H4 Unable to take driver's licence in Florida

Recently my wife and I moved to Florida from Utah. I’ve lived in Utah for 6 years (F1, OPT, H1) and my wife was always been able to have a drivers licence as my dependent.

However, she has been denied a drivers licence in Florida. Here’s the problem. Before we got married she was issued a SSN # (she came here as a student). So the has a SSN with her maiden name, and all her other documents today, passport mainly, has her married name.

The DMV told us they can’t do it if the names on the SS and Passport don’t match. So we went to the SS Administration Office, to try and update the name.

They told us they can’t issue a SSN for my wife because her current visa (H4) does not allow her to work. I tried argumenting that the SSN has been already issued years ago and we merelly would like to update the information on the card.

No success. So now, while we have all legal documents to stay in the countrly, my wife cannot have a driver’s licence…we have 3 kids and she needs to drive them to school and after-school programs…how are we suppose to make this work?

Can somone offer us some light? Thank you!

Try getting some other state’s license

This link says that “U.S. citizenship (if you have not established your citizenship with us) orimmigration status (including Department of Homeland Security permission to work in the United States.” to change name on SSN.

[http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/315](http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/315)



Sounds ridiculous that they don't allow any changes on SSN unless the person has work authorization, but maybe they want to freeze SSN details to the time the person was last allowed to work in US.



You can agin try going to SSA office and explain the situation to a different officer/supervisor. If not, can you try getting the DL w/o mentioning the SSN? Most of H-4 dependents don't have SSN and still get the DL.

I was able to get thru a FL Driving license for my wife in a similar situation. (She had an SSN based on L2 with maiden name, later changed the name and came back on H4).

Went to the SSN office and explained the need that we do not really need a replacement SSN card, but just that the records be updates with the corrected name. They do have an option to do that where its a “Name change only without issuing a Card”.

Once done at the FL DMV (Tax Collector Office in JAX) they were able to verify online the correct name and issued the License right away.