CLEAR+ Review – 13 Times the Price of PreCheck, and It Does Not Replace It

What It Actually Does, and What It Does Not

Most confusion about CLEAR comes from people assuming it is a faster version of TSA PreCheck. It is not the same thing at all, and the difference decides whether it is worth buying.

CLEAR+ gets you to the front of one queue. It does not let you keep your shoes on, leave a laptop in the bag, or skip the liquids rule — those are PreCheck benefits, and you have to buy PreCheck separately to get them.

They are complementary, not alternatives, and CLEAR’s own positioning acknowledges this: to enjoy PreCheck benefits you must pair CLEAR with PreCheck or Global Entry. Anyone buying CLEAR expecting to skip the shoes-off routine has bought the wrong thing.

The Price Comparison Is Not Close

Global Entry is the striking one. At about $24 a year it includes PreCheck outright and adds expedited customs on international arrival — two benefits for a ninth of the price of one. There is no reading of these numbers on which CLEAR is the first purchase.

The Order You Should Buy These In

If you take one thing from this page, take this sequence:

1. Global Entry, ~$24/year. Includes PreCheck. If you ever fly internationally, start here and stop thinking about it.
2. TSA PreCheck, ~$15.60/year, if you genuinely never fly internationally and will not qualify for Global Entry.
3. CLEAR+, $209/year — only after living with the above. Fly for a few months with PreCheck, then ask whether the remaining ID queue is still costing you enough time to justify this.

The reason for the ordering is that PreCheck already removes most of the delay for most travellers at most airports. Buying CLEAR first means paying the most for the smaller remaining problem — and you will not know how big that problem is until the larger one is solved.

The Security Record

You are buying an identity verification service, so how well it verifies identity is the product rather than a side issue.

A separate 2022 incident is the one that stays with you: a subscriber almost boarded a flight under a false identity, and was caught only because a later inspection found live ammunition among their possessions.

Read that mechanism carefully. The identity failure was not caught by the identity system. It was caught downstream, by an unrelated check, for an unrelated reason — which means we know about it by luck rather than by detection.

The TSA investigation found the company’s systems vulnerable to abuse, including computer-generated images that at times were blurry and did not show a member’s full face.

CLEAR’s response, reported fairly: it acknowledged the breaches, said two employees had violated strict protocols, terminated them and retrained staff. That is a reasonable response to a staff failure. It is a less complete answer to blurry enrolment images, which is a systems issue rather than a personnel one.

The TSA Moved to Make Members Show ID Anyway

This is the consequence that matters commercially, and it is the thing a prospective subscriber most needs to check.

The entire proposition is skipping the identity check. If members must produce ID regardless, the benefit you are paying $209 a year for is materially reduced — you may still get a shorter physical queue, but the thing that made the queue shorter has been partly reinstated.

Check the current position before you subscribe. This is a live regulatory matter and we cannot tell you where it has landed — but do not assume the marketing still describes the service you will receive. Ask precisely what happens at the lane today, at your airport.

Who Holds Your Irises, and What Happens If They Fail

A precision first, because most people assume wrongly: CLEAR verifies members on travel day using fingerprints and irises, not facial biometrics.

Irises and fingerprints are permanent. A compromised password is changed in a minute; a compromised credit card is reissued in days. You cannot reissue an iris. Whatever risk attaches to that data is a risk you carry for life, which is a different category of decision from most subscriptions.

That last clause is not hypothetical in this specific industry. CLEAR’s predecessor company, Verified Identity Pass, went bankrupt, and what happened to the biometric data of registered travellers in that bankruptcy was a documented privacy concern — the Electronic Privacy Information Center maintains an archive on precisely that question.

So the question is not only “do I trust this company?” but “what happens to my irises if this company ceases to exist?” — and there is a real precedent in this exact business for that being an unsatisfying question. It is not a reason to refuse outright. It is a reason to make the decision deliberately rather than at a kiosk in an airport in exchange for a queue jump.

If Standing in Line Is the Actual Problem

A word on why this is on a site mostly about weight and health, because there is one honest connection.

For a lot of people, the airport queue is not an inconvenience but a physical difficulty. Standing still for forty minutes is genuinely hard with joint pain, back problems, limited mobility, a recent operation, a chronic condition, or while carrying more weight than you would like to. That is a real reason to want to skip a queue, and quite different from wanting to save ten minutes.

Airlines also provide assistance on request, including help through the airport, at no charge. Neither of these is well advertised, which is how people end up buying a subscription to solve an accessibility problem the system already has a free answer for.

And PreCheck at $15.60 a year shortens the queue too, for a fraction of the cost. Exhaust the cheap and free options before the expensive one — which is broadly our advice on this whole page, for everyone.

You May Already Have It Free

Before paying anything, check your credit cards and airline status. A number of premium travel cards and frequent flyer programmes include CLEAR+ membership or a substantial credit toward it as a benefit.

