UK ETA: Who Needs It, How to Apply, Fees, Transit, and Status Checks

(UNITED KINGDOM) The UK ETA is the permission that decides whether an airline lets you board. Since full enforcement began on February 25, 2026, carriers check it automatically against Home Office records before departure, and a traveler without one is turned away at the gate rather than at the border.

The scheme is no longer new or small. The Home Office granted 25.1 million ETAs in the year ending March 2026, and US nationals alone accounted for 4.7 million of them, ahead of Germany on 2.7 million and France on 2.3 million. Nationals of the EU, the EEA, and Switzerland together made up 64 percent of all grants.

This guide covers the whole thing in one place: what the ETA costs today, exactly who needs one, how to apply, how to check your status and read the result, the mistakes that get applications refused, when a visitor visa is the better choice, and how the airside transit exemption actually works.

What the ETA is, and what it is not

The UK Electronic Travel Authorisation is a digital permission to travel, linked to one passport. It is not a visa and it is not a tax. The legal basis is section 75 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, and the operating rules sit in Immigration Rules Appendix Electronic Travel Authorisation.

An ETA covers travel to the UK, Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man for stays of up to 6 months. It is valid for tourism, seeing family and friends, business trips, short-term study, a permitted paid engagement, and up to 3 months on the Creative Worker visa concession.

What it does not do is guarantee entry. Holding an ETA gets you onto the plane and up to the desk. Border Force still grants or refuses permission to enter when you arrive, and it can refuse someone who holds a perfectly valid ETA.

You also cannot use an ETA to stay longer than 6 months, to work for a UK employer or as a self-employed person outside the two narrow concessions, to claim public funds, to live in the UK through repeated back-to-back visits, or to marry or register a civil partnership. That last one catches people out: giving notice of marriage requires a Marriage Visitor visa, and the ETA route explicitly excludes it.

Fees and validity as they stand today

An ETA costs £20. That figure took effect on 8 April 2026, when the Home Office immigration and nationality fees table raised it from £16, a rise of £4 or 25 percent. It is the second increase in the scheme’s life, after the move from £10 to £16 in April 2025.

There is no child rate and no family rate. Every traveler needs their own ETA at the full fee, including babies. A family of four pays £80. You cannot get a refund after you apply, and you cannot withdraw or amend an application once it is submitted.

An approved ETA lasts 2 years from the date of grant, or until the passport used in the application expires, whichever comes first. Within that window you can travel to the UK as many times as you like, with each visit capped at 6 months. The clock is not reset by leaving and returning.

Read that table next to the ETA line and the arithmetic is stark. A 2-year long-term visitor visa costs 25 times the ETA and buys the same 6-month stay per visit. For anyone eligible for the ETA route, the ETA is almost always the cheaper and faster option. The exceptions are covered further down.

Who needs an ETA: the full list

Eligibility is set by nationality, and the only authoritative source is Immigration Rules Appendix ETA National List. It currently names 83 countries and territories, added in four waves between November 2023 and April 2025, and it now covers every remaining non-visa national.

If your nationality is on this list and you do not already hold a UK visa or immigration status, you need an ETA. If it is not on the list, you are either a visa national who needs a Standard Visitor visa, or you are exempt for another reason.

The list moves. Jordan came off it at 3pm BST on 10 September 2024, and Home Office statistics record Colombia as a country whose nationals now need a visitor visa. St Lucia and Nicaragua were moved to the visa national list in March 2026, and Botswana, Nauru, and Trinidad and Tobago do not appear on the current version either.

Check the Appendix before you book if your nationality is one of the smaller entries. A removal takes effect quickly, sometimes with only a short transitional window for people who already hold an approved ETA.

Who does not need one

GOV.UK lists the exemptions plainly. You do not need an ETA if you are a British or Irish citizen, hold a UK visa, or already have permission to live, work, or study in the UK, including settled status, pre-settled status, and right of abode. The same applies to permission held for Jersey, Guernsey, or the Isle of Man.

You are also exempt if you travel on a British overseas territories citizen passport or a British National (Overseas) passport, if you live in Ireland and enter the UK from Ireland, Guernsey, Jersey, or the Isle of Man, if you are exempt from immigration control, or if you are waiting on an EU Settlement Scheme decision.

Two school-party exemptions exist that most guides skip. Pupils aged 18 or under at a French school registered with the French Ministry of Education, and pupils aged 19 or under at a German school confirmed by the relevant municipal authority, do not need an ETA when they travel as part of an organised party of five or more.

