United Kingdom Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-01

The document was derived from and cross-checked against the official sources below, but the full field-by-field comparison the practice requires (manual-source-review-v1 → Procedure step 2) has not yet been completed and recorded against the live, authenticated UK ETA app / gov.uk apply flow. It therefore remains draft, not verified.

Access constraint

gov.uk/eta and gov.uk/eta/apply render a thin JavaScript shell to automated retrieval — the same constraint the sibling us/cbp/esta-application document records. The actual application is completed in the UK ETA mobile app or the apply-for-an-eta.homeoffice.gov.uk flow, neither of which was scraped directly.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): gb/homeoffice/eta-application / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.1.0
• Authority: UK Home Office
• Primary source URL: https://www.gov.uk/eta
• Official form ref: UK ETA
• Supporting sources:
  • gov.uk/eta/apply (required items: passport, photo, email, payment method)
  • "Electronic Travel Authorisation: caseworker guidance (accessible)" — https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electronic-travel-authorisation-caseworker-guidance/electronic-travel-authorisation-caseworker-guidance-accessible (the official statement of the suitability/refusal grounds; some questions, e.g. the criminal-conviction ones, are given in near-verbatim self-declaration wording)
  • Home Office ETA factsheet, April 2026 — eligibility, exemptions, GBP 20 fee, validity (multiple journeys, up to 6 months per stay, over up to 2 years or until passport expiry)
  • Secondary practitioner summaries (cross-checked, not cited as primary) for the immigration-history grounds' plain-language phrasing and for the plannedArrivalDate travel-details item
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-01 (all pages confirmed live at authoring time)
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

What was confirmed against the source

| Source element | Field(s) | |---|---| | Applicant identified by name, date of birth, nationality, and passport details, all captured from a passport scan | lastName/firstName, dateOfBirth, nationality, passportNumber, passportIssueDate, passportExpiryDate | | Email address required to receive the decision | email | | A face photo/live scan is required (except for children 9 and under) | facialPhoto | | A photo of the passport's biographic page is required | passportBiographicPagePhoto | | Criminal-conviction self-declaration questions, given in near-verbatim wording by the caseworker guidance | convictedOfCrimeInLast12Months, custodialSentenceOver12Months | | War crimes / terrorism / extremism disclosure and non-conducive refusal ground | warCrimesTerrorismOrExtremismInvolvement | | Exclusion order / deportation order or decision refusal ground | subjectToExclusionOrDeportationDecision | | Immigration history refusal grounds (overstay, breach of conditions, illegal entry, deception) | previousUkImmigrationBreach | | Prior ETA cancellation or visitor refusal refusal ground | previouslyRefusedOrCancelledUkTravelPermission |

What is NOT yet independently verified

• The exact screen-by-screen field order, labels, and UI wording of the live UK ETA app / apply flow were not captured directly; sourceRef annotations point to the caseworker guidance and overview pages, not the live form.
• previousUkImmigrationBreach groups several distinct refusal grounds into one field because the live form's exact per-question wording for each was not confirmed; a future verification pass may split this into separate fields if the live form asks them separately.
• plannedArrivalDate is sourced from secondary application-walkthrough summaries, not the primary gov.uk pages, and is flagged lower-confidence in its own field description.
• Whether a residential address is collected (unlike the sibling ca/ircc/eta-application, which does collect one) was not confirmed either way by the sources reviewed; no address field is included pending confirmation.
• Fees (GBP 20, per the factsheet) are intentionally not encoded as data.
• This document models only an eligible visitor applying for themselves; a parent/guardian or representative applying on someone else's behalf is out of scope, as is the separate gb/ukvi/standard-visitor-visa process for visa-required nationals.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance to status: verified, a reviewer applies manual-source-review-v1 (Procedure step 2 field-by-field against the live, authenticated UK ETA app or apply flow, step 3 flow), confirms the source is authoritative, resolves any discrepancy by shipping a new schema version (immutability — VERSIONING §3, practice Procedure step 5), and records the outcome here plus sets status: verified with a current verification.lastVerifiedAt/nextReviewBy.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-01 (6 months): the UK ETA scheme rolled out in phases through early 2026 and its eligibility, fee, and suitability rules may still be adjusted. Re-check the sources on or before that date and on any source.url change.