SiteVerdict — Visa & Entry Requirements (official sources)

Do I need a visa, an eVisa or an ETA to visit this country on this passport? Get the answer from the government's own source, with a link, the date it was fetched and a content hash — or an honest "unknown — check the embassy" when no official data exists.

⚠️ Not immigration or legal advice. Entry rules change, sometimes with little notice. Every answer is an automated summary of an official government source, with the date it was fetched. Always confirm with the official source linked, the destination embassy/consulate and your airline before you travel. Border officials make the final decision.

Who it is for

• Travel agencies, tour operators and OTAs — pre-check every passenger's passport against every country on the itinerary, including transit stops.
• Corporate travel / HR / mobility teams — trip checklists for staff with different nationalities.
• AI agents and chatbots — a citation-backed tool (see MCP-TOOL.md) instead of a model's memory.
• Content teams and compliance — a "refresh" run that tells you exactly what changed in the official rules since last time.

What you get for each traveller × destination

Field	Example
category	visa_free · visa_on_arrival · evisa · eta · visa_required · free_movement · citizen · unknown
maxStayDays, stayRule	90, 90 days in any 180-day period
authorisation	UK Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) + official link + fee note
purposeCovered, exceedsMaxStay	work trips and over-long stays are flagged as "visa required" with the reason
passportValidity, transit, health	quoted from the official page where it publishes them
officialText	the exact official paragraph (GOV.UK)
sources[]	publisher, URL, licence, fetched date, official "last updated" date, SHA-256 content hash
confidence	high / medium / low (lower when the official prose is ambiguous or two official sources differ)
disclaimer	always included

Trip mode adds one checklist per traveller: actions ("get a UK ETA", "apply for a Schengen visa"), warnings (Schengen 90/180 overrun, passport expiring too soon, ETIAS status, unknowns) and a per-leg summary.

Official sources (and what they cover)

Destination(s)	Passports covered	Official source	Licence
~226 destinations	British citizen	GOV.UK Foreign travel advice (FCDO), via the GOV.UK Content API	Open Government Licence v3.0
United Kingdom	all nationalities	Immigration Rules Appendix Visitor: Visa national list; "Check if you can get an ETA" list; "Get an ETA" guide (GOV.UK Content API)	OGL v3.0
29 Schengen states + Cyprus (the 30 countries applying the EU visa list; Ireland excluded)	all nationalities	Regulation (EU) 2018/1806 Annex I & II (latest consolidated text), Visa Code Annex IV (airport transit visas) — retrieved via the EU Publications Office CELLAR API; ETIAS status from the European Commission (DG HOME) page	© European Union, Commission Decision 2011/833/EU
Canada	all nationalities	Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations s.7.1, s.190 and Schedule 1.1 (Justice Laws Website XML)	Reproduction of Federal Law Order
Australia	all nationalities	Home Affairs: ETA (subclass 601) and eVisitor (subclass 651) eligible passports	© Commonwealth of Australia, CC BY 3.0 AU
India	all nationalities	Indian Visa Online — e-Visa eligible countries	Government of India website (GIGW, acknowledgement)

Coverage achieved (refresh of 11 Oct 2026): 226 GOV.UK destinations for British citizens (221 classified, 5 "unknown"); for every other passport: UK, 30 EU-visa-list countries, Canada, Australia and India (34 destinations × up to 198 nationalities ≈ 6,900 official (nationality, destination) pairs). Run mode: "coverage" for the live matrix.

Never used: IATA Timatic (licensed), commercial visa websites, or any page whose robots.txt disallows us (EUR-Lex HTML is not crawled — the same legal text is taken from the Publications Office API). Sources that block automated access (e.g. US State Department, CBP, Japan MOFA) are not bypassed; those pairs return unknown.

Input examples

Check pairs

{
  "mode": "check",
  "checks": [
    { "nationality": "India", "destination": "United Kingdom", "durationDays": 14 },
    { "nationality": "US", "destination": "France" },
    { "nationality": "British citizen", "destination": "Thailand", "purpose": "business" }
  ]
}

Bulk matrix: "nationalities": ["India", "Nigeria"], "destinations": ["UK", "Canada", "Germany"].

