Identity verifiedReview · September 2026
Is CLEAR+ worth it? My review after four years as a member
I joined CLEAR in September 2022 to skip a sickening security line at Newark EWR. I was selected at random for a free trial. Four years later my membership is still active, so I finally sat down to work out whether I’d renew the thing again.
reviewNot sponsored
Match: Rocky · Member since 2022Four years later.
Newark · September 7, 2022
I got picked out of a line like a raffle winner
I was heading to security at Newark and the line was HUGE. So huge that CLEAR was live-recruiting random people out of it to join.
I didn’t particularly want to.
But I complied, in the interest of bypassing that sickening security line. They offered me a free trial right there on the spot, and I enrolled.
And then, because I was apparently very excited about it, I posted about it that same afternoon. I still have the exact words:
“Great airport time saver. Verifies identity with biometric screening. Dedicated line for security with essentially no wait.”
Me, that same afternoonAnd it worked. Today, four years later, my membership is still active, and that’s still pretty much why.
The mix-up
CLEAR is not a fancy TSA PreCheck (I thought so too)
This is the thing almost everybody gets wrong. I got it wrong for a while myself.
CLEAR+ does exactly one job: it proves you’re you. You walk into the CLEAR lane, a pod or a gate checks your face (or, back in the day, your eyeballs), and then you walk into the same TSA screening line as everyone else. Shoes off. Laptop out. Liquids in the little bag. The whole routine.
TSA PreCheck does the opposite job. It doesn’t care who you are at the front of the line. It changes what happens once you’re in the screening lane: shoes stay on, laptop stays in the bag, 3-1-1 liquids stay exactly where you packed them.
Have both and they stack beautifully. CLEAR walks you to the front, PreCheck makes the front worth arriving at.
Have only CLEAR? You get to skip the line so you can take your shoes off sooner.
The machines
Three generations of machine, one very patient guy
Here’s the unexpectedly fun part of having been a member this long: I’ve watched the hardware change underneath me. Same membership, same routine, completely different box every couple of years.
A year and change later I was still stopping at the same kind of pod. The stand-very-still-and-look-into-the-little-mirrored-slot kind. Fingerprints or irises, take your pick.
By November 2023, CLEAR’s own FAQ was already talking about something called NextGen Identity+ and the “CLEAR Lane of the Future.” The promise was that members would one day verify with their face instead, and eventually not have to stop at a pod at all.
At the time it read like a slide from somebody’s company meeting.
It doesn’t anymore.
The company also said every CLEAR airport would have them by the end of 2025. By that May, everyone was talking about the new pods.
I tried them for the first time on a recent round-trip flight from Newark to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and let me tell you, they are FAST. I was blown away by how quick and easy the new machine made it.
If that’s how quickly they can verify my identify with this new version of the machine, I’m so excited to experience the eGate for the first time! The eGate requires no stopping whatsoever. If only TSA could safely match that screening time achievement!
The catch
So it’s faster. The airport isn’t.
Genuinely, measurably faster.
And here’s the part that never makes it into the announcement. Thrifty Traveler tested the new pods in New Orleans in January 2025 and found the face scan really was quicker and far less fussy. But the whole trip through security didn’t get five times faster, because the bottleneck simply moved. In their words, the scan became “too fast for the rate at which TSA could screen travelers.”
Which is a very polite way of saying: they sped up the front of the line, so now you get to stand in a slightly different spot.
A faster ID check and a faster airport are two different things.
At the airport
What I actually notice at the airport
This is where four years has changed my mind the most.
I’ve flown next to people who had PreCheck while I only had CLEAR. And honestly? We get to the gate at about the same time. Sometimes I’m through first. Sometimes they are. Most of the time we’re within a few minutes of each other and neither of us has bragging rights.
Too many other things decide it. Which checkpoint happens to be open. How many other CLEAR members turned up in the same ten minutes as me. How the TSA line itself is moving that day.
And PreCheck just goes more places. It’s at over 200 U.S. airports and more than 90 airlines. CLEAR+ has over 150 lanes across 62 airports.
If your home airport doesn’t have a CLEAR lane, your membership does absolutely nothing for you that day. It’s a very expensive card sitting in your wallet.
If I were starting from zero today, knowing everything I know now? I’d get TSA PreCheck first. It’s in more places, it fixes the part of security I actually find annoying (unpacking my entire bag), and it costs a fraction of CLEAR for five times as long.
Overheard on Reddit
What a CLEAR employee said on Reddit
I found this in a Reddit thread on r/tsa, where somebody asked whether CLEAR is worth it if you already have PreCheck. One of the replies came from someone who says they worked at CLEAR for seven months, sharing their inside opinion on what’s worth it and what’s not.
- Two lanes, max.They say CLEAR can only feed two open screening lanes at a time, however many PreCheck and regular lanes are running. So if the regular line has about five people in it, don’t bother with CLEAR.
- PreCheck is already enough.In their words the CLEAR plus PreCheck line “does absolutely nothing” and is sometimes slower than plain PreCheck.
- The quiet lane is the one without PreCheck.Nearly everyone with CLEAR also has PreCheck, so the standard CLEAR lane almost never has a line, even at busy hours. They’ve had members with PreCheck walk down to the standard lane and say it saved them about half an hour.