This materially changes the analysis. Everything above concerns whether CLEAR+ is worth $209 of your money. If it is worth $0 because a card you already hold covers it, the value question largely disappears and only the biometric question remains — and that one you should still think about, because it does not get cheaper when the subscription does.

Many people pay for this without checking. Look at the benefits you already own first; the same applies to Global Entry, whose application fee is a standard credit on numerous travel cards.

The 14-Day Refund Is Genuinely Clear

Credit where it is due, and we have read enough bad ones to recognise a good one.

• Cancel within 14 days of being charged: full refund for that term. Lane access ends immediately on cancellation.
• Cancel after 14 days: no refund, and the account is set not to renew at the end of the current term.

That is unambiguous, and unambiguous is worth something. Across this series we have found guarantees that contradicted their own policy documents, windows that excluded the most common complaint, and terms that quietly voided if you bought through the wrong channel. This says what it does.

The practical implication: fourteen days is a real trial if you use it. Sign up before a trip rather than after one, fly, and decide inside the window.

How It Compares

On every row except the first benefit, the cheaper government programme wins. CLEAR does one thing the others do not — and charges nine times as much for it.

Pros and Cons

Who It Is Actually For

Get it free if you can. If a card you already hold covers it, take it — the value objection disappears and only the biometric question remains.

Pay for it if you fly very frequently through a small number of busy hubs where you know from experience that the ID queue is the bottleneck even with PreCheck. That is a real customer and this is a real product for them — someone flying weekly out of a congested airport can plausibly recover $209 in time and stress.

Do not buy it if you fly a few times a year. Global Entry at ~$24 does more for you, and the residual queue is not a $209 problem at that frequency.

Do not buy it instead of PreCheck. This is the single most common and expensive mistake available here.

Think properly about the biometrics if that matters to you — you can change a password, and you cannot change an iris.

Limitations of This Review

We have not used CLEAR+, and we cannot tell you how much time it saves at your airport — which is the whole value question and is entirely local. The queue it skips is enormous at some hubs and trivial at others, and varies by day and hour, so a general verdict cannot settle an individual case.

The regulatory position is live and may have moved. The requirement for members to present ID followed a notice and comment period and we cannot tell you the current state of it — verify before subscribing, because it bears directly on what you are buying. Prices for all three programmes change, and the figures here are as reported.

The security incidents are from 2022 and 2023 and the company says it has terminated the employees involved and retrained staff; we have not assessed whether the underlying systems issues the TSA identified were subsequently resolved, and it would be unfair to treat a three-year-old incident as describing current practice. Our account of the predecessor company’s bankruptcy and the associated data question comes from an advocacy organisation’s archive rather than primary court records. On the accessibility point, we have not tested any assistance programme and cannot say what it will provide in your circumstances — contact the operator directly. Nothing here is medical, legal or security advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Verdict

The pricing decides most of this. CLEAR+ is $209 a year, raised from $189. TSA PreCheck is about $15.60 a year. Global Entry is about $24 a year and includes PreCheck plus expedited customs. So CLEAR costs roughly thirteen times PreCheck and nine times Global Entry — and it does not replace either. It skips the ID queue; it does not get your shoes on, your laptop in the bag, or your liquids past the rule.

Buy in this order: Global Entry, then PreCheck if Global Entry is not for you, then CLEAR only if a residual queue is still costing you real time. Buying CLEAR first means paying the most for the smallest part of the problem, before you know how big that part is.

The security record matters more here than it would elsewhere, because identity verification is the product. Three high-profile incidents across 2022 and 2023, one involving a boarding pass retrieved from the trash, several involving employees walking unenrolled people through without ID checks. And a 2022 case where a subscriber nearly boarded under a false identity and was caught only because a later inspection found live ammunition — meaning the identity system did not catch the identity failure. The TSA found the systems vulnerable to abuse, with blurry enrolment images. CLEAR terminated two employees and retrained staff, which answers the personnel failure better than the systems one.

Then the consequence that undercuts the whole thing: the TSA moved to require CLEAR members to present ID. If you show ID anyway, you are paying $209 for the shorter physical queue alone. Check where that has landed before subscribing.

And think about the biometrics deliberately rather than at a kiosk. A private company holds your irises and fingerprints permanently — you can reissue a card and change a password, but not an iris. CLEAR’s predecessor, Verified Identity Pass, went bankrupt, and the fate of registered travellers’ biometric data in that bankruptcy was a documented privacy concern. That precedent is from this exact business.

It is a real product for a real customer — someone flying weekly through a congested hub where the ID line is genuinely the bottleneck even with PreCheck. And if a card you already hold covers it, take it. For everyone else: spend $24 on Global Entry and keep the other $185. If the queue is a physical difficulty rather than an inconvenience, check the free assistance routes the TSA and airlines already offer first.