Your I-94 travel history: every US arrival and departure, free

Most sources for rebuilding a flight history are approximations. Email is incomplete, photos give you a place but not a flight, and memory is worse than anyone believes.

The I-94 travel history is different. It is an official, dated, government record of every time you arrived in or departed from the United States — and if you are eligible for it, you can read it in about a minute for nothing.

First, whether this applies to you

It applies if you have entered the US on a foreign passport — as a visitor, a student, on a work visa, or under the Visa Waiver Program. Form I-94 is the arrival/departure record US Customs and Border Protection creates for non-immigrant travellers.

It does not apply to US citizens. The I-94 system exists to record non-immigrant entries, so if you hold a US passport there is nothing here to look up. That is genuinely a shame, because nothing else in this series comes close to it for reliability.

Green card holders sit awkwardly in between; results vary, and it is worth trying rather than assuming.

How to get it

1. Go to the official CBP I-94 site at i94.cbp.dhs.gov. It is free. Nothing about this process ever costs money, and any site charging for it is not CBP.
2. Choose "View Travel History".
3. Enter your name, date of birth, and passport number and country exactly as they appear on the passport you travelled with.
4. You get a table of arrivals and departures, each with a date and a port of entry.

Expect roughly the last five years. Some travellers see closer to ten. If you need more than the tool shows, CBP accepts records requests for a fuller history, which is slower but does work.

What you get, and what you have to infer

Each row gives you a date, a direction (arrival or departure), and a port — usually the airport code, sometimes a land border crossing.

So a row reading 2019-04-12 · Arrival · JFK tells you that you landed at JFK on 12 April 2019. What it does not tell you is where you flew in from. The I-94 record is about the border, not the flight.

In practice this is easy to close:

• If you know you were living in London that year, an April arrival at JFK is almost certainly LHR–JFK.
• The matching departure row a fortnight later gives you the return leg and its date.
• For anything genuinely ambiguous, the date is usually enough to find the confirmation email — and now you know exactly which day to search, which turns an inbox search from a trawl into a lookup.

That last point is why this is worth doing early rather than late. The I-94 list is a spine. Everything else hangs off it.

Land crossings are in there too

If you have driven or taken a train across the Canadian or Mexican border, those rows appear as well. They are not flights and should not go in a flight log — but they are useful for working out where you were, and they explain gaps that would otherwise look like a missing flight.

What to record

The usual three fields:

• Where from
• Where to
• When

The port gives you one airport and the date. The other airport comes from context. Orbit works out the distance, the flying time, the countries and the continents from those three, so an I-94 row plus one moment's thought is a complete logbook entry.

If you are a US citizen

You cannot use this, but you are not out of options. Your passport still gets stamped by other countries, your loyalty statements still exist, and — for domestic flights, which the I-94 would never have covered anyway — email remains the best record you have.

Start with your inbox instead, and treat the long-haul trips as the ones worth chasing hardest: they carry most of the distance and most of the milestones.

One caution

Your I-94 record is sensitive. It is your immigration history, tied to your passport number. Look it up on the official CBP site, over your own connection, and do not paste the results into anything you would not paste a passport scan into.

Orbit stores your logbook on your device and needs no account to start. Download now.