Poland officially switched its border booths to the European Union’s new Entry/Exit System (EES) at 00:01 on 10 April 2026, completing an 18-month transition that began with pilot tests at Warsaw-Chopin Airport in October 2025. During a press conference at the capital’s airport, Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński and Border Guard Commander-in-Chief Gen. Robert Bagan confirmed that every one of Poland’s 71 land, sea and air checkpoints is now equipped with biometric kiosks that scan the four fingerprints and facial image of third-country nationals at first entry. The EES replaces the manual stamping of passports with an EU-wide database that logs the date, time and place of each crossing, automatically calculating remaining days under the 90-in-180-day rule. Polish officials revealed that in the “shadow-mode” phase—12 October 2025 to 9 April 2026—officers already created 2.1 million individual files and recorded 5.8 million crossings. For business-travel coordinators the biggest immediate change is trip planning: travellers from the United Kingdom, the United States, India and other visa-waiver countries will have to enrol biometrics on their first post-10 April arrival, a process expected to add two to five minutes per person. Carriers that fail to verify whether travellers have already enrolled risk fines if passengers are refused boarding or entry. Poland is keeping additional mobile teams at high-volume airports through the summer to deal with teething problems. Officials also warned that non-EU nationals who previously overstayed—even briefly—will now be automatically flagged, making it harder to “reset” an overstay by exiting the Schengen Area for a short trip. Although some neighbouring states have expressed concern about queues at peak times, the Commission believes the system will ultimately shorten processing once the initial enrolment wave passes. Polish authorities said the next milestone will be the launch of ETIAS, the electronic travel authorisation, now pencilled in for late-2026.
