Europe’s new biometric checks

Europe’s Entry/Exit System became fully operational on April 10, replacing passport stamps with digital records, face photos and fingerprint checks for short-stay visitors. (home-affairs.ec.europa.eu) The European Commission said the system started a phased rollout on October 12, 2025 across 29 countries and is now active at all participating external border crossing points. It records entries, exits and refusals of entry for non-European Union nationals visiting for up to 90 days in any 180-day period. (home-affairs.ec.europa.eu) Those 29 countries are the Schengen states plus Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus? No—Cyprus and Ireland are outside the system, and their passports are still stamped manually. The participating list includes France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Greece, the Nordic countries and non-European Union members Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. (travel-europe.europa.eu) The rule it enforces is not new: most non-European Union visitors can stay only 90 days within any rolling 180-day period across the whole Schengen area. What changed is that border officers no longer rely mainly on passport stamps to count those days. (travel-europe.europa.eu) The Commission said that during the six-month rollout, the system logged more than 45 million border crossings and more than 24,000 refusals of entry before full implementation. It also said more than 600 people flagged as security risks were refused entry and recorded in the database. (home-affairs.ec.europa.eu) For travellers, the biggest change comes at the first crossing after registration: border staff collect passport details, a facial image and, in many cases, fingerprints. After that first enrollment, later crossings are meant to use a faster identity check against the stored record. (commission.europa.eu) The fingerprint rule is not identical for everyone. The official European Union travel site says short-stay visa holders usually have only their facial image stored in the Entry/Exit System because their fingerprints were already taken for the Visa Information System, and children under 12 are not fingerprinted. (travel-europe.europa.eu) The system also does not apply to everyone crossing Europe’s borders. Exempt groups include European Union citizens, holders of long-stay visas or residence permits, some family members of European Union citizens, diplomats in some cases, and certain transport and military personnel. (travel-europe.europa.eu) European Union law says the database stores the date, time and place of entry, exit or refusal of entry and uses that record to calculate whether a visitor has exceeded the permitted stay. The regulation says each exit or refusal record linked to a person’s file is stored for three years. (eur-lex.europa.eu) The next border change is separate. The European Travel Information and Authorisation System, a pre-trip clearance for visa-free travellers, is still scheduled to start in the last quarter of 2026, so Europe’s new biometric border check is already live even though that travel permit is not. (travel-europe.europa.eu)