What changes for every ETA holder on 8 October 2026
On 8 October 2026 the Immigration Rules widen what a visitor may do in the UK — and because an ETA holder enters as a visitor, the change applies to every ETA. The biggest one: the rule that UK training must be unavailable in your home country is deleted. The fee does not change.
A change to the ETA that is not about the ETA
On 8 October 2026 a change to the Immigration Rules takes effect. It is easy to miss, because nothing about the application, the fee or the validity period changes. What changes is what you are allowed to do once you arrive.
The connection is this. An ETA is not a visa and not a status of its own — it is permission to travel to the UK, where you are then admitted as a visitor. What a visitor may do is set out in a part of the Rules called Appendix Visitor: Permitted Activities. Change that appendix and you have changed what every ETA holder may do. Statement of Changes HC 584, laid before Parliament on 3 September 2026, changes four lines of it.
The four changes
| Rule | Until 7 October | From 8 October |
|---|---|---|
| PA 4(a) | Attend meetings, conferences, seminars, interviews | The same, plus workshops and debates |
| PA 10.2 | Training from a UK company must be required for your job overseas and not available in your home country | The words “and not available in their home country” are deleted |
| PA 11.3 | No provision | New: a visitor may participate in Skills competitions |
| PA 14.1(a) | Artists, entertainers and musicians may give performances | The same, plus attend rehearsals |
The training rule is the one that matters
The other three are useful but narrow. The deletion in PA 10.2 is the one with commercial weight, and it is worth reading the old wording closely to see why.
Until 7 October, a visitor may receive training from a UK company only where that training is required for the Visitor’s employment overseas and not available in their home country. That second condition is a real barrier. If your employer in Riyadh, Dubai or Kuwait City wanted to send you to a UK firm for a week of training, and a broadly similar course existed at home, the activity was not permitted — however much better the UK course was, and however sensible the business reason.
From 8 October those words are gone. The training must still be required for your job overseas. But it no longer has to be unavailable where you live.
Be clear about the limits, because they have not moved. You still cannot be paid by a UK source for the training, you still cannot do productive work for the UK company while you are there, and the training must still be genuinely connected to your employment abroad. This removes one condition. It does not turn a visitor into a worker.
Why the Home Office did it
The Explanatory Memorandum to HC 584 gives the reason at paragraph 5.17: the activities were widened “to facilitate participation in Erasmus+”. That is also why Skills competitions appear as a new provision, and why rehearsals were added for performers.
This is worth knowing because of how the change has been reported. The law-firm summaries of HC 584 that we could find frame it as an Erasmus, religious-worker and EU Settlement Scheme update. That is accurate as far as it goes, and it is how the Home Office itself presents it. But the permitted-activity changes are not limited to Erasmus+ participants — they are written into the general visitor rules, and they apply to everyone admitted as a visitor, including every traveller arriving on an ETA.
If you have already applied — or are about to
HC 584 contains a transitional provision, and unusually it names ETAs directly. Applications made before 8 October 2026 are decided under the Rules in force on 7 October 2026.
In practice this matters less than it sounds, because these rules govern what you may do after you arrive rather than whether your ETA is granted. An ETA issued under the old Rules does not lock you into the old activity list for the next two years. But if you are weighing a trip whose purpose is training that is also available at home, the safe reading is to travel on or after 8 October, not before it.
What is not changing
A separate Home Office fee table also takes effect on 8 October 2026, which has caused some confusion. We checked every line of it against the table it replaces. There are no increases at all — all 167 priced lines are unchanged.
- The ETA still costs £20, paid to the Home Office.
- A short visit visa still costs £135.
- An ETA is still valid for two years, or until your passport expires, whichever comes first.
- You may still stay for up to six months at a time.
- You still cannot work for a UK employer, and you still cannot take paid engagements beyond the narrow permitted list.
If a website tells you the ETA fee is rising on 8 October, it is wrong. If it tells you the fee is £10 or £16, it is quoting a price that ended on 9 April 2025 and 8 April 2026 respectively.
The official page will be behind for a while
GOV.UK’s plain-English page on what you can and cannot do with an ETA was last updated on 28 May 2025. Unless it is revised on the day, it will describe the pre-8-October activity list while the Rules say something different.
That is not a criticism of GOV.UK; consumer guidance always trails the statutory instrument that changes it. It is simply a reason to check the date on anything you read, including this page. The Rules themselves, and the Statement of Changes that amends them, are linked at the end of this article so you can read the exact wording rather than anyone’s summary of it.
What this means for you
- If you are travelling as a tourist or to see family, nothing changes. The four amendments do not touch leisure travel at all.
- If your trip involves corporate training, the door is wider from 8 October. You no longer have to show the course is unavailable at home.
- If you are attending a workshop, a debate or a skills competition, you are now explicitly covered. Previously these sat in a grey area that some travellers avoided.
- Your existing ETA is unaffected. You do not need to reapply, and nothing about it is invalidated.
- Do not expect the fee to move. It stays at £20.
We file UK ETA applications for a £29 service fee on top of the £20 the Home Office charges, and we will say plainly that if your application is straightforward and you are comfortable in English, you should apply directly at gov.uk/eta and pay only the £20. What we cannot do is change what the Rules permit, and no agency can. What we can do is read them accurately and tell you what they say on the day you ask.
Checked against the official sources below on 6 October 2026.