Dual nationals are the sharpest edge. If you hold British or Irish citizenship alongside another nationality, you cannot get an ETA at all. The system will not sell you one. You must prove your citizenship instead, with a valid British passport, a valid Irish passport, or another passport carrying a certificate of entitlement to the right of abode. Since carriers moved to automated checks, dual nationals travelling on the wrong passport have been refused boarding.

The Home Office has issued temporary guidance letting carriers accept an expired British passport issued in 1989 or later alongside a valid third-country passport where the biographic details match. Treat that as a stopgap, not a plan. If you have any doubt, renew the British passport before you fly.

Living in Ireland has its own carve-out. A third-country non-visa national who is lawfully resident in Ireland does not need an ETA when travelling to the UK from within the Common Travel Area. If you are 16 or over you must be able to prove that residence with an original, valid, Irish government document: an Irish driving licence or learner permit, a medical card, a GP visit card, a European Health Insurance Card, an Irish Residence Permit, a Permanent Residence Certificate, a National Age Card, or a diplomatic identity card. Under-16s do not need proof.

How to apply without delays

Most applications are decided automatically within minutes. The Home Office still tells travelers to allow up to 3 working days, Monday to Friday, because a small share of cases go to a human decision maker.

You will need the passport you intend to travel on, an email address, and a payment method. The Home Office accepts a credit card, a debit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. The seven stages look like this:

1. Download the UK ETA app from Google Play or the App Store, or open the application on GOV.UK.
2. Have your passport, email address, payment method, and a compliant photo ready.
3. Scan the passport and complete the face capture. On the app you use the phone camera; online you upload a photo of the passport and a photo of the face.
4. Answer the suitability and criminality questions honestly and in full.
5. Pay the £20 fee.
6. Wait for the decision email carrying your 16-digit ETA reference number.
7. Travel on the same passport. You do not need to print anything; carriers verify the ETA digitally.

You can apply for other people. On the app you can do it for someone sitting next to you; if they are not with you, apply for them online with a photo of their passport and a photo of their face. Decisions for a group can land at different times, so do not panic if one family member is approved hours before another.

Support is webchat only. UK Visas and Immigration will not take ETA enquiries by phone. And be careful where you apply: copycat sites charge well above £20 for the same application and cannot make a decision arrive faster.

How to check your ETA status, and what each result means

There is an official checker at GOV.UK Check your electronic travel authorisation. It tells you two things: whether you hold an ETA, and when it expires. You need the passport you used when you applied.

One limitation matters. The checker cannot track an application in progress. If you applied recently and have not had a decision, the service will not show anything useful. The Home Office asks you to wait the full 3 working days, check your spam folder, and only then contact UKVI.

The outcome vocabulary is where people get confused, because rejected and refused are not the same thing in Home Office language, and the recovery path is completely different.

A rejection is recoverable. Home Office caseworker guidance is explicit that an application rejected at the identity stage is never assessed against the suitability rules, and the applicant can simply make a new application. The same applies where a passport has been reported lost or stolen: reapply with a valid document.

A refusal is not. There is no right of appeal and no administrative review against an ETA decision. If you are refused, the only route left is a visa application. One narrow exception exists in the other direction: if your ETA was granted by a fully automated process, you have one calendar month to ask for a human review of that grant. Rejections and refusals are always made by a human already, so that right does not apply to them.

Systems do go down. In June 2026 the Home Office reported a technical outage in the ETA system. That is a further argument for applying days rather than hours before departure.

Ten mistakes that get an ETA refused, rejected, or stuck

Refusals are rare for ordinary travelers, but they are not random. The Immigration Rules make refusal mandatory once a suitability ground is met, and caseworkers are told not to apply discretion. These are the traps, in rough order of how often they bite.

Two more grounds sit in the rules and occasionally catch people: unpaid litigation costs awarded to the Home Office, and an ETA previously cancelled because the validity requirements were never met. An existing ETA can also be cancelled for unpaid NHS charges of £500 or more.

ETA or visitor visa: which one you need

For most eligible travelers the answer is the ETA, and it is not close. It costs £20 against £135, it is decided in minutes rather than weeks, and it needs no appointment at a visa application centre. But there are genuine boundary cases where the visa is the right call even when you qualify for an ETA.

