The Real Cost of Entering the US in 2026, by Passport

A Finnish traveler flying to Miami pays $40.27 to enter the United States. A Colombian on the same flight, with the same ticket and the same hotel, pays $435 and books an interview nine months out. Both are tourists. Both stay two weeks. The gap is the passport, and in 2026 it widened on one side while barely moving on the other.

Three charges changed in the last year. A fourth thing, the one people ask about most, has not happened at all. Almost every page on this subject blends the two, which is why travelers turn up at an embassy site unsure what they owe. Below is the split, with a date on every row. Every number here was checked against the Federal Register, DHS, and the State Department fee schedule on 24 August 2026.

What you pay today

Arriving by air or sea? The I-94 fee does not touch you. CBP said so explicitly when it set the charge: it applies to people who apply for an I-94 at a land border port of entry. Drive across from Canada or Mexico and it does.

The ESTA figure is three fees stapled together: a $17 travel promotion fee, $13 added by the 2025 budget law, and $10.27 to cover CBP's cost of running the system. CBP charges that last piece on approval and refusal alike, so a denied application still costs $10.27 and the other $30 is charged only if you get the authorization. DHS published the split and the 27 cent inflation adjustment in November 2025. An approved ESTA runs two years from issuance, or until your passport expires, whichever comes first (8 CFR 217.5). Spread across four or five trips that is small money. Apply only at esta.cbp.dhs.gov; CBP's own filings describe a persistent problem with copycat sites charging large fees for applications that never reach them.

Same trip, three passports

Take one two-week August trip to the US and price the paperwork alone.

A Swede or a Finn pays $40.27, once, and it covers the next two years. Nothing else is due at the border.

A Vietnamese traveler pays $185 to apply and $250 on issuance, so $435 before a flight is booked, plus a trip to the consulate. That is roughly eleven times what the Finn pays for the identical holiday.

A Nigerian applicant pays the same $435, then, if a consular officer directs it, posts a bond of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 through Pay.gov on Form I-352. Nigeria is one of 50 countries in the bond pilot, a list the State Department last updated on 13 May 2026. The bond comes back if the terms are met, but it goes out first, and bond holders may only enter and leave through commercial air ports of entry. No land crossings, no charter flights.

That is the part no fee table shows you. The headline "US entry fee rises to $40" is a story about the cheapest travelers in the system.

The $250 that most coverage calls refundable

A position, then, and a contestable one: treat the visa integrity fee as money spent, not money parked.

The statute (HR-1 section 100007, now 8 USC 1806) says the Secretary of Homeland Security "may provide a reimbursement", not shall. It cannot be waived or reduced. Reimbursement only becomes possible after the visa's own period of validity expires, which for a ten-year B1/B2 means ten years, and only if the holder complied with every condition and left within five days of the end of that period, or was granted an extension or a green card.

Then there is the machinery. As of 24 August 2026 no State Department rulemaking implementing the fee appears in the Federal Register, and the official fee page still carries no line for it. The Alliance for International Exchange reported in September 2025 that senior consular officials had received no guidance from DHS, and that the Congressional Budget Office expected implementation to take years. Applicants at some posts are being charged. Others are not.

A refund that requires a discretionary decision, a decade of waiting, and a system nobody has built is not a deposit. Budget $435, and treat any reimbursement as a surprise.

Waits are a post problem, not a passport problem

The other half of the cost is time, and it does not track nationality the way people assume. These are the State Department's own figures from its Global Visa Wait Times table, which carried a last-updated stamp of 18 June 2026 and was read from an archived copy taken on 9 July 2026, since the live page blocks automated retrieval. State updates it monthly and reports an average only where the next appointment is more than three months away.

Vietnam is fast and Toronto is nearly two years out. Where you apply drives the calendar far more than which passport you hold, and third-country applicants living in a jammed post are the worst off.

State's response is the $750 expedite fee, live since 1 July 2026 and running to 31 December. Its own rule puts the median global wait near 30 days and concedes that some posts exceed 12 months, cites the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Games as the reason to test the idea now, and projects 25,705 people will pay. Read the conditions before you do. It buys an appointment inside ten business days at selected posts, in capped quantities, and nothing else: no faster adjudication, no shortcut through administrative processing, no promise of a visa. Miss or cancel that appointment and the $750 is gone.

Proposed, and not the rule yet

If you came here asking whether you have to hand over five years of social media for an ESTA, the answer on 24 August 2026 is no.

CBP put that requirement in a 10 December 2025 Federal Register notice, alongside phone numbers used in the last five years, email addresses over ten years, IP addresses and photo metadata, family members' names, birth dates and birthplaces, and biometrics. The same notice proposes retiring the ESTA website so the mobile app becomes the only way to apply. Comments closed on 9 February 2026. No follow-up notice has been published since, and none of it is collected today.

One item from that notice is already approved, through an emergency clearance: a selfie alongside the passport photo page, including when a travel agent or family member files on your behalf.

Proposals become rules on their own schedule, and this one may well arrive. Until a notice says otherwise, do not fill in fields the form does not ask for.

Budgeting it

Price the visa route at $435 per person and check your post's wait before you buy flights, not after. If you are on the Visa Waiver Program, apply for the ESTA the day you book: it is valid two years, so an early application costs nothing and removes the one entry document that can fail on you a week out.

Ticket holders for next summer have the sharpest version of this problem, since the 2026 World Cup spans three countries and a knockout draw nobody can predict. Our guide to planning a trip around the tournament covers re-routable multi-city plans, and the same discipline applies here: know which crossings need a document and which need only a boarding pass. Coming from Europe, it is worth reading the mirror image too, since the EU's own border rules run on a separate timetable with its own gap between what is live and what is merely announced. And once the paperwork is paid for, the next avoidable line item is usually your phone bill, which we broke down in the roaming and eSIM cost math.

Fees move. This page reflects the Federal Register and travel.state.gov as of 24 August 2026, and the ESTA and EVUS charges both adjust for inflation every fiscal year, so expect the cents to drift again on 1 January.