A weekend in London now requires a form and £20. That is the whole of it, and it takes about ten minutes.

The reason it is worth a guide is not the form. It is the two ways people get caught: the traveller who applies at the airport and discovers their case needs review, and the family who applied for three of four passengers.

What an ETA is, and what it is not

An Electronic Travel Authorisation is a digital permission to travel to the UK. It is linked electronically to your passport; there is nothing to print and no sticker.

It is not a visa. It does not grant permission to work, and it does not extend how long you may stay.

Critically, it is also not permission to enter. It authorises you to board a carrier and present yourself at the UK border. A Border Force officer still decides whether you come in. In practice this is a formality for ordinary visitors, but the distinction is real and it is why “I have an ETA” is not an argument at passport control.

Who needs one, and since when

Visa-exempt travellers to the UK — which includes citizens of every EU and EEA country — have needed an ETA since 2 April 2025.

Enforcement completed on 25 February 2026. Since that date no visa-exempt traveller can enter the UK without one, by any mode: air, sea, rail or land. Carriers are required to verify the authorisation before boarding, which means the check now happens at the departure gate rather than at the UK border. Without one you are not refused entry; you are refused boarding, in your own country, having already paid for the ticket.

British and Irish citizens do not need one. Nor does anyone who already holds a UK visa or eVisa status.

What it costs and how long it lasts

The fee rose from £16 to £20 on 8 April 2026.

An ETA is valid for two years, or until your passport expires, whichever comes first. Within that period it allows multiple journeys, with stays of up to six months each. It also covers travel to Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

It is tied to the passport you applied with, and you must travel on that document. Get a new passport — renewal, loss, damage, a change of name — and you need a fresh ETA at the full fee. It cannot be transferred, and the remaining time on the old one is lost. Border officers scan the new passport and find nothing attached to it.

If your passport is due to expire inside the next two years, that is worth knowing before you pay: the ETA will expire with it.

Apply through the official channel, and nowhere else

Use the UK ETA app from the Apple App Store or Google Play, or the application page on GOV.UK. Both are run by the Home Office and both charge £20 and nothing else.

The reseller ecosystem around this is aggressive. Search “UK ETA” and you will find professionally built sites, often ranking above the official one, offering to handle your application for a fee several times the actual cost. They do not have a faster channel or any influence over the outcome. They fill in the same form.

You will need your passport, a photograph of yourself taken on the phone, a payment card and an email address. The app scans the passport chip, which is quicker than typing.

Leave a working-day buffer

Most applications through the app get an automatic decision in minutes. That is the common experience and it is why people leave it late.

But the Home Office advises applying at least three working days before travel, because a small share of applications go to manual review. Working days exclude weekends and UK bank holidays, so a Friday-evening application before a bank-holiday Monday has a longer runway than it looks.

Apply when you book the flight. There is no advantage to waiting — the two-year clock starts either way, and applying early costs nothing but removes the only genuine risk in the process.

Do not apply in the airport queue. If your application is one of the few that needs review, there is no expedited route and no one to appeal to.

Everyone travelling needs their own

Each person needs an ETA, including babies and children. There is no family application and no infant exemption.

One person can apply on behalf of others, which is the sensible arrangement for a family or a group trip — one account, one payment card, one set of records. Do that, and it is straightforward.

The commonest failure on group and family trips is exactly here: the six-month-old who does not have a passport photo taken yet, or the adult child who booked their own flight separately and assumed they were on someone’s list. Whoever is organising should count passports against ETAs, by name, before anyone goes to the airport.

Keep a note of which email address each application was made from. The confirmations go there, and reconstructing that later is tedious.

The exception: Ireland and the Common Travel Area

This is the part that genuinely changes the answer, and it turns on where you are travelling from, not on your nationality.

Irish citizens are exempt. Under the Common Travel Area, which predates both countries’ EU membership and survived Brexit intact, Irish citizens do not need an ETA and cannot apply for one. This includes Irish dual citizens.

Separately, legal residents of Ireland who are otherwise visa-exempt do not need an ETA when travelling to the UK from within the Common Travel Area. That covers most EU citizens living in Ireland.

The consequence is specific. Take a German national resident in Dublin.

Travelling Dublin to Belfast, or Dublin to London: covered by the CTA exemption. No ETA required.

Travelling Berlin to London: outside the CTA, so the exemption does not apply. An ETA is required, and the carrier will check it before boarding.

Same person, same passport, different answer — decided entirely by the departure point.

If you are relying on the residence exemption, carry proof of your Irish residence. An Irish Residence Permit, or documentation showing you live there. You can be asked for it, and “I live in Dublin” is not evidence.

One further wrinkle for group trips crossing the land border: there are no routine immigration controls between Ireland and Northern Ireland, which means nobody will check anything on that crossing. That is not the same as nobody being entitled to. A non-exempt traveller crossing without the permission they should hold is in breach regardless of whether they were stopped, and it can surface on a later trip.

The Ireland exemption is a real and useful piece of law. It is not a workaround, and it does not extend to a Berlin flight because the passenger happens to also have a Dublin address.