Travelers including Britons and Americans visiting most European countries will have to register their fingerprints and faces under a system that goes live next month.

The European Union will phase in its Entry/Exit System (EES) between October 12 and April 10. It covers short-term travel by non-EU citizens to the 29 Schengen area countries that share border controls. The area includes all EU countries plus Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland, but not Cyprus and the Republic of Ireland.

Non-EU citizens over the age of 11 will have to register their fingerprints, facial images, and passports on reaching a Schengen border, creating a free-of-charge EES record that will be retained for three years. Those with records will then provide a fingerprint or facial scan when crossing a Schengen border, in many cases replacing the current system where border guards eyeball passengers and ending the practice of getting your passport stamped with a picture of a plane, train, or boat.

The EU says EES will make border checks more efficient, improve security, and make it easier to enforce its short-term visa rule that non-EU citizens can spend at most 90 of every 180 days in the Schengen area.

The system, which is going live several years later than originally planned, will be run by the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice – with the friendly acronym eu-LISA – based in Tallinn, Estonia. It will collect passport data including name and date of birth, date and place of each entry and exit, and whether entry was refused, with facial images and fingerprints stored in a biometric matching service.

EES will retain most records for three years, although if no exit is recorded, it will keep them for five years from the expiry of the authorized stay.

European Digital Rights, a group of campaigning organizations, said in 2018 that although the plans were an improvement on the initial version, the levels of data collection were still disproportionate and unnecessary.

Most people will register when reaching the Schengen area, but Britain hosts European border controls at Dover for ferries, Folkestone for drive-on Eurotunnel trains, and St Pancras in London for Eurostar passenger trains.

The UK government has provided the Port of Dover, Eurotunnel, and Eurostar with £3.5 million each for registration kiosks and infrastructure.

Eurostar will initially invite premier ticket holders and club members to register with EES, then extend the system to all passengers traveling through St Pancras and Paris Gare du Nord in January. The company has installed 49 kiosks at St Pancras and says registration should take two minutes.

Eurotunnel told the Financial Times it has spent £80 million on EES kiosks and technology as well as taking on 120 people to help passengers use the self-service system. It will start applying the system to coaches and lorries from October and cars by the end of this year, with specific bays for drivers to park in while registering.

In the last quarter of 2026, the EU will also introduce a €20 three-year visa waiver, the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS), for travel to the 29 Schengen countries and Malta. This will cover most citizens of visa-exempt countries including Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US. ®