Student ID Card Size, Templates and Printing Guide

Student cards tend to be needed all at once. A new intake arrives, or a new term starts, and suddenly the office needs two hundred cards by next week. This guide is written with that in mind: what the card should say, what it shouldn't, and how to produce a full class without typing every card by hand.

What belongs on a student card

• A recent photo, so staff can match the card to the student.
• The student's name and student number.
• Class, grade or course, whichever your school uses.
• An expiry date or academic year, so last year's card is easy to spot.
• The school's name and logo.

If the library or cafeteria scans cards, add the QR code or barcode their system expects. Check the format with them first, because a scanner set up for one kind of barcode may simply ignore another.

What to leave off

Cards get lost on buses and dropped in parking lots, and anyone who picks one up can read it. Think twice before printing a home address, a full date of birth or medical details, especially for younger students. If staff need an emergency contact, the back of the card or a school database is a better place for it than the front.

Student ID card size

Standard student cards are CR80, the size of a bank card (54 × 86 mm), which fits ordinary lanyard holders and card printers. That's the default in the editor, and larger sizes are there if your holders take them. Most schools use portrait cards, but landscape templates are available if your old cards were landscape and you want the new ones to match.

One card, or a whole class

For a single replacement card, open the ID Card Maker, filter the templates by Student, fill in the details, add the photo and download it as a PDF or PNG.

For a class, use bulk mode. Export the class list from your school system or a spreadsheet as a CSV, with one row per student. Add a column with each student's photo file name, then upload the photos, and the editor pairs them up by file name. You can download the cards as separate PNG files or as an A4 PDF with several cards per sheet for printing and cutting.

Before printing the lot, look through the preview for long names. A double surname that fits on most templates can run off the edge on a narrow one.

Photo day

Matching photos make a batch of cards look far more professional than any template choice. Use the same plain wall, the same distance and the same lighting for everyone. If photos arrive from parents instead, they'll vary a lot, so crop them to the same size with Passport Photo Maker or Crop Image. Very large phone photos can be scaled down with Resize Image first, which makes a big batch quicker to work with.

Printing and privacy

Print at 100% or "Actual size", not "Fit to page", and measure the first card before running the whole batch.

Student photos and details are processed in your browser and aren't uploaded to a server. The editor does keep your current design in the browser so you can pick up where you left off, so on a shared office computer, clear the site data for pilotpdf.com when you've finished.