Every figure has a source, and a source type
No date, fee, validity period or country count on this site is typed into a page. Each one lives in a single data layer entry recording the value, the exact page or document it came from, what kind of source that is, and the date somebody last read it there. Pages request the value; they cannot invent one.
The type matters as much as the value, because "the EU has decided this" and "a newspaper has reported this" are not the same claim. We use four, and every claim on the site is labelled with one of them.
| Label | What it means | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Regulation | The text of EU law itself, read on EUR-Lex. The strongest thing we can cite. | 4 |
| Official source | An EU or national government publication: the EU travel portal, the Commission, a national government's own guidance. | 40 |
| Reported | Press reporting. Presented as journalism, attributed and dated, never as an EU statement or as settled fact. | 1 |
| Expected | Our own reading of official wording. Clearly ours, never written in the present tense, and never presented as a decision that has been taken. | 1 |
46 entries in total as at 10 September 2026. You will see these labels in a box under the claims they support.
Everything expires
Each entry carries a date after which it is treated as unverified. When that date passes, our build fails and the site cannot be updated until somebody re-reads the source and either confirms the value or changes it.
The launch status entries expire 30 days after they were last checked, because that is the fastest moving part of this subject. Regulation values get longer, though not indefinitely: the ETIAS fee was changed by a delegated act after the original regulation set it, so even law is not permanent.
This is deliberately inconvenient. A page that quietly keeps asserting last year's launch window is the specific failure this system exists to prevent.
Counts are counted, not typed
When this site says how many countries require a travel authorisation, that number is produced by counting the list we hold, and the list is transcribed from the EU's own page. The number and the list cannot disagree, because the number is derived from the list every time the site is built. A previous version of this site stated a country count that was wrong by one, which is exactly the sort of error this removes.
What we do when a source will not answer
Some publishers block automated access. When that happens we say so rather than working around it. An entry is marked as checked live, meaning somebody retrieved and read the source, or as unverified at source, meaning the value came from elsewhere and is waiting for a retest.
Checked at source Unverified at source
As at 10 September 2026 none of our 46 entries is in that second category. The last one that was, a press report about launch timing, was retested and reached at its source, and the part of it we could not verify was cut rather than kept. That number is not a target and it will go up again the next time a publisher refuses us.
Retesting matters more than it sounds. A source that refused us last month may answer this month, and a gap left open is a gap that gets closed. Our fee comparison table carried "Not verified" against one system for exactly that reason, through a session in which four separate government routes would not yield the figures. They were read at their source at the next attempt, and one of them turned out to be roughly double what the previous version of this site had claimed.
Where we cannot verify something at all, we leave the gap and label it. A gap is more honest than a number, and it is also the thing that makes somebody go back and look again.
One home per fact
Any given fact is stated on one page and linked from the others. The launch status tracker is the only page that deals in launch timing; no guide repeats a date. This is why you will find yourself sent to the tracker rather than reading a date in three places that might drift apart.
What we do not do
- We do not process, submit, track or expedite applications.
- We do not predict whether an application would be approved.
- We do not state a start date the EU has not published.
- We do not name individual websites as fraudulent without an official publication to cite, and we do not publish a count of them.
- We have no affiliate or referral arrangements with visa services, insurers or travel agencies.
Our main sources
- EUR-Lex, for the text of the ETIAS and EES regulations and amending acts.
- The EU travel portal, for ETIAS and EES guidance and country lists.
- The European Commission's home affairs directorate, for announcements.
- National government sources, for the comparison systems.
- Press reporting, labelled as such and never as fact.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we would rather know. Tell us what the page says, what it should say, and where you saw the correct version, through the contact page. A dated correction is better for a reference site than a quietly edited one.
Last verified 10 September 2026. How we verify