Choose the Standard Visitor visa instead of an ETA when any of these apply:

• You have a criminal record or a previous UK refusal. GOV.UK says so directly: if you have been refused entry before or have a criminal record, you may want to apply for a Standard Visitor visa even if you do not need one. The visa route allows a fuller assessment; the ETA route does not.
• You were convicted of anything in the last 12 months. The ETA must be refused. The visa is your only realistic path.
• You need to stay longer than 6 months, for example for private medical treatment (up to 11 months) or as a visiting academic (up to 12 months).
• You are getting married or registering a civil partnership in the UK, or giving notice of one. That is a Marriage Visitor visa, and no ETA covers it.
• Your course runs longer than 6 months. That is a Student visa, not a visitor permission.
• You will work for a UK employer. Only a permitted paid engagement or the Creative Worker concession, capped at 3 months, sits inside the ETA.
• Your nationality is not on the Appendix ETA National List. Then the visa is not a choice, it is the requirement.

One myth worth killing: frequent travel is not a reason to buy a long-term visitor visa if you are ETA eligible. A £20 ETA already gives you unlimited entries for 2 years. The 2-year long-term visa at £506 buys the same 6-month stay per visit for 25 times the money. It exists for visa nationals, not for people who could use an ETA.

Transit: the airside exemption, and where it stops

This is the section that decides whether millions of connecting passengers need to pay anything at all, and the rule is narrower than most travelers assume.

Home Office caseworker guidance states the position in one sentence: airside transit passengers are temporarily exempt from the ETA requirement, and those transiting landside, meaning passing UK border controls, continue to require an ETA. The guidance adds that the exemption is temporary and will be kept under review.

The Home Office ETA factsheet published in April 2026 is more specific about geography. It says that those transiting through Heathrow and Manchester airports who do not go through UK passport control do not currently need an ETA. Those are the two UK airports with genuine international-to-international airside transfer facilities, which is why the exemption is effectively a Heathrow and Manchester rule in practice.

The practical test is not the airport name and not the length of the layover. It is a single question: does your itinerary make you walk up to a UK passport control desk? If yes, you need an ETA. If no, you currently do not.

The commercial stakes here are real. US citizens connecting airside at Heathrow still do not need an ETA, which saves a family of four £80 on a single trip. But the exemption is explicitly under review, so anyone booking a connection months ahead should re-check the rule before departure rather than rely on what was true when they booked.

Two related points. Visa nationals get no benefit from this exemption; they need a Direct Airside Transit Visa or, for landside transit, a transit visit visa costing £74.50. And Home Office guidance is clear that the ETA requirement applies to all routes and modes of entry, including journeys through juxtaposed controls in France and Belgium and journeys made within the Common Travel Area.

Travelers combining the UK with Europe on one trip should also plan for the separate EU system. ETIAS and the UK ETA are different schemes with different fees, different validity, and no reciprocity. Holding one does nothing for the other, and both belong on the same checklist of new European travel rules.

What happens at the border

An ETA gets you to the desk. It does not get you through it. Border Force can still ask about your funds, your accommodation, your onward ticket, and the purpose of the trip, and can refuse permission to enter.

The visitor eligibility tests have not changed. You must show you will leave at the end of the visit, that you can support yourself and any dependants, that you can pay for the return or onward journey, and that you are not using successive visits to live in the UK. Carry the same evidence you would have carried before the scheme existed.

Border officers also watch travel history. Repeated long stays that add up to effective residence can lead to refusal at the border even with a valid ETA, and can trigger cancellation of the ETA itself.

Cruise, rail, and the wider cluster

Cruise passengers are inside the scheme. Anyone stepping ashore at a UK port passes border control, and cruise lines have been warning passengers directly because a missing ETA can stop boarding at the embarkation port, not just at the UK.

The Crown Dependencies are covered by the same permission. Jersey and Guernsey apply the ETA requirement, and one ETA covers the UK, Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man.

Carriers, not the Home Office, are the enforcement layer travelers actually meet. The legal power to fine carriers for bringing a non-visa national without an ETA came into force in March 2026, which is why airline systems now block check-in rather than flag a warning. Since enforcement tightened, passengers have been stranded at departure airports over documentation that would once have been sorted on arrival.

The short version

If your nationality is on the Appendix ETA National List and you do not already hold UK permission, apply on the official app for £20, use the passport you will fly on, answer the criminality questions honestly, and do it at least 3 working days out. Check the result on GOV.UK before you travel.

If you are connecting airside through Heathrow or Manchester on one booking, you currently need nothing, but verify that again close to departure. If your itinerary touches UK passport control at any point, you need the ETA. And if you have a recent conviction or a past UK refusal, do not gamble on an automated decision: go to the visa route, where your case can actually be considered.

The authoritative reference remains the GOV.UK ETA guidance, and the fee and nationality list both move. VisaVerge.com tracks each change as it lands, but the Appendix and the Home Office fees table are the documents that decide the answer.