The U.S. Secretary of State granted a postponement until October 26, 2004, as the date by which visa waiver program travelers from 21 countries must resent a machine-readable passport (MRP) at a U.S. port of entry to be admitted to the United States without a visa. The Department of State indicated that it consulted with the Department of Homeland Security before making this decision.

The countries for which the postponement has been granted are: Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Per the Department of State, each country to which this postponement was granted made a formal request and certified that it is making progress toward ensuring that machine readable passports are available to its nationals and that it has taken appropriate measures to protect against misuse of its non-machine-readable passports.

Five other VWP eligible countries did not request a postponement of the effective date, because the Department of State indicated that virtually all of their citizens already have machine-readable passports. Those countries are Andorra, Brunei, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Slovenia. As of October 1, 2003, Visa Waiver travelers from those five countries must present either a machine-readable passport or a United States visa.