Planning a spring business trip or family holiday to Britain just became a little more expensive for Indian passport-holders. From 8 April 2026 the fee for the United Kingdom’s Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) jumped 25 per cent—from £16 to £20—under a Home Office fee order laid before Parliament last month. The change comes barely six weeks after the UK rolled out the ETA requirement for passengers of all nationalities who do not already enjoy free-movement rights. Because India is **not** on the UK’s short list of visa-exempt countries, Indian nationals must now secure *both* a standard visit visa (for stays of up to six months) *and* an ETA before boarding a flight. The two-step process adds roughly Rs 2,463 in direct ETA fees on top of the existing Rs 16,000-plus cost of a six-month visit visa.
![UK hikes Electronic Travel Authorisation fee to £20, doubling paperwork for Indian visitors]()
For travellers who would rather not juggle multiple government portals, VisaHQ’s India platform (https://www.visahq.com/india/) can bundle the standard UK visit-visa application and the new ETA into a single managed workflow, flagging passport mismatches and renewal dates before they become a problem. The service, used by both individual holidaymakers and corporate travel desks, helps cut down on form errors and provides real-time status updates so trips stay on schedule.
Mobility managers at multinational firms say the new requirement complicates short-notice travel. “Executives who used to get a UK visit visa over a long-term validity now have to remember to file an ETA every trip,” notes Anita Kapoor, head of global mobility for a Gurugram IT major. In addition to the fee, the online ETA form captures biographic data, travel history and security questions similar to the U.S. ESTA, and approval is linked digitally to the passport. For Indian corporates the operational impact is two-fold. First, travel budgets must now factor in the fee for every UK entry. Second, traveller education is critical: airlines will refuse boarding to passengers whose ETA has expired or whose passport details do not match the ETA record. Large Indian consultancies are already building ETA prompts into internal booking tools to cut down last-minute airport denials. UK officials argue the higher price reflects the cost of scaling the digital border programme to support full global coverage by the end of 2026. But industry groups such as the Global Business Travel Association’s India chapter warn the rising stack of UK immigration fees—visa, Immigration Health Surcharge, and now ETA—could nudge marginal conferences and project work to other European hubs.
For travellers who would rather not juggle multiple government portals, VisaHQ’s India platform (https://www.visahq.com/india/) can bundle the standard UK visit-visa application and the new ETA into a single managed workflow, flagging passport mismatches and renewal dates before they become a problem. The service, used by both individual holidaymakers and corporate travel desks, helps cut down on form errors and provides real-time status updates so trips stay on schedule.
Mobility managers at multinational firms say the new requirement complicates short-notice travel. “Executives who used to get a UK visit visa over a long-term validity now have to remember to file an ETA every trip,” notes Anita Kapoor, head of global mobility for a Gurugram IT major. In addition to the fee, the online ETA form captures biographic data, travel history and security questions similar to the U.S. ESTA, and approval is linked digitally to the passport. For Indian corporates the operational impact is two-fold. First, travel budgets must now factor in the fee for every UK entry. Second, traveller education is critical: airlines will refuse boarding to passengers whose ETA has expired or whose passport details do not match the ETA record. Large Indian consultancies are already building ETA prompts into internal booking tools to cut down last-minute airport denials. UK officials argue the higher price reflects the cost of scaling the digital border programme to support full global coverage by the end of 2026. But industry groups such as the Global Business Travel Association’s India chapter warn the rising stack of UK immigration fees—visa, Immigration Health Surcharge, and now ETA—could nudge marginal conferences and project work to other European hubs.