Trip check

{
  "mode": "trip",
  "trip": {
    "startDate": "2026-12-01",
    "travellers": [
      { "name": "Asha", "nationality": "India", "passportExpiry": "2027-05-01" },
      { "name": "Tom", "nationality": "United Kingdom" }
    ],
    "itinerary": [
      { "country": "Netherlands", "role": "transit" },
      { "country": "Canada", "days": 10 },
      { "country": "France", "days": 7 }
    ]
  }
}

Refresh + change report: { "mode": "refresh", "govukRefreshScope": "changed" } — re-fetches every official source, diffs it against the previous refresh (list additions/removals, changed stay limits, changed official text) and outputs one row per change. Schedule it daily or weekly.

Sample output (abridged)

{
  "type": "answer",
  "nationalityName": "India",
  "destinationName": "United Kingdom",
  "category": "visa_required",
  "categoryLabel": "Visa required before travel",
  "authorisation": { "name": "UK Standard Visitor visa", "applyUrl": "https://www.gov.uk/standard-visitor" },
  "summary": "India → United Kingdom (tourism, 14 days): Visa required before travel — UK Standard Visitor visa. Source: Home Office (UK) (updated 2026-03-05), fetched 2026-10-11.",
  "confidence": "high",
  "sources": [{ "id": "uk-visa-nationals", "url": "https://www.gov.uk/guidance/immigration-rules/immigration-rules-appendix-visitor-visa-national-list", "fetchedAt": "2026-10-11T07:58:12Z", "contentHash": "…" }]
}

How it works

1. Each official source has its own parser (JSON from the GOV.UK Content API, consolidated EU law XHTML, Canadian regulation XML, embedded JSON on Home Affairs pages, the India e-Visa list).
2. GOV.UK prose is normalised with a conservative rule engine (negations like "visa on arrival is no longer available", conditional "if…" sentences and "exempt from K-ETA" are handled). Ambiguous text lowers the confidence instead of guessing.
3. Parsed sources are cached in a persistent named key-value store (siteverdict-visa-kb) for maxCacheAgeHours (default 24 h). GOV.UK pages are re-fetched whenever the official index shows a newer update.
4. Destination-government sources win; GOV.UK FCDO advice is used for British citizens and as a cross-check (disagreements are flagged in notes).

FAQ

Why "unknown" for my pair? No official, machine-readable source we are permitted to use covers it (e.g. Brazilian passport → Thailand). We'd rather say "check the embassy" than guess.

Does it know about ETIAS? Yes — the European Commission page is checked on every refresh. As of 11 Oct 2026 it states ETIAS is not yet in operation; answers say so and switch to "ETA required" automatically when the official status changes.

Transit? Set "role": "transit" on a leg (or purpose transit). Schengen uses the EU airport-transit-visa list; the UK distinguishes airside/landside and flags visa nationals for DATV checks; Canada's eTA applies to air transit.

Is the data live? Each answer shows when its source was fetched. Set maxCacheAgeHours: 0 to force live fetches.

Limits

• British citizens get the widest coverage (GOV.UK). Other passports are covered only for UK, EU-visa-list countries, Canada, Australia and India.
• GOV.UK classification is text-based; always read officialText for edge cases (special zones, cruise visits, land borders).
• Maximum stays are short-stay visitor rules; long stays, work and study need national visas.
• US (ESTA/VWP), Japan, Singapore, UAE, Thailand and NZ government pages were not machine-readable or blocked automated access in Oct 2026, so non-British passports to those countries return "unknown".

Pricing

Pay per event: check (one charged answer per traveller × destination; unknown/invalid/citizen answers are free) and source-refresh (once per refresh run). The run's maximum charge is respected — work stops cleanly when the budget is reached. See PRICING.md.

Compliance & attribution

• Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (GOV.UK).
• © European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu — re-use under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU.
• Canadian federal law reproduced under the Reproduction of Federal Law Order; this is not the official version.
• Source: Australian Government Department of Home Affairs, © Commonwealth of Australia, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia.
• Government of India, Indian Visa Online — source acknowledged.
• Honest User-Agent, robots.txt respected, per-site politeness delay, no CAPTCHA/bot-protection bypass, no personal data collected (traveller names you supply are only echoed back in your own dataset).