The United States will no longer require international travelers to provide contact tracing information prior to flying to the United States, and that’s a change that seems pretty logical to me.
USA ends foreign quarantine and COVID-19 policies
On December 4, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced that interim final rule (IFR) 0920-AA75, which amended its Foreign Quarantine regulations during the COVID-19 public health emergency, has expired.
Specifically, with this rule, all inbound international air travelers to the United States had to provide contact tracing information within 72 hours of their flight’s departure. So this could be done through the booking management function, during online check-in, or at the airport.
Airlines had to keep this information on file for 30 days, and transmit it to the CDC upon request. As it was described at the time, “the purpose of collecting this information is to identify and locate passengers who may have been exposed to a person with a communicable disease for public health follow-up.”
However, with this latest update, that’s no longer required. I suspect airlines will soon update their systems to remove this requirement.
This policy change seems logical and overdue
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not exactly a fan of the current Department of Heath and Human Services. That being said, I am happy to see this rule updated. Of course it was minor in the scheme of things, but it just seemed like a complete waste of time to collect this information, when you consider how many tens of millions of people had to provide this information with no real purpose.
Last year, I posed the question of why collecting this information was still necessary. Even at the height of the pandemic, the United States was bad at doing any sort of contact tracing (unlike in some other countries). But years later, after funding for things like vaccines largely dried up, I found it even sillier to request this information.
Sure, maybe it only takes one or two minutes per person to provide this information. But when you consider the number of people who had to provide this information, that sure adds up to a lot of wasted time. It just seemed like there was no actual practical use for this.
Bottom line
The United States has finally ended its contact tracing requirement for international air travel, after the CDC expired an interim final rule that added such a requirement.
While I of course see merit to contact tracing, it’s not something the United States did well. And even as the pandemic stopped being on peoples’ minds, the government still required this information, which seemed unnecessary. So this is a minor change in the scheme of things, but it does make it a bit faster to check in for US-bound flights.
What do you make of the end of this contact tracing requirement?
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