The 100ml Liquid Rule Is Quietly Disappearing in 2026

For twenty years, the 100ml rule has been the closest thing air travel has to a universal law. You decant your shampoo. You bag your toiletries. You watch a stranger's good moisturiser get confiscated with the quiet solidarity of someone who's lost one exactly the same way. In 2026, a growing list of European airports quietly stopped enforcing it. Nobody sent a memo.

Which means half the people flying through those airports right now are still travelling with a clear plastic bag they didn't need, and the other half found out the hard way that their departure airport wasn't one of the upgraded ones. Both mistakes are avoidable with about ninety seconds of checking, which is roughly ninety seconds more than most people spend on it before they leave for the airport.

ℹ️ The Short Version

New CT scanners at some European airports — Heathrow since January 2026, Munich from 18 September, and a growing list of others — let you carry liquids in containers up to 2 litres through security, no bag, no removal from your case. Most airports haven't upgraded yet. Pack for the old 100ml rule unless you've specifically checked your departure airport.

The old rule exists because of 2006-era scanner technology, which could only read a flat 2D image of your bag and couldn't reliably tell shampoo from something worse. The fix was blunt: cap every container at 100ml, bag them separately, make the scanner's job easier by limiting what it had to interpret.

CT scanners fix the actual problem instead of working around it. They build a rotating 3D image of your bag's contents, dense enough that security staff can identify a liquid's volume and composition without pulling it out. Where these scanners are installed and switched on, the 100ml cap and the separate bag both become unnecessary — you can carry liquids up to 2 litres per container, laptops and other electronics can stay in your bag too.

The catch is entirely about geography. The scanners are expensive, the EU hasn't made installing them mandatory, and airports are upgrading on their own timelines. Heathrow made the switch at the end of January 2026 after a reported £1 billion investment. Munich Airport scrapped the old rule at every checkpoint from 18 September. London City Airport has also dropped it. Plenty of major European airports — including ones you'd assume are equally modern — haven't got there yet.

This isn't a national policy anywhere yet — it's airport by airport, sometimes checkpoint by checkpoint within the same airport. "Germany dropped the liquid rule" is the kind of headline that gets shared without the detail that it's true at Munich and not, say, at a regional airport two hours away. Search your specific departure airport's security page rather than trusting the destination country as a proxy.

Pack for the stricter airport in your itinerary, always. If you depart from an upgraded airport with a full-size bottle in hand luggage and connect through one that hasn't installed the new scanners, that bottle gets confiscated at the connection regardless of what your first airport allowed. The rule that matters is whichever security checkpoint you haven't cleared yet.

The CT upgrade changes container size limits, not the underlying banned-items list. Anything explicitly prohibited in cabin baggage — certain flammables, specific aerosol categories, anything security flags on inspection regardless of volume — stays prohibited whether the airport has new scanners or not. The 2-litre allowance is a relaxation of the volume rule, not a blanket pass on liquids generally.

CT scanners cost a genuine amount of money to install — Heathrow's own upgrade programme ran into the hundreds of millions of pounds across its terminals — and every lane needs the new machine, not just a couple for show. Airports are staggering the investment across years, prioritising their busiest terminals first, and there's no EU-wide deadline forcing anyone's hand. That's the actual reason this is a patchwork instead of a switch that flipped everywhere on the same date: it's a capital-spending decision made airport by airport, not a single regulation being rolled out on a timetable.

If any single airport on your itinerary — outbound, return, or a connection in between — hasn't confirmed the CT upgrade, pack the whole trip as if none of them have. It costs you nothing to carry a 100ml bottle through an upgraded airport. It costs you a confiscated item and a queue delay to carry a full-size one through a checkpoint that isn't ready for it. Honestly, until this stops being a patchwork, the safe default is the boring one — and the boring one has the added benefit of being nine times out of ten the one that actually gets you through security without a second look.

Vani can pull up your flight details and the airports on your route, and point you to each airport's official pages so you're checking the primary source rather than a forum post from two years ago. It's genuinely useful for the unglamorous part of trip prep — confirming details airport by airport instead of assuming a headline applies everywhere.

What it can't do is track live security-equipment status at every airport in Europe — nobody's built that database, and airports don't always publish upgrade timelines in advance. Treat any liquid-rule answer, from Vani or anyone else, as accurate on the day it was checked, not as a permanent fact. If you're building out a multi-city Europe trip and want the whole route checked properly rather than guessed at, start planning it with Vani and work through the airports one leg at a time.

For what it's worth, this is the same total-trip-cost thinking that applies to flights and hotels: the headline number (or in this case, the headline rule) rarely tells you what actually happens at the specific checkpoint you're walking through. The detail is where the real answer lives, and it's usually one search away.

Somewhere in Europe right now, someone is triumphantly walking a full bottle of conditioner through security while someone else, at a different airport an hour away, is watching theirs get binned. Both of them are following the rules. That's the whole story for now — pack the small bottle until your specific airport tells you otherwise.