Average time for Clearing Customs and Immigration at Heathrow

Immigration process, i.e. passport control was very fast, used a scanning machine, last time I was there, Dec. 2019, a few days before Christmas.. Walk through “ nothing to declare” for customs. 5-10 minutes total.

there have been report of delays recently - worst at Manchester and Dover but pretty much everywhere. You'll be in holiday crowds too with half term and Easter holidays.

Add a bit of extra time to your expectations.

I hope the e-gates don't go down again when you are trying to use them (they have done - a lot - recently.

Border Force are understaffed due to staff sickness and destaffing due to covid.

depends why you're asking and why it's important.

To Ramblin on...the reason I am asking is because we are scheduling a transport pickup to London and I don't want a delay to cause extra costs. I am now scheduling for an hour and a half potential delay/

In March, the plane pulled up to the gate and we were off quickly. After the long walk to immigration we were through in 10 minutes. Had the plane parked on the tarmac and we had to take a bus to the terminal, that would have added time, especially if seated at the back of the plane. On our trip we arrived about 6am and there may have been only one other flight arriving about the same time.

Martcourt, please come back and let us know your actual experience. I suspect you are on Delta flight 30 from Atlanta. We are on the same flight later this month. Thanks.

If one of the car services are picking you up they monitor your flight and adjust their timings apparently. An hour and a half is likely too much.

There have been daily reports of chaos at most of the major UK airports over the last week or so due to a perfect storm of conditions involving Covid sickness, IT glitches, e-gate breakdowns and a failure by airlines and airports to increase staff numbers to anywhere near pre-pandemic levels.

Saturday 16th April will be busy although not as busy as Friday 15th (Good Friday) or Sunday 17th (Easter Sunday). I'll be leaving for Mallorca from Heathrow on the 16th and have been advised to arrive three hours in advance when usually the advice is two hours for a short haul flight. Arrivals on the 16th will likely be less than the Monday which will see a lot of visitors returning from a long Easter weekend break.

Will you be arriving with carry-on or checked luggage? This will make a difference as there have been long delays with baggage retrieval.

Will 1 1/2 hours be sufficient? I expect so. What usually takes me 20 to 30 minutes will likely take longer this time but I wouldn't anticipate going beyond 1 1/2 hours.

I just took out my trip notebook from my last visit to London in Sept 2019 and I had noted it took 20 minutes to get through at 7 am on a Friday.

My experience last Wednesday.. .plane arrived 30 minutes early. It took 30 minutes to find someone to operate the jet bridge. Had to wait 15 minutes for the train to take us to the main terminal (T5). It was packed.

Immigration was a zoo. The egates were working but rejecting a bunch of passports. One person working the side desk. It took me an additional 20 minutes to get checked.

We landed at 9:45 PM and I walked out of customs at 11:00.

Thats the longest its taken in years.

Thanks for all your advice...I'll let you know how it goes after we get through the process!

FWIW, here is my experience this past Tuesday AM at LHR. I will spare the problems and associated pieces of luck as they are not germane to the basic question. We gated from Philly at 8:17 AM, on a BA 772, row 28. For some reason, this gated at the NW corner of T5A, not 5C. We were connecting domestically, and we were through security by 8:50AM, the time lost was all at security, I have two metal hips, a neck plate, and a shoulder screw, so I am always held up, plus for some reason their X-rays did not like two of our bins and that was further delay. Had our flight been timely so that our planned connection had not been scrapped (don’t ask), we would have been on a listed 60 minute connection, and we would have made it - we were through “conformance” in about 15 minutes. Oddly, we do NOT recall anything about clearing customs, all we remember is walking from the passport machines across the painted line that says “Entering UK”, looking at the camera for the conformance photo and boarding pass scan, and then moving to security. We both swear we never saw any customs lane!

We both swear we never saw any customs lane!

You'll only pass through customs before going 'landside', if you're connecting you won't pass through them, only when you leave your arrival airport.

If you're connecting domestically then customs will occur at the second airport. That’s where you would retrieve any luggage and declare any goods. Or get stopped for a random search. 😁

Hey, JC! We walked straight out on arrival in Glasgow, never saw anything! At home in Philly, you are forced past the customs inspector after passport check no matter what, and always landside at that point. Perhaps this would have been different if we had bags checked through but we are always full carry-on…