Policy

No REAL ID? Flying Now Costs $45 Extra — Here's Exactly How It Works

By the TSA Wait Times team · Updated July 2026 · Published July 2026

TSA's ConfirmID fee has been live since February 1 and is still catching travelers at the checkpoint. What the $45 buys, how long identity verification adds, and how to skip it.

The $45 fee that's still catching travelers

Since February 1, 2026, anyone who reaches a TSA checkpoint without a REAL ID-compliant license, a passport, or another accepted form of ID has to pay a $45 fee for a process called ConfirmID before they can board. TSA announced the fee on December 1, 2025 and confirmed the February 1 start date in a follow-up release about six weeks later.

Five months in, it is not a footnote. CBS News' Atlanta affiliate reported that REAL ID enforcement is “reshaping air travel” and still leaving flyers scrambling at the checkpoint well into summer 2026. The fee is non-refundable and buys a 10-day travel window, not a single flight — so a round trip taken inside that window does not mean paying twice. It does not replace showing an ID at all; it pays for the identity-verification step that stands in for one.

The fee exists because a meaningful slice of travelers simply were not ready. Coverage of the February 1 rollout put the share of travelers arriving without a REAL ID or passport at roughly 6 percent at launch — enough that TSA built a whole paid-verification path around it rather than turning that many people away at the door.

Compliance is high — the stragglers pay

REAL ID enforcement hit its one-year mark on May 7, 2026. By then, TSA reported that 95 to 99 percent of travelers were already showing up with a compliant ID — a REAL ID license, a passport, or another accepted document. That is the headline number: the fee, paired with a year of enforcement, pushed near-universal compliance.

The flip side of a 95–99 percent compliance rate is that 1 to 5 percentof travelers are still arriving without a compliant ID on any given day. At a busy hub screening tens of thousands of people daily, that is still a real number of people paying $45 and going through additional verification — the same population CBS Atlanta's reporting captured.

That remaining slice is not usually a traveler who refuses to get REAL ID. More often it is a license that expired without a renewal appointment on the calendar, a move to a new state that reset the paperwork, or a passport left in a drawer at home. The fee and the extra screening exist precisely for that everyday miss, not for anyone trying to avoid the system.

How the checkpoint actually works without a REAL ID

Show up without a REAL ID-compliant license, a passport, or another accepted ID, and a TSA officer routes you to identity verification instead of turning you away. You confirm who you are through additional questions and checks, and the $45 ConfirmID fee pays for that extra step — payable online ahead of time or at the checkpoint. Only once your identity is confirmed do you move into standard screening.

None of that replaces the screening itself — bags, liquids, and the walk through the scanner still happen exactly as they would with any other ID. ConfirmID only adds the identity-check stop in front of the line you would already be standing in, which is why it is worth planning around rather than treating as a rounding error on travel day.

That is a real, separate stop before you even reach the scanner — our advice is to budget roughly 30 extra minutes on top of however long the regular line is already running if you know you are flying without a REAL ID or passport. It is enough cushion for the identity check plus the screening that follows, and it is worth folding into how early to arrive at the airport rather than discovering it once you are already at the podium.

How to skip the fee entirely

The easiest way around the $45 fee and the extra verification time is to not need ConfirmID at all. A valid U.S. passport or passport card is accepted at the checkpoint in place of a REAL ID, so if you already carry one for other travel, you are covered domestically too. A handful of other documents work the same way, including a Global Entry card, which doubles as accepted ID and a faster screening lane.

If your license does not carry the star that marks it REAL ID-compliant, the real fix is a DMV visit, not a $45 payment every time you fly. Since the requirement is now more than a year old, most states process the upgrade routinely — the trouble is almost always waiting until the week of a trip to start. For the full rundown of what counts, what does not, and how to apply before your next trip, see our guide to REAL ID requirements to fly in 2026.

Why it matters this weekend

On an ordinary Tuesday, 30 extra minutes at the identity-check podium is annoying but survivable. This is not an ordinary Tuesday — TSA is forecasting the busiest screening days in its history, and our July 4th weekend wait tracker shows what the standard lines are already doing at airports like Atlanta (ATL). Layer a ConfirmID stop on top of a record queue, and it is the last place you want a surprise delay. If there is any chance you or someone in your group is flying without a compliant ID this weekend, get it sorted before you leave the house, not at the checkpoint.