Philippine Consulate General in Houston
There is no queue to join. Everything is by appointment
passport.gov.ph handles passport slots nationally. The rest —dual citizenship, notarials, civil registry— is booked office by office, with no shared system behind it.
A passport means appearing in person at any age: the fingerprints and photograph are captured at the counter. The book is printed in Manila and comes back in six to eight weeks, with no express option from abroad.
The Philippine Consulate General in Houston serves Texas, Arkansas,
Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma from an office on Richmond Avenue in
the Westchase district, west of downtown. It is the Philippine consulate for the Gulf
Coast and the Southwest.
Texas alone accounts for most of its workload, and the state is big enough that the
consulate is backed by an honorary consulate in
Dallas and another in
New Orleans.
Address, hours and contact details in Houston
Houston publishes three trunkline numbers rather than one, plus a separate
emergency line. That is not disorganisation: it is a small consulate covering six states,
and the numbers ring in different sections. If one does not answer, try the next
before assuming the office is closed.
Distance is the real issue in this jurisdiction. From El Paso to Houston is a
twelve-hour drive; from Little Rock or Oklahoma City it is most of a day. Before
committing to that, check whether your procedure needs you at all, a
PSA certificate, an
apostille and the paperwork side of an
NBI clearance are all handled without setting
foot in a consulate.
What you can get done at this counter
This is one of the offices that does the whole list, because it is staffed by career diplomats rather than an honorary consul. What people come for, commonest first:
- Philippine passport renewal in the United States: Ten years for adults, five for minors, printed in Manila and mailed back in six to eight weeks. Why you must appear in person and why nine months’ notice is the real deadline.
- Philippine dual citizenship under RA 9225: For natural-born Filipinos who lost citizenship by naturalising abroad. The oath does not require renouncing your other nationality, and minor children come in as derivatives.
- Special Power of Attorney and consular notarisation: Twenty-five dollars a document, personal appearance required, and the consulate will neither draft your document nor act as your witness.
- Report of Birth and Report of Marriage: How to register a child born in the United States or a marriage celebrated here so that they exist in the Philippine civil registry. Mail-only at most consulates.
- Affidavit of One and the Same Person: The document that fixes a name that does not match between your PSA birth certificate and your US passport. It is what stops most dual citizenship and passport applications.
- Philippine visa and visa-free entry for US travellers: US passport holders enter visa-free for 30 days, balikbayans for a year, and 9(A) visas are now filed online at evisa.gov.ph , not at the consulate counter.
Honorary consulates under this consulate
They cannot issue passports or take the dual citizenship oath, but they are the closest official Philippine contact in their area and the first place to hear about an outreach mission:
- Philippine Honorary Consulate in Dallas, 8315 Navisota Drive, Lantana, TX 76226
- Philippine Honorary Consulate in New Orleans, 6660 Riverside Drive, Suite 102, Metairie, LA 70003
What you can settle without going to Houston
The commonest wasted journey in this system is for a document the consulate cannot produce. There are three of them, and between them they account for most of the search demand:
- PSA certificates , birth, marriage, death and CENOMAR, are issued by the Philippine Statistics Authority and ordered online. The consulate asks for them; it does not print them.
- Apostilles on American documents come from the Secretary of State of the state that issued them. Since 15 May 2019 the consulate cannot authenticate them.
- NBI clearance is issued by the NBI in the Philippines and applied for by mail. The only consular step is notarising your fingerprint card.
Everything else can be prepared elsewhere. What cannot is the passport, which needs your fingerprints, the oath of allegiance, which needs your voice, and the power of attorney, which needs a witness.
Fees, accepted payment methods and document checklists are on the requirements page, and every procedure has its own guide in the procedures section.
philippineconsulates.us is an independent information guide to the Philippine consulates in the United States. We are not the Philippine Consulate General, the Philippine Embassy or any government agency. We do not book, sell or manage appointments: every consulate runs its own system. We check the details regularly, but they can change without notice, always confirm with the consulate before you travel.