Every time federal funding runs up against a deadline, the same question spreads through travel forums: if the government shuts down, will I still get through airport security?

Travelers now have three recent shutdowns to learn from, including the longest one TSA has ever worked through. The short answer is still yes: checkpoints stay open and screening continues. The longer answer is that a shutdown changes airport security in ways that are uneven, follow a fairly predictable clock, and are easy to plan around once you understand the mechanism. This guide covers what keeps running, what breaks, when it breaks, and how to tell whether your airport is one of the ones getting hit.

Is the Government Shut Down Right Now?

Not as of October 8, 2026. A continuing resolution signed on September 2 funds the federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security and TSA, through December 11, 2026. Congress has not passed a full-year Homeland Security spending bill, so December 11 is the next date to watch.

That deadline falls about a week before the Christmas travel peak. If you are flying over the holidays, the section below on when lines actually get worse matters more than the headline date.

Does TSA Keep Screening During a Shutdown?

Yes. Transportation Security Officers are classified as “excepted” employees, which means their work is considered necessary for the protection of life and property. They are legally required to keep reporting for their shifts during a lapse in appropriations.

The catch is that they work without pay until funding is restored. Under the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, federal employees are guaranteed back pay once a shutdown ends, but that does not help anyone covering rent in week five. In the 2026 lapse, the administration improvised a workaround: an executive order signed March 27 directed DHS to pay TSA officers from other available funds starting March 30, about six weeks in. Do not count on that repeating. It was a one-time fix, not a standing rule.

So airport security does not shut down. On paper, every checkpoint that was open the day before a shutdown is open the day after.

The Real Mechanism: Callouts, Not Closures

Here is what most shutdown coverage gets wrong. Lines do not get longer because TSA closes. They get longer because officers stop showing up.

When people work full time without a paycheck, unscheduled absences climb. Officers pick up second jobs, cannot afford the commute, or cannot cover childcare on an unpaid shift. TSA calls these unscheduled absences “callouts,” and the callout rate is the single best predictor of whether your checkpoint will be slow.

In normal operations the national callout rate runs in the low single digits. During the 35-day shutdown of 2018 to 2019 it peaked around 10 percent. During the 2026 Homeland Security shutdown it passed 12 percent nationally on March 27, and individual airports went far higher: Houston Hobby reached a reported 55 percent, and TSA told Congress that some major airports were running callouts of 40 to 50 percent.

A checkpoint staffed for twelve lanes that can only crew eight does not process passengers at two thirds of the speed. It gets disproportionately worse, because queues degrade sharply once demand approaches capacity. At high enough callout rates, consolidation becomes closure: on March 23, 2026, Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental ran with only two of its eight checkpoints open for most of the day, and waits approached four hours.

This is also why the effect is so uneven. A callout rate is a national average. The delays land on specific checkpoints at specific hours.

The Shutdown Clock: When Lines Actually Get Worse

The most useful lesson from 2026 is that security lines follow paychecks, not the shutdown date.

  • Before the first missed full paycheck: mostly manageable. The Homeland Security lapse began February 14, 2026. The severe staffing failures did not arrive until the second half of March.
  • After the first missed full paycheck: the danger zone. Officers missed their first full paycheck on March 13. Callouts climbed over the following two weeks, colliding with spring break, and on March 25 TSA Deputy Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill told the House Homeland Security Committee the agency was seeing the longest wait times in its 24-year history, with lines at some major airports passing four hours.
  • Within days of pay resuming: fast recovery. Pay restarted March 30. Atlanta’s callout rate fell from around 40 percent to roughly 15 percent within days, and some of the worst-hit airports were soon back under 10-minute waits.
  • Months afterward: a thinner bench. More than 1,110 officers quit during the 2026 lapse, out of a workforce of roughly 50,000, and TSA says new hires need four to six months of training before they can work regular checkpoint duties.

