How Much Does an ETA to UK from US Cost?

The Official Fee: £20 Since April 2026

The UK ETA fee has moved twice since launch, and old prices linger all over the internet — which is why travellers keep finding three different numbers. The scheme opened at £10, rose to £16 on 9 April 2025, and rose again to £20 on 8 April 2026, where it stands today. The Home Office ETA factsheet of April 2026 states the current figure plainly: £20, permitting multiple journeys for stays of up to six months at a time over two years or until the holder's passport expires. Any page still quoting £10 or £16 as the current price is out of date, and any checkout charging more than £20 is not the government.

Two properties of the fee matter as much as its size. First, it is non-refundable: refusal, withdrawal, cancelled flights and changed minds all leave the £20 with the Home Office. Second, it is per application, not per trip — one payment buys the full two-year validity with unlimited entries, so a frequent flyer making six London trips pays £20 total while a single-visit tourist pays the same £20. Per journey, the ETA is among the cheapest border documents in the world; per application, it is a flat charge that rewards accuracy, because a typo means paying twice. The application steps themselves are walked through in UK ETA for US citizens; what follows here is everything about the money.

Who Pays: Every Passport, Every Age

The per-person rule is absolute: every traveller needs an individual ETA linked to their own passport, and each one costs the full £20. Babies pay. Toddlers pay. Teenagers, parents and grandparents all pay. A family of two adults and three children pays £100 — five applications, five fees, submitted one after another through the same GOV.UK account. There is no family bundle, no child rate, no senior concession and no group discount of any kind. This surprises Americans partly because the coming European system, ETIAS, will be free for under-18s and over-70s — Britain offers no equivalent break.

The reason is architectural rather than miserly: an ETA is not a ticket but a passport-linked security clearance, and clearances cannot be shared. Each application runs its own automated checks against the passport number presented, so a family shares nothing except the account used to submit the forms. Practically, this means budgeting by headcount — count the passports, multiply by £20 — and starting children's applications early, since a baby's passport photo that fails the automated quality check can add a day or two. Nobody is exempt on grounds of age; the only people who pay nothing are people who cannot hold an ETA at all, covered two sections down.

What Americans Actually Pay in Dollars

The Home Office charges in sterling, so the dollar cost of a UK ETA floats with the exchange rate. At typical 2026 rates £20 converts to roughly $26–$27, against the $22 or so that the old £16 fee cost — if your memory says "about twenty bucks", update it. The exact figure on your statement depends on your card issuer's rate on the day plus any foreign-transaction fee your bank adds, usually 1–3%. A safe budgeting rule is $28 per person: it covers the conversion, the bank's cut, and any rate movement between application day and statement day.

Two payment tips save real annoyance. Pay with a card that has no foreign-transaction fee if you have one — on a family of five, a 3% surcharge adds over $4 for nothing. Pay for the whole family on one card in one session so the charges appear together and any query to the bank is a single conversation. And remember that the dollar figure is informational only: the Home Office receipt will show £20.00, and it is that sterling amount — not your bank's conversion — that proves you paid the official fee. Anything on a receipt above £20 per applicant means you used an intermediary, which brings us to the trap.

Third-Party Markups: The £50–£100 Trap

Search "UK ETA apply" and the top results are often not the government. Dozens of commercial sites sell "ETA processing services" at £50 to over £100 per person — two to five times the official fee — for forwarding your answers into the identical Home Office system. GOV.UK carries an explicit warning that other websites may charge more to apply, and the Home Office factsheet repeats the £20 figure precisely so travellers can spot the gap. These sites buy nothing extra: no faster decision exists to sell (most ETAs are decided in minutes whoever submits them), no extended validity, no waived requirement. The surcharge purchases a web form with flags on it.

The maths of the markups is worth seeing once. A couple paying a £70-per-person intermediary spends £140 where the government asks £40 — £100 lost. A family of five at £80 each spends £400 against the official £100. And the risks go beyond money: you hand passport numbers, birth dates and card details to an unregulated business with no published data-retention policy, and if the intermediary mistypes your details, the refusal and the re-application fee are both yours. The defence is a two-second domain check: genuine applications live on GOV.UK and the official UK ETA app — domains ending .com, .org or .net with words like "express", "apply" or "online" are resellers by definition. Bookmark the official page before you need it, via UK ETA for US citizens.

Dual Citizens: The £0 Exception

Exactly one category of American traveller pays nothing for UK entry paperwork: dual US-British (or US-Irish) nationals travelling on their British or Irish passport. British citizens — including dual nationals — are not eligible for an ETA at all, because they hold a right of abode that no authorisation can improve on. The Home Office factsheet states it directly: British and Irish citizens do not need an ETA, including dual citizens. Travel on the British passport and the cost of entry permission is zero, forever.

The expensive mistake is applying for an ETA on the US passport anyway. The system will take the £20 and the application will fail, and because the fee is non-refundable the money is gone. Worse, since carrier checks began in February 2026, a dual national who presents only a US passport without an ETA can be denied boarding even though they are legally entitled to enter Britain — the airline sees a document gap, not a citizenship. If you are a dual national with an expired British passport, renewing it is cheaper than a detour through ETAs and visas, and it permanently ends the problem. Check your position with the ETA checker before spending anything.

Refused ETA: The £135 Visa Path

An ETA refusal is not the end of the trip, but it is the end of cheap travel. The fallback is the Standard Visitor visa at £135 for stays up to six months (raised from £127 on 8 April 2026, the same fees order that lifted the ETA to £20). That is nearly seven times the ETA price, and the money is only the start: the visa requires a full online application, a biometrics appointment at a US visa application centre, supporting documents for funds, ties and purpose, and roughly three weeks of processing. Travellers who visit Britain regularly can consider the long-term versions — £506 for two years, £903 for five, £1,128 for ten — each still limiting stays to six months per visit. Estimate the full picture with the UK visa fee calculator and the UK visa fee guide for 2026.

Refusals usually trace to four causes: criminal history, previous UK immigration violations or overstays, earlier refusals, or data errors where the application does not match the passport. The last of these is the only cheap one — correct the mistake and reapply for a fresh £20. For the others, the visa route means addressing the reason head-on with evidence, because the refusal must be disclosed on the new application and caseworkers will look for what changed. One strategic note: never let an ETA refusal push you into the arms of a "guaranteed visa" agency. No agency can guarantee a Home Office decision; anything they charge sits on top of the £135 government fee rather than replacing it.

Cost Comparison: ETA vs ESTA vs ETIAS vs Visas

Britain's £20 sits in the middle of the world's authorisation prices — neither the bargain of Canada nor the premium of America. All figures are official fees in force on 5 October 2026.

Three patterns deserve attention. First, authorisations are an order of magnitude cheaper than visas: £20 against £135 in Britain, $40.27 against $185 in America — the visa-free route is worth protecting with an accurate application. Second, America's ESTA is now the priciest mainstream authorisation after its September 2025 rise from $21 to $40.27, costing roughly double the UK ETA per grant. Third, only ETIAS discounts children — for every live system on this table, family budgeting means multiplying the headline fee by headcount. The broader comparison, with processing times and eligibility, lives in ETIAS vs ETA vs ESTA, and the American side in the ESTA guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

How We Fact-Check This Page