How Do Pakistani Students Fill In the DS-160 for a US Student Visa? (2026)

What is the DS-160, and who has to fill it in?

The DS-160 is the Online Nonimmigrant Visa Application. It is not optional and it is not a formality. Federal regulation requires that every person seeking a nonimmigrant visa make an electronic application on Form DS-160, and the form is signed by clicking a button marked Sign Application rather than by putting a pen anywhere.

It covers every temporary category, so the tourist applying for a B-2 and the student applying for an F-1 use the same form. What differs is the section that opens once you tell the system which visa class you want. Choose Student or Exchange Visitor, then Academic Student, and the form will ask for your SEVIS number and the school code from your Form I-20.

One form per person. A father and daughter travelling together each need their own, and a spouse or child coming in F-2 status needs one too. There is no family application.

The form lives at the Consular Electronic Application Center, which everyone calls CEAC. It is filled in online, submitted online, and reaches the embassy electronically before you do. Nothing is posted, and nothing is emailed.

What should be in front of you before you start?

Assemble everything first. The form asks for dates and numbers you will not remember, and hunting for them mid-application is how errors get typed.

• Your passport, open at the biodata page, plus the passport book number if your booklet has one.
• The Form I-20, for the SEVIS number, the school code, the school name and the programme dates.
• Travel history for the last five years, meaning every country you visited and roughly when.
• Your CNIC, your father's full name as it appears on his documents, and your mother's full name.
• Dates of employment or study for the last five years, with the address and phone number of each employer or institution.
• Names and contact details of two references in the United States if you have them, or the school's international office if you do not.
• A digital photograph that meets the standard set out below.

Old passports matter more than people expect. Previous US visas, previous refusals and previous travel all have to be declared, and the honest answer is always the safe one. A refusal you disclose is a fact the officer already knows. A refusal you conceal is a misrepresentation, and that is a far more serious problem than the original refusal ever was.

What photo does the DS-160 need?

A digital photograph is uploaded inside the form itself. Get this right at the start, because a rejected upload stops the application dead and most Pakistani studio photographs are cropped for a passport rather than for this standard.

The photo must be in colour, taken within the last 6 months, taken in front of a plain white or off-white background, in full face view directly facing the camera, with a neutral expression and both eyes open. Sizing is measured by head height rather than by the frame: the head should be between 1 inch and 1 3/8 inches, or between 50 and 69 percent of the total image height, measured from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head. If you are scanning an existing print rather than uploading a digital file, that print has to be 2 x 2 inches (51 x 51 mm).

The rules on head coverings are worth reading properly, because they are misreported constantly in Pakistan. A hat or covering that obscures the hair or hairline is not allowed unless it is worn daily for a religious purpose. A dupatta or hijab worn every day is acceptable, provided the full face is visible and the covering casts no shadow across it. Spectacles are no longer accepted in visa photographs, so take them off.

Use a studio that has done this before and ask specifically for a US visa digital photo, not a passport photo. The two are different sizes and the studio will not volunteer that.

What does the form ask, section by section?

The DS-160 runs to roughly a dozen screens. None is difficult. Several are easy to answer carelessly.

Personal information

Your name has to be entered exactly as it appears in the machine readable zone of your passport, not as you write it socially. Many Pakistani passports carry a single given name and no surname, or carry Muhammad as a separate first name. Copy the passport. If the surname field is empty on your passport, enter your given name in the surname field and follow the on-screen guidance, and do not invent a family name to make the form look tidier.

Address and phone

Give the address where you actually live, with a working mobile number and an email address you check. That email is how the embassy and the courier reach you.

Passport

Passport number, issue date, expiry date and place of issue, all copied character by character. Pakistani passports issued at different offices carry different city names, so read yours rather than assuming Lahore.

Travel

Purpose of trip becomes Student or Exchange Visitor, then Academic Student. This is where the SEVIS number and school code go. Your intended arrival date should sit inside the window your I-20 allows, which is the 30 days before your programme start date.

US contact

For a student this is normally the school itself. Enter the institution name, the international office address and its telephone number. Person and organisation are both acceptable answers.