What that means for December 11: if funding lapses then, the 2026 pattern suggests the first few weeks would look mostly normal, and the higher-risk window would open roughly three to four weeks in. That lands closer to the New Year return rush (January 3 and 4, 2027) than to the pre-Christmas outbound peak. Treat that as a reasoned projection, not a forecast. A lapse may not happen at all, and pay timing or another workaround could shift it. Our Christmas and New Year TSA guide has the full peak-day calendar.

What Happened in the Last Three Shutdowns

2026: The Homeland Security Shutdown (February 14 to April 30, 76 days)

  • Only DHS was unfunded, so TSA and Customs and Border Protection worked unpaid while the FAA and air traffic controllers were paid normally. Flights ran; security lines were the problem.
  • Checkpoints closed outright at some airports, not just individual lanes. Houston Hobby closed its PreCheck lane entirely during the worst stretch, with waits approaching three hours.
  • Reinforcements did not fix it. ICE officers were sent to some airports starting March 23, but they are not trained screeners. The lines broke when pay resumed, not before.
  • It ended on April 30, when Congress funded most of DHS, including TSA, and the President signed the bill the same day.

2025: The Full-Government Shutdown (October 1 to November 12, 43 days)

TSA officers worked unpaid, but the disruption travelers felt most came from air traffic control. As controller absences grew, the FAA ordered airlines to cut flights at 40 major airports starting November 7, beginning at 4 percent and stepping up to 6 percent. More than 2,600 flights were cancelled on November 9 alone, and the cuts were lifted on November 17. The lesson: in a full-government shutdown, watch your flight status as well as the security line.

2018 to 2019 (35 days)

Miami International closed a concourse checkpoint early for several days and Houston Hobby temporarily closed one entirely. Delays clustered at the morning departure push rather than midday, and the shutdown ended shortly after controller absences triggered a ground stop at LaGuardia and delays at Newark and Philadelphia.

Is TSA PreCheck Still Open During a Shutdown?

This splits into three separate questions that often get tangled together.

Does my existing PreCheck still work? Yes. Your Known Traveler Number stays valid, Secure Flight keeps running, and the “TSA PRE” indicator keeps printing on your boarding pass. There is one 2026 asterisk: on February 22, DHS announced it would suspend PreCheck and Global Entry. TSA reversed the PreCheck part within a day, saying PreCheck “remains operational with no change for the traveling public,” while reserving the right to adjust case by case if staffing ran short. Global Entry stayed suspended for 17 days, until March 11, while CBP officers were reassigned to process general arrivals.

Will the PreCheck lane be open? Not always, and this is the part travelers get caught by. When a checkpoint is short-staffed, PreCheck lanes are among the first things consolidated. You may arrive with a perfect PreCheck boarding pass and find the dedicated lane roped off, which routes you into standard screening with everyone else. If that happens, our guide to picking the fastest checkpoint at your airport is more useful than usual, because a PreCheck lane may still be running at a different checkpoint.

Can I still enroll or renew? Mostly yes for PreCheck. Enrollment is run by private contractors and funded by application fees rather than annual appropriations, so enrollment centers have generally kept operating. Global Entry is different: it is run by CBP, which cancelled interviews at many centers in 2018 to 2019 and suspended the program itself in 2026. If you are choosing between the two, our PreCheck vs Global Entry comparison covers the tradeoffs, and the step-by-step application guide walks through enrollment. Confirm any appointment directly with the provider before traveling to it.

Why Official Wait Time Numbers Get Less Reliable

During the 2018 to 2019 shutdown, TSA published daily figures stating that the large majority of passengers waited under 30 minutes, and PreCheck passengers under 10. Those numbers were accurate as national averages and close to useless as travel planning.

A national average is dominated by the hundreds of quiet checkpoint-hours where nothing goes wrong. It cannot tell you that Terminal B at your airport ran 70 minutes at 6am on a Tuesday, and it smooths over exactly the localized, few-hour spikes that a staffing shortage produces.

