Schengen is working better than it ever has. Illegal border crossings are at their lowest level in years, a new digital system has caught hundreds of criminals and thousands of overstayers before they could disappear into the crowd. And yet ten countries, a third of the entire area, are still checking passports at borders that were supposed to be open long ago.
Board a train in Vienna, step off in Prague, and no one asks for your passport. Drive from Rotterdam to Cologne without slowing at a border post. For decades, this was the everyday reality for millions of Europeans. Today, for many of them, it is not. The European Commission today published its fifth annual State of Schengen Report, and it captures both sides of that story: real progress at the edges of Europe, and a stubborn failure at its heart.
The most visible sign of progress is the Entry/Exit System, which became fully operational at all Schengen border crossing points on 10 April 2026. Since its rollout began in October 2025, member states have registered more than 60 million entries and exits of third-country nationals. Nearly 800 were flagged as a direct security threat and almost 7,000 were caught having overstayed their permitted time. Before the system existed, both groups would likely have gone unnoticed. That is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a fundamental change in how Europe knows who is inside its borders.
A border that bites back
The external picture is, on the whole, encouraging. Fewer than 180,000 illegal border crossings were detected in 2025, the lowest figure in several years and a drop of more than 25 per cent on the previous year. Returns of people without the right to stay reached a ten-year high, with Frontex supporting more than 63,500 departures. Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, who oversees the Schengen file, put it plainly: “To keep Schengen both open and secure, we must modernise how we manage mobility and security risks.” The numbers suggest the modernisation is, slowly, working.
The internal picture is harder to defend. Ten member states spent all of 2025 checking documents at their own internal borders, citing migration pressure and security concerns. They include Germany, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands, among others. That affects cross-border workers who cross every morning, students who commute between cities, families divided by a line on a map that was supposed to mean nothing. The Commission argues that joint police patrols and mobile identification technology could achieve the same security outcomes without the queues. Most of the ten have not been persuaded.
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An unannounced inspection at Lisbon Airport in December 2025 found serious deficiencies in how Portugal handles external border checks. Remedial measures followed swiftly. But the episode was a reminder that Schengen’s strength depends entirely on 29 countries implementing the same rules to the same standard, and that this remains an aspiration as much as a reality.
The road ahead
Only 12 member states have appointed a national Schengen coordinator, the single official responsible for making sure a country actually delivers on its commitments. The rest manage their obligations through a tangle of ministries and agencies with no clear accountability. The Commission has raised this for years. Progress has been slow.
The next two years will test whether the momentum holds. The European Travel Information and Authorisation System, which will require visa-free travellers to obtain authorisation before entering Schengen, is due to launch later this year. A study on what internal border controls are costing European economies is expected in the second half of 2026. That figure, when it arrives, may prove more persuasive than any number of Commission recommendations.
We are at a turning point for border and migration management.
— Magnus Brunner, Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration
“We are at a turning point for border and migration management,” said Commissioner for Internal Affairs Magnus Brunner. The report makes clear what that turning point requires: not just better technology at the edges, but the political will to keep the centre open.
