Everything a Wallet pass needs, in one place.

1. Row width is the real budget, not the field count

The field limits above tell you how many values fit. They do not tell you how many characters fit, and that is the number that decides whether your pass looks finished. Wallet lays each row across roughly 345 points and truncates rather than wrapping. Measured at 15pt, a one-column row takes about 42 characters, a two-column row about 20, three columns about 13 and four columns about 9.

Nine characters is not a field. Put a long email address in a four-column row and it does not shrink to fit; it truncates, and so does everything sitting beside it. Four columns of ellipses is less information than one column of text. Pack rows greedily against a width budget and stop, rather than filling every slot because the slot exists.

2. An unsupported image fails silently, and expensively

If you put thumbnail.png in a store card bundle, nothing happens. No warning, no validation error, no log line. The file is hashed into manifest.json, covered by your signature, downloaded to the device, and ignored.

The failure mode this produces is worse than a crash, because it runs in both directions at once and neither is visible. We shipped store cards carrying a thumbnail Wallet has no slot for, while the generic passes that do have a slot shipped none, for weeks. Nothing downstream ever reported it. If you take one thing from this page: derive your image set from the style programmatically, and make a mismatch fail your build.

3. The square-barcode rule is easy to read past

Apple states the field capacity in a single paragraph, and the sentence that matters is the last one: Coupons, store cards, and generic passes with a square barcode can have a total of up to four secondary and auxiliary fields, combined.

Read quickly, that looks like a note about barcodes. It is not. It is a hard halving of your front-of-pass capacity from eight fields to four, and it applies to almost every pass that is not a ticket, because almost every pass that is not a ticket uses a QR code. Event tickets and boarding passes are absent from that sentence and keep four secondary plus four auxiliary in full.

4. There is no animation, and the internet will tell you there is

Pass images are static PNG. APNG is not supported. Animated GIF is not supported. Wallet renders a still frame or nothing, with no error either way.

The confusion is real and it has a cause: Google Wallet does support GIF, so a good deal of advice written for one wallet gets applied to the other. There is no supported way to make an Apple Wallet pass front move, and there has not been one at any point in the format's history.

5. The good event ticket layout is behind an entitlement

iOS 18 introduced a full-bleed poster layout for event tickets, and it is genuinely the best-looking thing the format can do. It is requested with preferredStyleSchemes: ["posterEventTicket"], and if you try it you will find it does nothing.

It renders only for NFC-enabled passes signed with an NFC certificate. Apple grants that entitlement to transit, ticketing and access-control partners after a business review; it is not something you enable in the developer portal. It also requires one of semantics.venueName, venueRegionName or venueRoom to be set. Without the entitlement the pass silently falls back to the standard layout, which is at least a graceful failure, and is still a failure you will spend an afternoon on.

Cardr issues a signed .pkpass for every card, so these rules are not trivia to us. Every number on this page is generated at render time from pass-spec.js, the single module our pass builder derives its image sets and field budgets from. If a limit here is wrong, our own passes break the same rule, which is the only accuracy guarantee that is worth anything.

Use it, quote it, screenshot the tables. If it saved you an afternoon, a link back is welcome and is not required.

Primary source: PassKit Package Format Reference — Creating the Source for a Pass. Last checked 4 August 2026. Apple Wallet and PassKit are trademarks of Apple Inc.; Cardr is not affiliated with Apple.