This is the gap crowdsourced reporting fills: a traveler who cleared your checkpoint twenty minutes ago knows something no aggregate can, and the gap widens during a shutdown. Our guide to how TSA wait times are measured explains why official and reported numbers diverge.

How to Plan Around It

  1. Size your buffer to the shutdown’s age. In the first few weeks, adding 30 to 45 minutes to your usual target covers the realistic bad case. After officers miss a full paycheck, and especially at airports reporting high callouts, add an hour or more. Our airport arrival time guide has the baselines.
  2. Check your specific checkpoint the morning of. Not the airport, the checkpoint. That is where the variance lives.
  3. Fly at off-peak hours if you can move. Staffing gaps hurt most during the morning and late-afternoon departure banks. The patterns in our busiest days and times guide hold during a shutdown, just amplified.
  4. Carry on if possible. A missed bag drop cutoff is a harder failure than a slow line.
  5. In a full-government shutdown, watch your flight too. Air traffic control staffing, not security, caused the mass cancellations of November 2025.
  6. Know your options if it goes wrong. If the line does cost you a departure, our guide on what to do after missing a flight because of security covers the first 30 minutes, including killing the no-show before it cancels the rest of your itinerary.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do TSA officers get paid during a government shutdown?

Not normally. They are excepted employees who must work without pay during a lapse in appropriations, and they receive back pay after funding is restored under the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019. In 2026, an executive order restarted TSA pay about six weeks into the Homeland Security shutdown, but that was a one-time workaround rather than a standing rule.

Will airport security lines actually be longer during a shutdown?

Sometimes, and unevenly. Screening continues, but unscheduled absences rise once officers miss a full paycheck, which reduces the number of staffed lanes. Short shutdowns typically produce little visible effect. Long ones produce sharp, localized delays at peak hours and specific checkpoints, and in 2026 some lines passed four hours.

What was the longest shutdown for TSA?

The Homeland Security shutdown of February 14 to April 30, 2026, which lasted 76 days. TSA described the wait times it produced as the longest in the agency’s history. The October to November 2025 shutdown, at 43 days, was the longest full-government shutdown.

Is TSA PreCheck still open during a government shutdown?

Your membership stays valid and the PreCheck indicator keeps printing on boarding passes. Individual PreCheck lanes may close when a checkpoint is short-staffed. DHS briefly announced a PreCheck suspension in February 2026, but TSA reversed it within a day. Global Entry, run by CBP, was suspended for 17 days that year.

Will the government shut down in December 2026?

Current funding runs through December 11, 2026, under a continuing resolution signed September 2. Congress has not yet passed full-year Homeland Security funding, so a lapse is possible but not certain. Check the news in the week before December 11, and check live wait times before you leave for the airport.

Does a shutdown affect REAL ID requirements?

No. REAL ID compliant licenses are issued by state motor vehicle agencies, which are not affected by a federal shutdown. The REAL ID requirements for boarding a domestic flight do not change.

How long does it take for security to return to normal after a shutdown ends?

Lines recover quickly once officers are paid: in 2026, the worst airports improved within days of pay resuming. Staffing takes longer. More than 1,110 officers left during the 2026 lapse, and replacements need four to six months of training, so peak-day capacity stays thinner for months.

Which airports get hit hardest?

The ones already operating near capacity, and the ones where local callouts spike. Large hubs with heavy origin traffic feel a shortage first because more of their passengers pass through security instead of connecting airside, which is why both Houston airports were among the worst in 2026. Our breakdown of which airports have the longest TSA wait times is a reasonable proxy for which ones are most exposed.

Check Before You Leave for the Airport

A shutdown does not make every checkpoint slow. It makes checkpoints unpredictable, and it makes national averages a worse guide than they already were. The only number that helps you is the one from your terminal, this morning.

Look up your airport on Airport TSA Times to see when its checkpoints are busiest, from TSA’s own hourly counts, including IAH, HOU, ATL, MSY, EWR, JFK, and MIA.