REAL ID took 20 years to enforce. The bill lands on travelers, not states.

Congress passed the REAL ID Act in 2005, on a recommendation from the 9/11 Commission.▸ Full enforcement did not begin until May 7, 2025 — two decades and multiple delayed deadlines later. When it finally arrived, more than 94% of passengers were already compliant, carrying a REAL ID-compliant license or an acceptable substitute like a passport. The system built to handle the rest is now up and running, funded entirely by the travelers who use it — and the reason some of them are still showing up without a compliant ID traces back to a second system, run by each state, that the federal enforcement date did not wait for.

Since February 1, 2026, any traveler who reaches a TSA checkpoint without a REAL ID or another acceptable form of identification can pay $45 to use TSA ConfirmID — a knowledge-based identity check that takes 10 to 15 minutes and is valid for a 10-day travel window.▸ The fee is not an arbitrary round number. Under OMB Circular A-25 and the DHS Appropriations Act of 2006, TSA is required to recover the program's full cost from the people who use it, not from general taxpayers. TSA's own Confirm.ID Fee Development Report puts that cost at approximately $476 million over five years and divides it by 10,577,089 expected chargeable uses over the same period — $45.00 per use, rounded down from the precise figure.

The single largest line item, at $270 million, is not software — it's Computed Tomography screening equipment, deployed over three years to "states with lower levels of REAL ID compliance."▸ In other words: the federal government is spending the most money at the checkpoints in the states whose residents are least likely to show up with a compliant ID.

TSA's population estimate for the fee model comes from its own checkpoint data: from May through November 2025, an average of 6.4% of daily air travelers — 154,946 people — arrived without an acceptable form of identification, per the same Fee Development Report.▸ TSA expects that number to fall sharply as more travelers obtain compliant IDs — down to a projected baseline of 1,530 people a day by year four — but it is still forecasting more than ten million paid ConfirmID uses in the meantime. By February 2026, TSA reported that 95–99% of travelers were presenting acceptable ID, an improvement TSA credits to the fee itself pushing holdouts toward their state DMV.

TSA's fee model treats non-compliance as an individual choice — an "economic decision" travelers make between the cost of a ConfirmID fee and the trouble of visiting a DMV.▸ For a meaningful share of the noncompliant, that framing skips a step: the DMV itself has to have the capacity to issue the ID.

North Carolina's Office of the State Auditor examined exactly this question in a performance audit of the state's Division of Motor Vehicles, released August 4, 2025 — three months after REAL ID enforcement began, with roughly half the state's residents still lacking a compliant ID.▸ The audit found that of 710 budgeted driver license examiner positions statewide, 160 were vacant as of April 2025 — a 22.5% vacancy rate — leaving daily examiner availability at just 62–75% of budgeted strength.

The gap didn't open overnight.▸ Over the preceding 15 years, North Carolina's population grew by 2.5 million people — 29% — while the state added only 52 permanent examiner positions, a 10% increase, per the same audit. The result shows up directly in service times: the statewide average DMV visit now exceeds one hour and 15 minutes, up 17.9% since 2019. At the Lillington office in Harnett County — the state's most severe case — a single examiner covers a service area of more than 56,000 residents with a 50% vacancy rate at that location alone.

North Carolina is one state's audit, not a national census of DMV capacity — but it is a documented, measured example of the mechanism TSA's fee model treats as a traveler's choice: a REAL ID is only as available as the office that issues it.

Figures describe two different, independently reported systems: TSA's national 5-year Confirm.ID fee model (federal, forecast) and North Carolina's statewide DMV staffing audit (state-level, a snapshot as of April 2025). They are not additive and other states' DMV capacity may differ.