TALLINN, ESTONIA / EuroWire / — The Schengen Information System (SIS) processed 17,763,405,971 searches in 2025, an 18% increase from 2024, according to annual statistics published by eu-LISA. The total equaled almost 49 million searches per day and more than 2 million per hour across countries and EU agencies connected to the system. The figure places SIS among Europe’s most heavily used digital platforms for border checks, law enforcement cooperation and security-related information sharing.
The SIS is used by authorities to consult and enter alerts on wanted or missing persons, return decisions, refused entry or stay, and objects such as vehicles, documents and licence plates. eu-LISA said 94,605,202 alerts were stored in SIS as of Dec. 31, 2025, up 2% from the end of 2024. The total included 92,615,164 alerts on objects and 1,990,038 alerts on persons, including unknown persons.
Overall access to SIS reached 17,786,377,248 instances in 2025. That total included the 17.76 billion searches and 22,971,277 operations to create, update, delete or otherwise manage alerts. Alphanumeric searches accounted for 99.93% of all searches, totaling 17,750,291,535, while biometric searches represented 0.07% of the total. Countries using SIS include EU member states and the Schengen associated countries Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
Search volumes expand
Automatically processed searches continued to rise in 2025, reaching more than 12 billion, compared with 9.9 billion in 2024 and 4 billion in 2021. These searches include automatic number plate recognition checks and other automated bulk queries, such as processing passenger name records. The Netherlands accounted for 29% of total SIS searches, followed by Belgium with 22%. Together, Dutch and Belgian authorities performed more than half of all searches recorded in the system during the year.
Biometric searches totaled 13,114,436 in 2025, an 88% increase from 2024. That equaled almost 36,000 biometric searches per day and about 1,500 per hour on average. The searches were carried out through SIS-AFIS, the automated fingerprint identification system operating at central level. All member states, Europol and Frontex performed fingerprint or latent searches in 2025, while five biometric search modalities were available through SIS-AFIS during the reporting year.
Alerts and hits reported
Alerts on persons rose 19% from 2024 and reached almost 2 million by the end of 2025. The largest category was alerts on third-country nationals subject to return decisions, which accounted for 41% of person alerts. Alerts on third-country nationals to be refused entry or stay accounted for 34%, followed by discreet, specific or inquiry checks and national security alerts at 11%. Missing and vulnerable persons represented 7%, and judicial procedure alerts represented 6%.
The top three contributors to stored SIS alerts were France, Italy and Germany, which together accounted for 55% of all alerts in the system at year-end. France held 19% of stored alerts, Italy held almost 19%, and Germany held 17%. Member states reported 364,984 hits on foreign alerts through SIRENE Bureaux in 2025, an 8% decline from 2024. That amounted to about 1,000 reported hits per day across the Schengen Information System.