The UK visa with nothing in your passport: how an eVisa works
There is no sticker and no card any more — your permission exists only as a record tied to a passport number. If the passport you turn up with is not the one in your UKVI account, the airline's check fails and you may not board.
People keep asking where their visa went. The answer is that it was never printed. An eVisa is a digital record of your immigration status and its conditions — whether you may work, whether you may study, and until when — and it has replaced the physical documents entirely.
First, check this applies to you. If you are coming to the UK as a visitor on an ETA, you do not have an eVisa and none of this affects you. An eVisa belongs to people granted permission to live, work, study or settle. The two are separate systems that happen to have arrived at the same time.
What replaced what
Biometric residence permits are finished. BRPs were issued to people granted permission on or before 31 October 2024. Every one of them has now expired and been replaced by an eVisa.
An expired BRP is not quite dead. You can still use it for 24 months past the expiry date printed on the card, or until 31 December 2026 — whichever comes first — and only for three narrow purposes: signing in to view your eVisa, creating a UKVI account, and applying to extend your permission. For proving your status to anyone else, it is finished.
Vignettes are not finished. If you have a visa sticker in your passport it stays valid until its own expiry date. It is the one piece of physical evidence still in circulation.
The mistake that stops people boarding
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is not obvious and it is unforgiving.
Your eVisa is tied to a passport number. You must add the passport you intend to travel on to your UKVI account, and the details you give your airline must match it exactly. Carriers check your status automatically against that record. If the numbers do not agree, the check simply fails — the airline sees no valid permission, and may refuse to carry you. You may also be held up at the UK border.
A renewed passport is the classic trigger. Your status has not changed and your eVisa is perfectly valid, but the number in your hand no longer matches the number on file. Update the account before you fly, not at the airport.
You can hold more than one passport in the account, which matters for dual nationals. What you cannot do is treat the account as an afterthought.
Share codes
You prove your status to an employer, a landlord or a carrier with a share code rather than by showing them your eVisa. A share code lasts 90 days, works as many times as you need within that window, and you can generate a fresh one whenever you like. Whoever you give it to also needs your date of birth to open it.
Because it lasts 90 days, get one before you travel rather than trying to produce it on airport wi-fi.
Getting into the account in the first place
You need a UKVI account, and it is free — nobody should charge you for setting one up or for viewing your eVisa. You can sign in with your passport, a national identity card, a biometric residence card whether valid or expired, an expired BRP, or your UKVI customer number.
Check the record itself, not just that you can log in. An eVisa can carry the wrong date of birth or the wrong status, and the time to discover that is not at a check-in desk. If anything on it is wrong, or you can see it but cannot generate a share code, report the error to UKVI. And if your expired BRP has a problem of any kind you cannot use it at all — the guidance says to destroy it.
Checked against the official sources below on 3 September 2026.