Family

Father and mother, with dates of birth, and whether either is in the United States. Immediate relatives in America are declared here, and declaring them is not a problem. Hiding one is.

Previous work, education and training

Five years of history, each entry with dates, an address and a telephone number. This is the section that takes the longest, so gather it before you sit down.

Security and background

A long list of yes or no questions about health, criminal history, immigration violations and security matters. Read each one. Answer truthfully. A yes answer is not automatically fatal, and many have explanations, but a false no is a misrepresentation that follows you permanently.

Student or exchange visitor

The SEVIS number appears again, with the school details and any additional contact. Check it against the I-20 one final time.

How should you answer the social media questions?

This is the section that has changed most, and the one Pakistani applicants most often get wrong by being too casual.

The form asks for social media identifiers for every platform you have used in the past five years. That means the handle or username, not the password, and it covers accounts you have stopped using as well as accounts you post on daily.

As of 23 August 2026, students should also expect their profiles to be looked at. The Department of State announced in a media note published on 18 June 2025 that all applicants for F, M and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to public, so that the vetting can be carried out. The US Embassy in Santo Domingo restated the same instruction in September 2025 and added that incomplete or false information may result in a visa denial and could make an applicant ineligible for future visas.

Three practical points follow from that.

• List every account you can remember, including the one you made at sixteen and abandoned. An omission looks worse than an embarrassing old post.
• Set the accounts to public before the interview rather than after, since the review happens around the adjudication and not on a schedule you control.
• Read your own timeline the way a stranger would. Political content is not disqualifying in itself, but content that contradicts your stated plans, such as posts about permanent settlement while you are claiming an intention to return, is a genuine problem.

Deleting an account to avoid listing it is the worst available option. The question asks about the last five years, so a deleted account was still used, and a deletion that shows up in vetting reads as concealment.

How do you save the form and come back to it?

You will not finish in one sitting, and you are not expected to. When you begin, the system issues a unique application identification number after you choose and answer a security question. Write that number down before you go any further. Without it you cannot get back into your own application.

The State Department's own DS-160 guidance says you have 30 days to return to a partially completed application on the CEAC site, and that to reach it after 30 days you must save it to your own computer using the Save Application to File button. We could confirm that against one official source rather than two, so treat the 30 days as the working limit and do not test it.

Clicking Next at the bottom of each page is what saves your progress. The session also expires if you sit idle, so if you are interrupted by a phone call, click Next before you walk away. Losing twenty minutes of typing to an expired session is the most avoidable frustration in the whole process.

What happens when you sign and submit?

The last screen shows a certification. You are certifying that the statements are true and complete to the best of your knowledge, and that you will tell the truth during the interview. Clicking Sign Application is the legal signature.

Certain applicants may have the form completed by somebody else. If the applicant is under the age of 16, or is physically incapable of completing the application, a parent or guardian may complete it and click Sign Application on their behalf. Where a third party assists an applicant who is literate and capable, that third party has to be identified on the Sign and Submit page, and the applicant still clicks the button themselves.

Then print one page. The Department of State's instruction is to print and keep the DS-160 barcode page, and you do not need to print the full application. That barcode is how the embassy pulls up your form, and it is how the appointment system links your file. Print two copies. Lose the barcode and you are effectively starting again.

What do you pay, and in what order?

Order matters, and Pakistani applicants routinely pay in the wrong sequence and lose weeks.

As of 23 August 2026, the visa application fee for an F student is USD 185, the tier set for a non-petition-based nonimmigrant visa, and a Federal Register rule published on 9 June 2026 records that this fee was last updated in May 2023 and remains at that level. The Department of State's own fee table lists F, Student, Academic in that same tier alongside B visitor and J exchange visitor applicants.

The SEVIS fee and the visa application fee are different payments to different agencies, and paying one does not touch the other. Our breakdown of F-1 visa costs and SEVIS charges from Pakistan sets out the whole ledger, including the newer visa integrity fee charged at issuance.

How does the appointment process work in Pakistan?

Scheduling, fee collection and document delivery in Pakistan are handled by a third party company on behalf of the US Mission, and the applications themselves are decided by consular officers at the Embassy in Islamabad and the Consulate General in Karachi. Both posts say they prioritise student and exchange visitor cases in the F and J categories, which is genuinely useful to know in a busy summer.

