Where is the MRZ located on a passport or ID card?

On a standard passport, the MRZ sits at the very bottom of the photo data page, the page that contains the holder's name, photo, and personal details. It's printed as two lines of 44 characters each, running the full width of the page, using a distinctive monospaced font that makes each character easy to isolate even in a slightly blurry photo.

Look at a passport's biographical page and you'll see it: the row of capital letters and numbers with < symbols filling the gaps, directly under the printed name and photo.

National ID cards vary more by country, but the MRZ usually appears on the back of the card rather than the front, arranged as three lines of 30 characters each. Some countries put a shorter MRZ on the front alongside the photo, but the back-of-card placement is far more common, especially for cards that follow the ICAO 9303 standard for machine-readable travel and identity documents.

Driver's licenses are a bit different. Many don't include an ICAO-format MRZ at all.

Especially in North America, they instead carry a PDF417 barcode on the back that encodes similar data in a different format, following the AAMVA standard rather than ICAO's. Some countries do issue MRZ-equipped driver's licenses, so it depends heavily on the issuing country.

Visas, residence permits, and crew member certificates each have their own placement conventions too, generally following the same idea: a fixed, predictable location so scanning hardware and software don't need to search the whole document to find the zone.

Knowing where to expect the MRZ matters for anyone building a scanning workflow, because capture guidance, telling a user how to position the document in front of a camera, depends on it. ScanDoc's scanning flow is built to detect the document type first and then locate the MRZ automatically, whether that means the bottom of a passport page or the back of an ID card.

Users don't need to know these placement rules themselves; they just present the document and the software finds the right zone.