Nepal e-Visa 2026 - How It Works, What It Costs, and Who Cannot Use It

Nepal switches on its full electronic visa system on 17 August 2026. I have had four clients ask me about it in the last week, and every one of them asked the same nervous question underneath the polite one: does this mean the old way has stopped working, and have I left something too late?

No. Visa on arrival is not going anywhere. The Department of Immigration has said so plainly. What is happening is that you now have a second door into the country, and for most of my trekkers it is the better one.

Here is what I know, what I do not know yet, and what I would actually do if I were flying to Kathmandu this autumn.

What actually changes on 17 August

Tikaram Dhakal, the spokesperson for the Department of Immigration, has confirmed the system goes fully live that day after a testing period. The portal is nepaliport-new.immigration.gov.np.

The short version is that you can now apply for your tourist visa before you leave home, pay for it with a card, and receive it by email. You print it, you carry it, and when you land you join a much shorter queue to get it stamped.

That is the whole change. It is not a new visa, it is a new way of getting the same visa.

The thing most people get wrong straight away

Visa on arrival still exists. It has not been withdrawn, there is no announced date for withdrawing it, and the Department has confirmed both systems run side by side.

I am labouring this because I have already seen the panic. Somebody reads a headline about a new e-visa, assumes the old route is closed, and starts worrying about a flight they booked six months ago. Nothing about your existing plan has broken.

So which one should you actually use?

This is the only part of the article that matters, so let me be direct rather than diplomatic.

Use the e-visa if you want to pay by card. This is the real reason to bother. The visa fee at Kathmandu airport has to be paid in US dollars cash, in clean undamaged notes, and getting hold of crisp dollars in Copenhagen or Melbourne or Toronto is more annoying than it sounds. The e-visa lets you pay online with an ordinary card and skip that problem entirely.

Use the e-visa if you land at a busy hour. The arrivals hall at Tribhuvan is not difficult, but it is warm, it is crowded, and if three wide-body aircraft land together the visa queue is genuinely long. Arriving with the thing already approved takes you out of the worst of it.

Use visa on arrival if you are still deciding your dates. Nothing needs to be done in advance, and nothing is wasted if your plans move.

And use visa on arrival if the online system misbehaves. It is four days old as I write this. I would not stake a flight on a brand new government payment page in its first fortnight, and neither should you. More on that below, because it is the single most useful piece of advice in this article.

How the e-visa application works

The process, as the Department has described it, runs like this.

You go to the portal and fill in your personal details, your passport information, and the address you are staying at in Nepal. If you are trekking with a company, that is usually your first hotel in Kathmandu, and any operator worth using will give you that address without being asked twice.

You upload a scan of your passport and a recent photograph on a white background. The passport must have at least six months of validity left from the date you enter Nepal. That six months is a hard requirement and it is the one thing on this list that cannot be sorted out at the airport, so check it now rather than in October.

You pay by credit or debit card.

The approved visa comes back by email, and the stated turnaround is within 24 hours.

You print it. You will be asked for it at check-in by your airline as well as at immigration in Kathmandu, so a printed copy in your hand luggage is worth more than a photograph on a phone with a flat battery.

What it costs

The fees have not changed, which is worth saying clearly because a new system often arrives with a new price and this one has not.

Fifteen days is US$30. Thirty days is US$50. Ninety days is US$125. These are multiple-entry tourist visas, so if you cross into India or Tibet in the middle of your trip and come back, you are not paying twice.

For almost every trekker reading this, thirty days at US$50 is the correct answer. Fifteen days sounds like enough and then is not. An Everest Base Camp trek is twelve days of walking before you add the day you land, the day you fly out, and the buffer you keep in hand for a Lukla flight that does not go. I have watched a fifteen day visa expire under a client who did everything right and simply got weathered in. Pay the extra twenty dollars.

The detail nobody mentions, and it is a good one

The approval is valid for six months from the date it is issued.

That means you are not tied to applying in the fortnight before you fly. If you have booked an October trek you can deal with this in May and forget about it. For anyone who likes their admin done early, this is the most useful thing in the whole announcement, and I have not seen a single article lead with it.

Who cannot use the e-visa yet

Chinese nationals are excluded from the e-visa at launch. This is deliberate and temporary, and the reason given is to keep the system from being overwhelmed in its first weeks. Chinese passport holders continue to use visa on arrival exactly as before, and Chinese citizens still receive up to 150 days free.

I mention this because I have Chinese clients arriving in September and it would have been easy for them to spend an evening on a portal that was never going to accept them.

Who cannot get a visa on arrival at all

This part is not new, but it is missing from most guides including, until today, my own.

Citizens of twelve countries cannot obtain a Nepali visa on arrival and must apply through a Nepali embassy or consulate before travelling. Those countries are Afghanistan, Cameroon, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Ghana, Iraq, Liberia, Nigeria, Palestine, Somalia, Syria and Zimbabwe.

