CBP holds Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) records for 13 months. The data — passport details, full name, date of birth, citizenship, and the PNR locator number tied to a booking — is screened against law-enforcement and terrorist databases before a traveler reaches a U.S. border.
The 13-month window is confirmed in CBP’s own documentation. What viral “CBP now keeps your data longer” claims skip: no 2025 or 2026 Privacy Impact Assessment update appears anywhere in the public record, so the change framing itself is unsubstantiated.
Every time a traveler boards a US-bound flight from Bangkok, Tokyo, or Melbourne, they trigger a data handoff most never see. Before the plane pushes back, the airline transmits a specific slice of personal information to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. What happens after that handoff is where the record gets interesting — and where a lot of recent claims fall apart.
The data CBP keeps on that traveler doesn’t vanish at arrival. It outlives the trip, the booking, and the return flight, sitting in agency systems until a fixed retention window closes. That window — not the collection itself — is what turns a routine check-in into a privacy question.
The retention window itself isn’t in dispute. What’s circulating online is a claim that it recently changed — and that claim is where the record gets thin.
What CBP collects before you board
Four carrier types — air, sea, rail, and bus — are legally required to transmit advance passenger data to CBP. Two statutes sit behind that mandate: the Aviation and Transportation Security Act and the Enhanced Border Security Act.
Neither is new. Both have been on the books for years, which matters when you’re trying to separate genuine policy shifts from recycled statements.
The data itself is biographical, not behavioral. Airlines, cruise lines, rail operators, and bus companies each submit full name, date of birth, citizenship, and passport details.
For air travel specifically, the PNR locator number — the six-character code on every booking — also enters the system. Airlines don’t flag this at check-in. The data handoff happens in the background, buried in a booking process most travelers treat as a formality.
Why CBP collects it: the agency frames the system as serving both border security and faster handling of legitimate travelers. The security function gets the public attention. What’s less discussed is that the same data feeds the screening travelers never see — the watchlist query that runs before landing and determines whether an arrival is routine or something else.
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Thirteen months, and what the record doesn’t say
CBP holds APIS records for 13 months. That’s the verified figure, and it’s the one solid number in this entire conversation. In practical terms, the window applies to every traveler who boards a U.S.-bound flight, not just those flagged for extra scrutiny.
Here’s where the record gets thinner. The idea that this 13-month window is a change — that a 2025 or 2026 Privacy Impact Assessment update extended it — doesn’t appear anywhere in CBP’s published documentation.
No PIA update for either year turns up in the source material behind this piece. So the retention period stands on its own, and the news hook doesn’t.
Two follow-on questions have no answer in the public record. What was the retention period before, if it ever changed? No source establishes a prior figure or a delta, so “what changed” is genuinely unanswerable.
Whether 13 months meaningfully improves suspect identification versus a shorter or longer hold goes unexplained as well. The security benefit is asserted, not shown.
Where the data goes after CBP runs the check
Advance passenger data doesn’t stay inside CBP. Under a Memorandum of Understanding, APIS records flow from CBP to the National Counterterrorism Center, where they feed counterterrorism work and threat identification. This is the part most generic border-security coverage skips: it names the receiving agency, not just “law enforcement.”
The screening itself sorts travelers into three categories that emerge from APIS queries: people with outstanding wants or warrants, persons of interest, and possible terrorism suspects. The same data also surfaces travelers suspected of civil or criminal law violations or who may simply be inadmissible to the United States.
None of this requires a traveler to do anything wrong. The system is built to flag before arrival, which means the screening happens invisibly, at check-in or before, rather than at a border crossing where a person could contest it face-to-face.
How the screening runs, step by step
The APIS pipeline runs before your flight does. At check-in, the carrier transmits your biographic data to CBP.
That submission happens before departure, not at arrival — the statute requires it in advance, so screening occurs outside the border processing line. CBP runs the data against its law-enforcement and terrorist databases, and the results determine what happens when the traveler reaches a U.S. port of entry.
What a flag changes is the arrival itself: a traveler named on a want or warrant list meets a different process than one who clears screening before boarding. The two travelers may have handed over identical biographical data.
After the retention window closes, CBP’s documentation doesn’t specify what happens next. Does the data get deleted, archived, or folded into a broader pool tied to other systems? The record doesn’t say.
What is clear is that the clock starts at some point during the APIS process, and that travelers are never told when it began.
Key terms
- APIS
- The Advance Passenger Information System is the U.S. Customs and Border Protection system that receives passenger and crew data from commercial carriers before a flight departs for the United States. Airlines, cruise lines, rail operators, and bus companies transmit the data electronically, and CBP screens it against law-enforcement and terrorist databases before the traveler reaches a U.S. border. For anyone trying to work out how long a booking record stays on file, APIS is the system name to search for, because the published 13-month retention figure applies to APIS records specifically.
- PNR
- A Passenger Name Record is the airline’s booking file for a single reservation, holding the traveler’s itinerary along with name, date of birth, citizenship, and passport details. Each PNR carries a six-character locator code — the reference a traveler uses to retrieve or change a booking — and that code travels to CBP with the rest of the record. Because the locator binds one reservation together, it is the element that lets an advance-passenger submission be tied back to a specific trip rather than to a traveler’s wider history.
- Aviation and Transportation Security Act
- The Aviation and Transportation Security Act is one of the two U.S. statutes that require carriers to transmit advance passenger data to Customs and Border Protection. It applies to air, sea, rail, and bus operators, the same four carrier types covered by the mandate’s companion law, the Enhanced Border Security Act. For the retention question this article examines, the act matters because it is long-standing law — which means the data handoff it authorizes is not a recent policy development, however often online claims describe it as one.
- Memorandum of Understanding
- A memorandum of understanding is a formal agreement between two organizations that sets out how they will cooperate, share information, or divide responsibilities. In this case an MOU governs the transfer of APIS records from Customs and Border Protection to the National Counterterrorism Center, where the data supports counterterrorism work and threat identification. That agreement is why a traveler’s booking details can end up outside the agency that collected them — an onward-sharing step that discussions of the retention window routinely leave out.
