13 countries already charge for entry they call visa-free. When ETIAS launches, 1,770 visa-free entries (13.8% of the world's total) get a €20 form overnight, and the toll-booth club grows to 43.
Thirteen countries currently charge travelers for the privilege of not needing a visa. In the July 2026 passport matrix (199 passports, 39,402 passport-destination pairs, the same dataset behind our most-welcoming-countries ranking), 819 entries are electronic travel authorizations: no visa, but a form and a card payment before you board. That is 2.1% of the world's open doors.
In the last quarter of 2026, when the EU switches on ETIAS, it becomes 6.6% in one day.
Terminology first, because the industry works hard to blur it. An ETA is a pre-authorization for people who officially don't need a visa. You apply online, pay a fee, and an algorithm decides whether you may use your visa-free status. Our classifier refuses to call that visa-free, which is why the US admits exactly four passports without paperwork in our reciprocity table while every travel brochure says Europeans breeze in. I stood by the strict definition then and it's aging well: the category it isolates is the fastest-growing requirement type in the matrix.
The toll-booth club
Who charges today, and how many nationalities they charge, from the July 2026 matrix:
| Destination | Passports charged | Fee (where verified) |
|---|---|---|
| Kenya | 191 | ~US$30 |
| Ivory Coast | 175 | — |
| Papua New Guinea | 87 | — |
| New Zealand | 60 | NZ$23 + NZ$100 levy |
| Pakistan | 55 | — |
| United Kingdom | 54 | £16 |
| Canada | 52 | CA$7 |
| South Korea | 48 | ₩10,000 |
| Australia | 45 | A$20 |
| United States | 42 | US$40 |
| Taiwan | 4 | — |
| Mexico | 3 | — |
| Morocco | 3 | — |
Two different clubs are hiding in that table. Kenya and Ivory Coast run near-universal systems: almost everyone fills in the same form, whatever their passport. The English-speaking bloc does the opposite. The US charges exactly 42 nationalities — its Visa Waiver Program partners, the passports it has certified as lowest-risk on Earth. Everyone else needs a full visa anyway.
The ETA is a tax collected exclusively from the trusted.
The ratchet
Fees in this category move in one direction. The US ESTA launched free in 2008, cost $14 from 2010, $21 from 2022, and $40 since September 30, 2025. Of the original $14, $10 went to Brand USA — the agency that advertises America to the same foreigners paying the fee. The UK's ETA went from £10 to £16 in April 2025, months after full rollout, and the Home Office has already asked for £20. ETIAS was announced at €7 and raised to €20 in July 2025, before processing a single application. New Zealand's visitor levy, stacked on top of its NZ$23 NZeTA, went from NZ$35 to NZ$100 in October 2024 — so a family of four pays NZ$492 before anyone boards a plane to Auckland.
Canada has charged CA$7 since 2015 and never raised it, which at this point qualifies as eccentric.
Walk-backs exist, but read the fine print: Kenya exempted African passports (minus Somalia and Libya) in January 2025, and South Korea has suspended K-ETA for 22 countries through December 2026 as a tourism promotion. Both are carve-outs from systems that stayed switched on. No country has ever dismantled one.
Launch-day math
ETIAS is the largest single expansion this category will ever see, and the arithmetic is unusually clean. Exactly 59 passports are visa-free to the 30 ETIAS countries — and because Schengen waivers are uniform, every one of the 59 is visa-free to all 30. When the system goes live (currently Q4 2026, enforcement after a grace period around April 2027), 59 × 30 = 1,770 visa-free entries convert to paid pre-authorization simultaneously. That is 13.8% of the 12,871 visa-free entries that exist on Earth, one in seven, repriced by a single regulation.
The global ETA count goes from 819 pairs to 2,589. The toll-booth club goes from 13 countries to 43.
For the 59 affected passports — the US, UK, Japan, Brazil, the UAE, all of them — the change is total: every walk-up entry to Europe from Lisbon to Helsinki now runs through the same €20 form. Under-18s and over-70s are exempt from the fee, though not the form, so a family of four with two kids pays €40, not €80. The authorization then lasts three years, which is genuinely more generous than the UK's two or the US's two.
What this does to an actual trip
Take a British passport, currently one of the most toll-boothed in the matrix: it already needs a paid pre-authorization for the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Papua New Guinea, and Pakistan: 8 destinations. After ETIAS, 38. Roughly a quarter of everywhere a British traveler can go without a visa will charge for the privilege. The American number is nearly identical.
None of this makes any single trip expensive. It makes every trip slightly worse in an untrackable way, which is precisely why it keeps happening: no one cancels Portugal over €20. But check your specific passport-destination pair in the visa checker before booking, because this category moves faster than any other in the matrix; Kenya's rules changed twice in twelve months.
Steal the data
The per-country openness table, including the visa-free/VoA/eVisa/ETA split behind this article, is passport-welcome.csv: free, recomputed monthly from the open passport-index dataset. Rankings and an embeddable passport widget live on the flagship page. Use it, chart it, publish it; a link back is appreciated. Unlike the fees above, the price of this dataset is not going up.
Matrix: 2026-07-12 snapshot, 199 countries, 39,402 pairs. Fees and dates verified July 2026 against the sources linked above; classification rules on the methodology page.