As of 23 August 2026, the US Mission in Pakistan states that all nonimmigrant visa applicants applying in Pakistan, including applicants under the age of 14 and over the age of 79, will generally require an in-person interview with a consular officer. The Department of State set out the same position in its interview waiver update effective 1 October 2025, which superseded the July 2025 guidance and left waivers available only to a narrow list of diplomatic categories and certain B visa renewals. No student category appears on that list, so plan for an interview.

The mission also states that an MRV fee payment is valid for 365 days from the date the receipt is issued, and that an applicant must schedule an interview or submit an interview waiver application inside that window, though the interview itself need not fall within it. We could confirm that against one official source rather than two, so check the position on the mission's own site before you rely on it.

Wait times move with the season. August is the worst month to start, because every autumn intake is trying at once. If you want a sense of the real calendar, we track it in our note on how long a US F-1 student visa takes from Pakistan.

What goes wrong most often on a DS-160?

Seven errors, in rough order of how often we see them.

The first is a name that does not match the passport. Pakistani naming conventions and the form's rigid surname field collide constantly, and the fix is always the same: copy the passport exactly, including the order.

Second is the wrong SEVIS number, usually typed from the wrong I-20 after applying to several universities. The number begins with N and appears at the top of the certificate. Check it twice.

Third is an undeclared previous refusal. Schengen refusals, UK refusals and earlier US refusals all have to be declared. Officers can see them anyway.

Fourth is a thin employment and education history. Five years means five years, with no unexplained gaps, and a year spent preparing for entry tests is an answer rather than a blank.

Fifth is a rushed social media section, covered above, which is now the fastest growing category of trouble.

Sixth is choosing the wrong location. You pick the post where you will apply inside the form, and while a barcode can usually be used at another post, mismatches create avoidable friction on an already tight timeline.

Seventh is a photograph that fails the upload, which sends applicants back to the studio at the exact moment appointment slots are moving. If an application is refused despite all of this, our guidance on what Pakistani students should do after a student visa refusal explains the realistic options.

Can you correct a DS-160 after submitting it?

Not by editing the submitted form. Once it is signed and submitted, that version is locked.

What you do instead is complete a fresh DS-160. The CEAC site lets you retrieve a submitted application and use it as the basis for a new one, so you are correcting rather than retyping everything. The new form produces a new barcode, and that new barcode is what you carry to the interview.

Tell the appointment service if the barcode on your booking no longer matches the form you intend to rely on. Officers see both, and turning up with a barcode that points at a superseded application invites exactly the sort of question you do not want to answer at the window.

Small typographical slips discovered at the interview can often be corrected verbally with the officer. Substantive errors, such as a wrong SEVIS number or an answer flipped from yes to no, should be fixed in a new form before you attend.

A realistic timeline with dates

Take Hamza, a Karachi student admitted to a university in Texas for a programme starting on 20 January 2027.

His I-20 arrives on 8 September 2026. That evening he checks his name against his passport, signs the form and photographs it. On 9 September he pays the I-901 SEVIS fee of USD 350 and prints the confirmation.

He starts the DS-160 on 11 September. It takes him two sittings. The first ends after the passport and travel sections, and he notes down his application ID on the same page as his SEVIS number. The second sitting, on 13 September, covers the five year work and education history, which is the part that takes him nearly an hour because he has to phone his old college for its address.

The social media section stops him. He lists four accounts, including a Twitter handle he has not opened since 2021, and sets all four to public that night. On 14 September he submits the form, prints the barcode page twice, and files one copy with his passport.

He pays the MRV fee on 15 September and books the first available slot, which falls on 21 October in Karachi. He attends with the passport, the barcode page, the fee receipts, the original I-20, his admission letter, transcripts and his father's financial documents. The interview runs about five minutes. He is asked what he will study, who is paying, and what he intends to do after graduating.

His passport comes back with the visa on 3 November. Because his programme starts on 20 January, he cannot enter before 21 December, and he books a flight for 6 January. Four months from I-20 to boarding pass, with no step repeated.

Frequently asked questions