TSA Finalizes Fee for Biometric Crew Access Program

The Transportation Security Administration is taking over the expedited-screening program for airline crews, adding facial recognition to it, and now setting what it will cost. A Federal Register notice published June 30 finalizes a fee of 19 dollars per crew member, per year, for aircraft operators that choose to take part in the Crewmember Access Point program. The fee takes effect on January 1, 2027.

The program, known as CMAP, is the renamed successor to the Known Crew Member program, which has given eligible pilots, flight attendants, and other crew expedited access to secure areas at certain U.S. airports since 2011. That program is currently run by the airline trade group Airlines for America, but TSA says it will assume administration by the end of 2026 and rebrand it as CMAP, a move it says will improve the cybersecurity of crew data and strengthen identity verification.

The bigger change for crews is biometric. At designated CMAP access points, TSA will take a digital photograph of each arriving crew member and compare it against the person’s photo in federal databases. A biometric match clears the crew member for expedited access to the sterile area; if there is no match, or the crew member is randomly selected for additional screening, they are sent to a standard passenger checkpoint. The old program relied on scanning a barcode against a database of eligible crew rather than a live facial comparison.

TSA is treating CMAP as a registered traveler program, a category Congress directed it to fund through fees that cannot exceed the program’s costs. The agency said it modeled costs and the user population over a five-year period to arrive at the 19 dollar annual charge, which it will bill to participating aircraft operators per crew member and review at least every two years. Access points are rolling out beginning in the summer of 2026 as the old locations are retired, though the fee does not kick in until the start of 2027.

The fee accompanies the hardware side of the switch, as TSA has expanded the CMAP biometric hardware rollout and pushed more broadly for biometric identification in aviation badging.

Sources: Federal Register

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By the ID Tech Editorial Team