Half of Schengen still has its border checks up, and this week Germany booked its into 2027

The idea most people carry into a move to Europe is that once you are inside, the borders disappear. You land in Madrid, you take a train to Lisbon or a bus to Toulouse, and nobody asks for anything. That was close to true for a long time. It is not the picture on the ground in 2026, and this week the gap widened rather than closed. Germany extended the checks at all nine of its land borders to the middle of March 2027. Poland did the same. Seven other countries are running internal checks into the autumn and winter. The checks Spain and Italy put up after the Ceuta crisis in July are still there. None of this changes your right to be in Europe if you hold the right document, but it does change what the journey looks like, and it is worth understanding before you plan one.

What actually happened this week

Under the Schengen Borders Code, a member state can put identity checks back on an internal border for a limited period if it can point to a serious threat to public policy or internal security, and it has to renew that decision every few months. Several countries have been renewing for years. Germany reintroduced checks on all its land borders in 2024 and has rolled them forward ever since. France has had them since late 2024. Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden go back further still.

This week the German interior ministry notified the European Commission that its controls will continue to mid-March 2027, and under the way the system works they carry on automatically unless the Commission formally objects. Poland, which brought in checks on its border with Germany in 2025, has extended into 2027 alongside it. Austria, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden all have internal checks notified into the closing months of 2026. Separately, Spain and Italy have kept the bilateral checks they agreed after tens of thousands of people crossed into Ceuta at the end of July, and those run through September. Put together, a traveller moving overland across Europe this autumn can expect to show a passport at more than one internal border, which is not what the brochure says.

Why the checks are still there

In June the European Commission wrote to the countries with the longest-running controls and asked them to set out how they intended to phase them out. Its argument was that the Entry/Exit System, which has been recording every non-EU arrival at the external border with fingerprints and a facial image since April, along with other work on the external frontier, had taken away the security reason for checking people again inside. The governments did not agree. Most of them framed their extensions around irregular migration and smuggling routes rather than any single incident, and Germany in particular has tied its checks to a fall in irregular entries that it credits them with. The politics point one way and the Brussels position points the other, and for now the politics are winning. That standoff is likely to define how freely you can move inside Europe for at least another year.

What an internal border check is, and what it is not

The distinction that matters is between an admission decision and an identity check. When you first enter the Schengen area on a visa, an officer decides whether to let you in. An internal border check is not that. It is that country's own police confirming who you are and glancing at whether you have a right to be in the area, usually on a train, a coach or a motorway. If you hold a valid Schengen visa or a residence card from any Schengen state, you show it and you carry on. The check does not restart your visa, it does not create a new entry, and it does not eat into the 90 days in any 180 that a short-stay visa allows, because that clock runs on your presence in the area, not on whether someone looked at your passport.

What a check can do is expose a document that is not in order. An expired card, a visa used outside its conditions, a stay that has quietly run past 90 days, a residence permit that exists only as a pending application: all of these are easier to ignore when nobody is looking and harder to explain at a border post. The checks are light for people whose papers are current. They are not light for people whose papers are not.

What to carry, and when not to cross

Carry the original of your passport and the original of your residence card or the visa sticker, not a photograph on your phone. Officers at these checks routinely decline to accept an image of a document. Give yourself extra time on any land crossing, especially by road on a Friday or a Sunday, because queues at reinstated checkpoints can run to an hour or more at busy times. If you are inside your first 90 days on a short-stay visa, know your own count to the day rather than trusting a rough estimate, because a border officer can work it out from the entry record and you do not want the two numbers to disagree.

And if your residence permit is mid-renewal and all you hold is the receipt that lets you stay in the issuing country while you wait, think hard before you leave that country at all. The receipt generally does not guarantee re-entry from abroad, and a checked border on the way back is exactly where that becomes a problem. When in doubt, stay put until the card is in your hand.

Also this week: Spain published its new shortage-occupation list

On 2 September the Boletín Oficial del Estado carried Spain's shortage-occupation catalogue for the third quarter of the year, the list the public employment service updates every quarter. It runs to 27 occupations. Eighteen of them are merchant navy roles, valid in every coastal province and also in Madrid and Lleida, where shipping companies keep their offices. The other nine apply across the whole country and cover professional athletes and sports trainers, building electricians, general electricians, aluminium and PVC carpenters, metal-carpentry fitters and three grades of crane operator. Nothing on it is new. The list is item for item the same one Spain published back in January, and the second-quarter edition never appeared at all, so the quarterly update that landed this week updates nothing.

The list matters because of what it removes from an employer's path. Hire for a job that appears on it, in the province where the work happens, and the national employment situation is treated as met, so the company skips advertising the post through the employment service and skips the certificate that no local candidate turned up. You do not register anywhere to benefit from this, and anyone asking for a fee to add your name to the catalogue is running a scam. What the list is not is a map of where the jobs are. Nursing, medicine, IT, hospitality and care work are all short-staffed in Spain and none of them is on it. We wrote about the maritime side of this list, and how foreign seafarer certificates are recognised, in full on Saturday.

Also this week: still nobody can apply for ETIAS

The Entry/Exit System has been live at every external Schengen border since April, replacing the passport stamp with fingerprints and a facial image for non-EU arrivals. Its companion, ETIAS, is the travel authorisation that visa-exempt visitors will one day need to buy before they fly, and it still has no start date. The agency building it dropped its late-2026 target over the summer, and its board is expected to hand the Commission a revised timetable this month. The earliest anyone serious is talking about is 2027, and industry estimates point to the spring of that year at the soonest. The application site is not open. Nobody can apply. If a website is charging you for an ETIAS application today, it is selling a document that does not exist.

For most people reading this, ETIAS was never the relevant step in the first place. It is a waiver for people who can already enter Schengen without a visa. Travellers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and much of Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America will still need a full Schengen visa after ETIAS launches, exactly as they do now. The launch date, whenever it lands, changes nothing about how you should be preparing.

What to do with all of this

If you are planning a move, none of this changes the plan. The right visa or the right permit still gets you in and still lets you travel, and the internal checks are an inconvenience rather than a barrier for anyone whose documents are current. What it changes is the assumption that Europe is seamless once you are inside. Build the extra time into land journeys, keep your originals on you, and be careful with cross-border trips while any permit of yours is still being processed. If Spain is your route and work is the goal, read the shortage list for what it is, a labour-market shortcut for a narrow set of jobs, not a guide to the labour market. And ignore anyone selling you an ETIAS application, because there is nothing to buy.

Frequently asked questions

This roundup reflects reporting as of 6 September 2026. Internal border controls are notified to the European Commission in short renewable periods and the countries and end dates change often, the Spanish shortage-occupation catalogue is replaced every quarter, and the ETIAS timetable has not been fixed. Confirm the current position for your own nationality and route before you travel or act.