- Treat it as a backup.Use CLEAR when you get to the airport and it looks like all hell has broken loose, not every single time you fly. Sometimes it saves you loads of time. Sometimes it costs you.
- Free? Keep it. Paying? Probably not.Good to have if a credit card or airline status covers it. Otherwise they wouldn’t pay for it.They quoted $189, which tells you how old the comment is. It’s $219 now.
Another commenter kept it even shorter: if you travel internationally, Global Entry beats CLEAR, and “Precheck is always a must.”
That’s a couple of anonymous people on the internet, so take it as exactly that. But it’s pretty much where I landed too.
The numbers
What the three of them actually cost
Last month I was poking around in my own CLEAR account, looking at what it would cost to add family members. Up to three adults at $125 a year each. Kids under 18 come along free.
And staring at that screen is exactly where the “wait, is this actually worth it?” question got loud enough that I had to go and answer it.
So let’s answer it. I checked every one of these myself in September 2026.
A few footnotes. Cheaper CLEAR+ tiers from $129 to $209 a year exist if you have certain airline status or the right Amex. PreCheck renewal pricing moves around a little depending on which enrollment provider you use. And prices change, so always double-check on the official site before you hand over any money. Every source is linked at the bottom.
Your turn at the pod
Okay, but what would you spend?
Pick how many people you’re dragging through the airport and how far ahead you’re thinking. The bars do the rest. Fair warning: the orange one gets away from you fast.
The damage, side by side
Standard prices, no discounts, everybody signing up together.
Who’s flying?
For how long?
CLEAR+ is $219 a year, plus $125 a year for each extra adult, every year shown. PreCheck is $79.95 once and covers all five years. Global Entry is $120 once, also five years, with PreCheck included.
The free bit
CLEAR will verify you on LinkedIn, for free
Here’s something I absolutely did not see coming when I said yes to a free airport trial: CLEAR now verifies identity for other companies too.
LinkedIn uses CLEAR as one of its identity-verification partners. You tap “Verify Now” on your profile, confirm with either your existing CLEAR identity or a government ID and a selfie, and a little verified badge shows up next to your name.
And the important part: you do not need a paid CLEAR+ membership for this. LinkedIn’s own help page says verification is free and cannot be purchased, and CLEAR will set up a free, separate account for anyone who doesn’t have one.
So go get the badge. Just don’t let anybody use it to talk you into the $219 airport membership.
Four years in
What I still love, and what bugs me
Verified: still love it
Walking past the line never gets old
Four years in and strolling past a very long regular line into a completely empty CLEAR lane still feels great every single time. Signing up was easy. The newer face-first pods really are nicer to stand in front of than the old fingerprint ones. And getting a front-row seat to the machines evolving has been a weirdly fun thing to be part of.
Flagged: bugs me
But it can’t fix the line behind it
A faster ID check does nothing about TSA’s own screening line, and it doesn’t exist everywhere. At $219 a year for something PreCheck matches on door-to-gate time in my own experience, and badly beats on price and coverage, CLEAR has stopped being the thing I automatically recommend.
The verdict
So, is it worth it?
If I were starting from zero today, I’d buy TSA PreCheck first. More airports, five years instead of one, and a fraction of the yearly cost.
If you fly internationally a lot, and if you’re building the kind of work-from-anywhere life where you’re in airports constantly you probably will, skip straight to Global Entry instead. It’s $120 for five years and PreCheck comes bundled in. That’s about half of what one year of CLEAR costs, stretched across five.
CLEAR stays on my card as a nice extra rather than the foundation. Lovely at the airports where it works well, very easy to justify if a credit card is covering the fee, and no longer the first thing I’d tell a new traveler to go buy.
Four years after saying yes to a free trial I never asked for, I’m still a member. I just don’t think of it as the answer anymore.
Over to you
Now I want to hear from you
Do you have CLEAR? Did you get pulled out of a line like I did, or did you sign up on purpose like a normal person?
And if you’ve got CLEAR and PreCheck together, I’d really love to know: is the combo worth it to you, or does your airport make the whole thing pointless?
Tell me in the comments. I have been thinking about this far too much on my own.
Leave a commentSources
Where I got the numbers
Everything above was checked in September 2026.
- Thrifty Traveler: hands-on test of CLEAR’s EnVe Pods and the “Lane of the Future” (January 2025)
- CLEAR: CLEAR+ pricing and airport and lane coverage
- Thrifty Traveler: CLEAR+ price increase to $219 (July 2026)
- Biometric Update: CLEAR eGates reach 50 airports (August 2026 earnings)
- TSA: the official TSA PreCheck program page
- NerdWallet: current TSA PreCheck enrollment and renewal pricing by provider
- Chase: current Global Entry cost and five-year term
- LinkedIn Help: identity verification via CLEAR
- CLEAR: the LinkedIn identity verification partner page
- Reddit (r/tsa): the thread asking whether CLEAR is worth it if you already have PreCheck, with the reply from a self-described CLEAR employee
This is an independent review. It isn’t sponsored by CLEAR and The Rocky Safari isn’t affiliated with them. CLEAR and CLEAR+ are their trademarks, used here only to talk about the service.
