What are the UK’s eGates—and the way do they work?
The UK’s eGates—formally referred to as ePassport gates—are automated passport management checkpoints operated by Border Force at airports and worldwide rail terminals throughout the nation. To discover them, merely observe the indicators in passport management.
Instead of handing your passport to an immigration officer, eligible vacationers can scan their passport themselves, step right into a gate, and look right into a digicam that matches their face to the biometric photo saved of their passport chip. If every little thing checks out, the gates open mechanically, and vacationers can proceed into the airport.
The gates first launched within the late 2000s for British and European vacationers, however this system expanded considerably in 2019 when the UK added vacationers from nations together with the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.
When functioning usually, the method can take lower than a minute and dramatically scale back wait occasions in contrast to conventional passport management traces. But the system just isn’t flawless: Travelers are sometimes flagged for guide screening, and several nationwide outages lately have prompted significant delays at UK airports.
Which airports have eGates?
The gates can be found at lots of the UK’s busiest international airports, together with:
- Heathrow Airport
- Gatwick Airport
- Manchester Airport
- Edinburgh Airport
- Birmingham Airport
- Glasgow Airport
- London Stansted Airport
- London Luton Airport
- London City Airport
- Bristol Airport
- East Midlands Airport
- Newcastle Airport
- Cardiff Airport
They’re additionally out there at Eurostar terminals in Paris and Brussels, the place UK immigration checks occur earlier than passengers board trains certain for London. All advised, the UK now has practically 300 eGates in operation.
Who can use the UK eGates?
Eligible customers currently include residents of:
- The United Kingdom
- European Union member states
- The United States
- Australia
- Canada
- Iceland
- Japan
- Liechtenstein
- New Zealand
- Norway
- Singapore
- South Korea
- Switzerland
Passengers usually should have a biometric passport—sometimes recognized by the small camera-like chip image on the entrance cowl—to use the gates.
Starting July 8, 2026, vacationers ages 8 and older can even develop into eligible, supplied they’re touring with an grownup and are at least 120 centimeters (about 3 toes 11 inches) tall so the facial-recognition cameras can correctly scan them. Children below 8 (and, sometimes, the dad and mom or guardian they’re touring with) will nonetheless want to use staffed immigration lanes.