The UK ETA: What Goes Wrong, and What It Costs You

By A. Akotkar · 20 September 2026

A UK ETA costs £20, takes minutes, and 25.1 million of them were granted in the year to March 2026. For almost everyone it is a form and a card payment.

The interesting part is the small print nobody quotes. There is no appeal against a refusal. There is no way to correct a typo once you have pressed submit. And since enforcement became real in February, the airline is the one enforcing it, at the gate, where being right is no use without the permit.

I have not applied for one myself. What follows is the Home Office’s own guidance, its caseworker instructions, and Dutch fraud reporting, all linked so you can check them.

TL;DR: You need an ETA for the UK unless you hold a British or Irish passport, already have UK permission, or transit landside at Heathrow or Manchester without passing passport control. It costs £20, covers two years or until your passport expires, and allows visits of up to six months. Since 25 February 2026 carriers must check before boarding. A refusal carries no right of appeal, and a submitted application cannot be amended. Apply only through the UK ETA app or GOV.UK: copycat sites charge many times the fee.

• Do you need a UK ETA?
• What happens if you arrive without one?
• Why are ETAs refused?
• Can you fix a mistake or appeal a refusal?
• Why are travellers paying hundreds of euros for a £20 permit?
• What should you check before you fly?

Do you need a UK ETA?

Probably, and the exemptions are narrower than people assume. GOV.UK’s guidance lists three ways out: you hold “a British or Irish passport”, you have “permission to live, work or study in the UK”, or you are transiting landside without passing through border control.

That last one is the trap in the small print. The Home Office’s April 2026 factsheet says passengers transiting Heathrow and Manchester who do not go through passport control “do not currently need an ETA” — but anyone whose connection takes them through UK passport control does. “Currently” is doing real work in that sentence, and it is a Home Office word, not mine.

The terms, from the same factsheet: an ETA “permits multiple journeys to the UK for stays of up to six months at a time over two years or until the holder’s passport expires – whichever is sooner.”

The price has moved twice, and quickly. When the Home Office announced full enforcement in November 2025, it called the fee “competitive at £16”. GOV.UK’s guidance today says “An ETA costs £20”. That is a 25% rise inside a year, on a document that did not exist in 2023.

One thing it is not: a guarantee. GOV.UK states plainly that an ETA “does not guarantee entry to the UK, Jersey, Guernsey or the Isle of Man”. It gets you to the border, not through it.

What happens if you arrive without one?

You do not arrive. That is the change most people have not registered.

Until February the scheme ran soft: the requirement existed, and enforcement was deliberately loose while people adjusted. The Home Office ended that on 25 February 2026, announcing that visitors from “85 nationalities, including the United States, Canada, and France” could no longer legally travel without one, and that “Carriers will be checking people before they travel.”

So the check happens at your departure airport, run by the airline, against Home Office systems. There is no counter where you can explain yourself, and no version of this where you sort it out on arrival.

The group most exposed is the one that feels least at risk: dual British citizens. The government “strongly advises dual British citizens to make sure they have a valid British passport or certificate of entitlement, to avoid problems like being denied boarding”. If you are British but travelling on your other passport, an ETA is not the fix — you are exempt from ETAs and therefore cannot use one to board.

Why are ETAs refused?

For reasons almost entirely absent from the how-to guides, because they sit in the caseworker guidance rather than the public-facing pages.

An application must be refused where the applicant has a custodial sentence of 12 months or more, or “any conviction unless 12+ months have passed since conviction” — so a recent minor conviction counts, not just a serious one. It must also be refused where there is a previous refusal of entry as a visitor without later permission, where there have been immigration breaches such as overstaying or illegal entry, and where “false representations were made, or false documents or false information was submitted.”

There is also the catch-all: refusal where “the applicant’s presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good because of their conduct, character, associations or other reasons.”

Against the grant numbers, refusals are rare. The Home Office reported 24.8 million ETAs issued between the October 2023 launch and the end of 2025, and 25.1 million granted in the year to March 2026 alone. Figures of roughly 124,000 refusals circulate widely; I could not verify that number against the Home Office’s own dataset, so treat it as unconfirmed rather than repeat it as fact. The outcome tables are published in the immigration statistics release if you want the primary figure.

Can you fix a mistake or appeal a refusal?

No, and no. This is the part worth knowing before you fill in the form rather than after.

On amendments, the caseworker guidance is blunt: “Once an ETA application has been submitted by the applicant, it will not be possible to withdraw, vary or amend this as part of the automated process.” A mistyped passport number is not a correction you can request. It is a new application, at £20.

On appeals: “There is no right to administrative review or appeal against a decision made on an ETA application.” One narrow door stays open, and it runs the other way — where a decision was made by the fully automated process, an applicant can ask for human review within one calendar month.

So the practical order is: check the passport number against the passport, check the expiry date, then submit. The document is cheap, but a refusal follows you into the next application, because previous refusals are themselves a refusal ground.

Why are travellers paying hundreds of euros for a £20 permit?

Because the copycat sites buy the search results, and the official process is new enough that nobody knows what it should look like.

The Dutch Fraudehelpdesk maintains a standing alert on visa and ETA fraud, last updated on 16 July 2026. Its description of the mechanism is mundane and effective: people land on an intermediary that charges more than the government does, and hands over passport details along the way.

The sums are not marginal. NOS reported in April 2025 on a Belgian traveller charged more than €437 for two travel documents, through a site called skylinetravelexpress.com, at a time when the official fee was £10 each. That is roughly eighteen times the real price.

Counts of how many people this has hit vary between reports, and I could not pin one to a primary source, so I am not quoting a figure. The mechanism is documented well enough without it.

The defence is dull and complete: apply through the UK ETA app or GOV.UK’s own application page, and nowhere else. If a site asks for more than £20, it is not the Home Office. If it appears above GOV.UK in a search, that is advertising, not authority.

What should you check before you fly?

• Check whether you are actually exempt. A British or Irish passport, or existing UK permission. “I have British citizenship” is not the same thing as holding the passport.
• Apply through the app or GOV.UK only. £20 is the price. Anything above it is someone else’s margin.
• Read the passport number back twice before submitting. You cannot amend it afterwards, and a refusal counts against the next application.
• Allow three working days. Most decisions arrive in minutes; the Home Office’s own advice is not to rely on that.
• Check your ETA is linked to the passport you are carrying. The airline checks against the passport you present at boarding.
• Transiting? Find out whether your connection passes UK passport control. Landside at Heathrow or Manchester is exempt; through passport control is not.
• Remember what it is not. An ETA does not guarantee entry, and it is not a visa.

Heading into Europe rather than out of it? The mirror-image scheme is covered in what ETIAS actually requires right now, and the biometric checks now running at Schengen borders are in what the EES kiosk actually takes.