries need checking against that limit before you book anything, because a document issued for the wrong route is no better than no document.

Do not cancel first in this scenario. GOV.UK's lost and stolen passport page states that if you are applying for an emergency travel document you do not need to cancel your passport at that point. The FCDO also reports lost and stolen passports through its overseas posts, and those reports feed into the same HM Passport Office LSR process, so the loss is recorded either way.

Report the theft to the local police as well, even where you are told nothing will come of it. A local police report is what a travel insurer will ask for, it is often required by the consulate, and in some countries it is what allows you to explain to immigration on departure why you are leaving on a document you did not arrive on. Where a passport is lost rather than stolen, ask the consulate what evidence they expect.

Once you are back in the UK, the emergency travel document is spent and you still need a full replacement application, with the identity confirmation and the extra checks described above. Build that into the timetable if you have onward travel — the emergency document gets you home, and nothing further.

A stolen passport is a stolen identity document, and cancelling it stops the document being used at a border without stopping your details being used elsewhere. Where a passport was taken with other documents — a driving licence, bank cards, correspondence showing your address — treat it as an identity theft rather than a lost item, and report the fraud element to Action Fraud, the national reporting centre run by the City of London Police.

Cifas Protective Registration is the practical countermeasure most people have never heard of. It places a warning flag against your details in the Cifas National Fraud Database, so that organisations using Cifas data carry out additional verification when your details are used to apply for their products or services. Cifas charges £30 for a two-year registration, applications are made online only, and the flag stays for twenty-four months unless you ask for it to be removed early.

Understand what it does not do. Cifas states that Protective Registration does not affect your credit score and does not cover transactions such as credit or debit card payments, so it will not slow down products you already hold. It slows down new applications made in your name, which is exactly the risk a stolen passport creates and exactly the risk a cancellation does not address.

Check your credit file in the months that follow. A passport used to open an account leaves a search or an entry on your file long before any demand for money reaches you, and that gap is where the damage compounds.

There is a rarer scenario worth naming because it is genuinely distressing: a passport cancelled by a report you did not make. HM Passport Office publishes guidance to its staff on dealing with customer queries where a malicious report has resulted in the cancellation of a passport from a loss report, and the department maintains a specialist safeguarding team that such cases can be referred to. If your passport has been cancelled and you did not report it, say so explicitly when you contact the Passport Adviceline, because it changes how the case is handled.

If the process goes wrong — a replacement lost in the post, an application stalled well beyond the published time, a decision you believe is unreasonable — HM Passport Office runs a four-stage complaints procedure. It begins with the customer contact centre on 0300 222 0000, by online enquiry form, or in writing to PO Box 767, Southport PR8 9PW, with an undertaking to respond within fifteen working days either fully or with an update. If you are not satisfied you can ask for the complaint to be reviewed.

Beyond that, the Independent Examiner of Complaints takes cases within three months of the department's response, by email to [email protected] or in writing to PO Box 6147, Sheffield S2 9JD. If the outcome is still unsatisfactory, your MP can refer the case to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. HM Passport Office also states that it will consider claims for financial loss that occurred as a direct consequence of an error, where documentation is submitted with the complaint — which is the route for a cancelled holiday caused by a departmental mistake rather than by a late application.