Country-wide policy
The Electronic Border Management System and the eTA
Since 2025 the Federation has operated an Electronic Travel Authorisation alongside an online immigration and customs form, through a portal the Ministry of National Security runs. The government announced it in January 2025 as a requirement for every traveller with visa-free access to apply for authorisation before entering, and presented it as both a security measure and a revenue stream. What we could not find is the instrument. The Immigration Act as consolidated to 31 December 2020 provides for permits granted by officers at the border and says nothing about pre-authorisation, and no later Act or Statutory Rule and Order creating the eTA was retrievable. The fee, the validity and the exemptions are therefore not stated here.
Topics it changes
What it requires
- An Electronic Travel Authorisation obtained before travel, where your passport has visa-free access to the Federation
- The Immigration and Customs embarkation and disembarkation form, submitted through the same portal
- Nothing in the Immigration Act as consolidated to 2020 that corresponds to either requirement
At a glance
- Operator
- Ministry of National Security
The portal at knatravelform.kn describes itself as the official portal for the online Immigration and Customs form and the Electronic Travel Authorisation.
- Who it applies to
- Travellers with visa-free access
The government's January 2025 announcement describes the system as requiring all travellers with visa-free access to apply for authorisation before entering. It also says citizens and residents will see no change.
- Statutory basis
- Not found
Nothing in the Immigration Act, Cap. 6.02, as consolidated to 31 December 2020 provides for pre-travel authorisation. Section 33 gives the Minister a general regulation-making power; we found no regulation under it creating the eTA.
- Fee
- Not stated here
Figures circulate in travel and commercial material. No fee appears in any instrument or government page we read, so none is published on this record.
- Validity
- Not stated here
Same reason. The portal's substantive pages are rendered in the browser and did not survive capture.
A live requirement with no readable instrument
This is recorded as a policy rather than folded into the entry record because of what it demonstrates. The requirement is real: there is a government portal, there is a government announcement, and a traveller who ignores it will have a problem. But the Law Commission's consolidation of the Immigration Act stops at 31 December 2020, its annual Statutory Rules and Orders run to 2025 with gaps in the numbering, and there is no 2026 folder at all. A rule that governs every arriving visitor is therefore visible only as an operating system and a press release. The honest thing is to say what exists, say what we could not find, and publish no figure that we could not trace.
First in CARICOM
The government's own framing is worth recording because it explains the shape of the thing. The announcement presents the eTA as putting the Federation's border security "at par with bigger countries", as making it the first Caribbean nation to require pre-authorisation from visa-free passports, and as creating "a reliable revenue stream". A measure introduced partly for revenue is a measure whose fee is likely to move, which is a reason to treat any figure found elsewhere as perishable rather than merely unsourced.
What the law says
«Regulations»The general regulation-making power, and the most likely home for an instrument creating the eTA. We did not find such an instrument in the Law Commission's annual collections for 2023, 2024 or 2025.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Prepares the revised editions of Kittitian law and hosts the annual collections of Acts and statutory rules and orders.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It must not be cited for the current state of the citizenship-by-investment rules: it prints the 2011 Regulations as a schedule to the Citizenship Act with no indication they were repealed in 2023. Nor for completeness - the 2020 edition is a supplement of fifty-six chapters rather than a corpus, so absence from it is not evidence that a law does not exist, and the social security and income tax Acts are simply not in it. Nor for anything after a revision's cut-off: the income tax Act it serves is as at 31 December 2002 and prints Omitted because of cut-off date in place of a section. Its annual instrument folders are not exhaustive either; one begins at number five.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«Duty of persons entering Saint Christopher and Nevis»The Act's own machinery for what a traveller must do, and it operates on arrival. The embarkation and disembarkation card is prescribed by the Immigration (Common CARICOM ED) Forms Regulations in the Seventh Schedule, which is the paper form the portal has replaced.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Prepares the revised editions of Kittitian law and hosts the annual collections of Acts and statutory rules and orders.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It must not be cited for the current state of the citizenship-by-investment rules: it prints the 2011 Regulations as a schedule to the Citizenship Act with no indication they were repealed in 2023. Nor for completeness - the 2020 edition is a supplement of fifty-six chapters rather than a corpus, so absence from it is not evidence that a law does not exist, and the social security and income tax Acts are simply not in it. Nor for anything after a revision's cut-off: the income tax Act it serves is as at 31 December 2002 and prints Omitted because of cut-off date in place of a section. Its annual instrument folders are not exhaustive either; one begins at number five.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
Practical notes
Nothing on this record states the eTA fee, its validity period, or which nationalities are exempt. Those are the three things a reader most wants and the three we could not source.
The OECS entitlements in sections 4(3), 14(7) and 14(8) of the Immigration Act are statutory and are not displaced by anything we read. How the eTA interacts with them is not addressed by any source we hold.
The portal's own content pages are rendered client-side and our capture returned only the shell. A future reading should try the publisher's FAQ and how-to-apply pages directly, or a different extraction method.
This is the clearest instance in this country of a rule that exists in administration before it exists in a published instrument, and it should be re-read whenever the Law Commission publishes a 2026 collection.