For summer travelers braving this record-breaking heatwave to take holiday trips and vacations, remember this along with extra water and sunscreen — not having a REAL ID will add a penalty fee to your expenses.
At $45, the fee is now more than double the original $18 charge.
The requirement to use a REAL ID (a standardized form of state identification) in order to fly domestically was enforced by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in May 2025. The REAL ID Act was signed 20 years ago in May 2005, but it took two decades to take effect on a national level.
When the rule was first enforced, the TSA would charge non-carrying passengers an $18 fee for “government-incurred costs” to use a “modernized alternative identification verification system,” coined TSA ConfirmID, for a 10-day travel period.
A published notice for the announcement shown on the Federal Register read, “This modernized program provides an alternative that may allow these individuals to gain access to the sterile area of an airport if TSA is able to establish their identity.”
However, the TSA made a 2025 announcement that they would be raising the fee to $45 — a $27 increase — which went into effect on February 1 of this year.
The uptick in price came about after the agency found that the new technology expenses and operational costs were higher than projected, per senior TSA officials.
Customers who do not have a REAL ID must get out of the physical airport queue and go online to the government website, where they can complete the necessary identification steps and pay the nonrefundable add-on cost, after which they will receive email confirmation of their payment.
The process typically lasts from 10-15 minutes, but can take up to a hair-pulling half hour.
And, if the TSA is ultimately unable to confirm a passenger’s identity, they will not be allowed to fly.
The ultimate goal? Getting travelers to their destinations safe and sound.
“Identity verification is essential to traveler safety, because it keeps terrorists, criminals and illegal aliens out of the skies and other domestic transportation systems such as rail,” Adam Stahl, a senior official of the TSA, had told Fox News.
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