If you hold one of those passports, the timeline is completely different from everything else in this article and you should start months rather than weeks ahead. Ask your operator to write you a letter of invitation with your itinerary and booking reference on it. We do this for clients as a matter of course and it costs nothing.

Who does not pay

Children under ten receive a free visa, with the exception of United States citizens, who pay.

Citizens of SAARC countries receive a free thirty day visa once a year. For Indian citizens the question does not arise at all, because Indians do not need a visa for Nepal.

Chinese nationals receive up to 150 days free.

Holders of a Non Resident Nepali card do not pay.

What I do not know yet, and I would rather say so

I am writing this before the system is fully live, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I have not put a real client through it. I do not know how the payment page behaves with a European or Australian card, I do not know whether the 24 hour turnaround holds in the first busy week, and I do not know what happens if your photograph is rejected at eleven at night two days before you fly.

I will find all of that out, because I have clients arriving through September, October and November and I will be walking several of them through it personally. When I have, I will come back and rewrite this section with what actually happened rather than what was announced. If you want the answer before then, message me and I will tell you where we have got to.

What I would genuinely do

If you are flying in the next few weeks, use visa on arrival. It works, you know it works, and there is no advantage in being the first person to test a new system with a non-refundable flight behind you.

If you are flying from October onward, apply for the e-visa a few weeks ahead. By then the system will have been through its first surge and the obvious problems will have been found by somebody else.

And whichever route you take, carry US$100 in cash anyway.

I want to be clear that this is not me being pessimistic about Nepali government IT. It is the same advice I would give about any brand new payment system anywhere in the world. Pages go down for an afternoon. Cards get declined for no reason a thousand miles from home. At the immigration counter in Kathmandu, cash is the one thing that has never once failed for any client of mine. If you never need it, you have brought some spending money for Thamel.

A few practical things about the arrivals hall

Bring a passport photograph with you. There is a booth at the airport and the queue for it is exactly as long as you would expect.

If you are paying cash, bring the exact amount. Change is available and it slows everything down.

Your luggage will take twenty to forty minutes to appear on the belt, so there is no need to sprint. Use the time to buy a local SIM at the Ncell or NTC counter in the arrivals hall.

Whoever is meeting you will be outside the terminal, not inside it. If you have booked with us we will be there with your name on a board, and if your flight is delayed we will still be there, because we watch the flight rather than the clock.

Your visa is not your trekking permit

This is the confusion I correct most often, and it catches experienced travellers as well as first timers.

The visa lets you into Nepal. It does not let you walk anywhere in particular. Every trekking region has its own permits on top, and they are bought separately once you are here.

For Everest you need a Sagarmatha National Park entry permit and a Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality permit. For Annapurna you need an ACAP permit and a TIMS card. Restricted areas work differently again and are charged by the day or the week rather than as a flat entry fee, so Upper Mustang is US$50 per person per day and Manaslu runs at US$100 per person per week in the September to November season.

Two things follow from that. The first is that a restricted area permit cannot be issued to an individual at all. It has to be applied for by a registered trekking agency, and you have to walk with a licensed guide. That is the law rather than a sales pitch, and any company telling you otherwise is telling you something that will not survive a checkpoint.

The second is that since 2023 a licensed guide has been required in national parks and conservation areas generally, not only in restricted zones. The rules changed again in March 2026 to allow solo trekkers into restricted areas provided they travel with a licensed guide, which is genuinely new and which a lot of published advice has not caught up with.

When you book a trek with us, all of that is included and handled before you arrive. You do not queue for it and you do not carry the paperwork. But you should know it exists, because the price of a trek that quietly excludes permits is not the price you will end up paying.

If you need longer than you planned

Visas can be extended inside Nepal through the Department of Immigration, and there is a service for it on the same portal. In practice that means a trip to the immigration office in Kathmandu or Pokhara and a queue.

My honest advice is not to plan around it. Buy the thirty day visa rather than the fifteen, or the ninety day if you are combining a trek with anything else, and treat extension as the thing you do when a mountain changes your plans rather than the thing you were relying on from the start. The twenty dollar difference between a fifteen day and a thirty day visa is the cheapest insurance you will buy on the whole trip.

If you are trekking with us

Send me your passport details and I will tell you which route suits you, what your Nepal address should be on the form, and whether your dates need a thirty day or a ninety day visa. It takes me two minutes and it is included in every trek we run, from a six day Poon Hill walk to the full Everest Three Passes.

We have been arranging permits and paperwork for trekkers since 2016, and the visa is the easiest part of it. Message me on WhatsApp and I will sort it out with you.

Written by Shreejan Simkhada, CEO of The Everest Holiday and third-generation Himalayan guide. TAAN Member #1586. Last updated 13 August 2026, before the system went fully live. This article will be updated once we have taken clients through it.