How to get a labour permit for working abroad

The labour permit is issued under Nepal's foreign employment law by the Department of Foreign Employment. It records that a named Nepali citizen has been approved to take a specific job, with a specific employer, in a specific country, on terms the department has seen.

It is not a visa. The destination country issues the visa; Nepal issues the permit. You need both, and having one does not produce the other. Workers regularly assume that because a visa has been stamped, everything on the Nepali side is complete. It is not.

It is not the agency's document. Some workers never see their own permit because the agency handles everything and hands over a passport at the airport. That is a bad arrangement. The permit is yours, it records your terms of employment, and you should have a copy of it and of everything attached to it before you fly.

It is also not a formality that can be arranged retrospectively. Immigration checks at Nepali airports look for it. Departing for employment without a permit is what makes a worker undocumented from the Nepali side, whatever the destination country's paperwork says.

What the permit does is put you inside a system of protections. The compulsory insurance, the welfare fund, the department's complaint mechanism and the tribunal all follow from being a permitted worker. Without a permit, a worker who is unpaid, injured or abandoned abroad is asking Nepali institutions to help with a departure those institutions have no record of.

One more distinction worth making: the permit governs employment. Going abroad to study, to visit family or as a tourist requires no labour permit — and equally, those routes give you no right to work. The category you travel in is the category you are in.

Most Nepali workers go through a licensed recruitment agency. The agency holds a foreign employment licence, receives an approved demand from a foreign employer, recruits against it, and processes the permit applications for the selected workers through FEIMS. The department's approval of the demand is the step that makes the job legitimate in the Nepali system.

The individual route exists for workers who found the job themselves — through a relative already abroad, through direct application, or through a previous employer calling them back. In that case you apply for the permit yourself rather than through an agency, and the burden of assembling documents falls on you.

The individual route is genuinely important because it is the legal alternative to the informal route. A worker whose brother has arranged a job for him does not need a broker; he needs to apply for an individual labour permit. A great deal of the informal, unprotected migration from Nepal happens because workers with a genuine job offer believed their only options were a manpower agency or nothing.

Re-entry permits are a third category, covering workers returning to a job they already hold after a visit home. Handling this correctly before you fly home for leave saves a scramble on the way back.

Verify the agency in every case where one is involved. The Department of Foreign Employment publishes the list of licensed recruitment agencies, and checking it takes minutes. An individual broker operating from a phone number is not a licensed agency, whatever he tells you about his connections.

Whichever route you take, insist on seeing the approved demand letter and your own contract before you pay anything. Those two documents are the substance of what you are agreeing to, and everything else is administration.

Start with the passport. It must be valid well beyond your intended contract, because destination countries and airlines apply their own validity rules and a passport nearing expiry stops the process before it starts. Apply or renew early — passport queues are their own delay.

Register on FEIMS. Registration uses your passport number, citizenship details and national identity number, and requires a mobile number or email you control to receive the one-time password. Use your own number, not an agent's. An agent holding the number that controls your account holds your account.

Confirm the job is real in the system. For agency recruitment, the demand from the foreign employer must be approved. For an individual application, you supply the employment offer and supporting documents. Approval of the job is the pivot on which everything else turns, and no amount of other paperwork substitutes for it.

Sign the contract, having read it. It should state the employer, the country, the job title, the salary and how it is paid, hours, leave, accommodation, food and the contract length. Get a copy in a language you can read and keep your own copy. Never sign a blank form and never sign a contract you are not permitted to keep.

Complete the medical examination at an approved centre. The report is time-limited, which is why sequence matters: a medical done far too early expires before the permit issues and has to be paid for twice.

Arrange the compulsory foreign employment insurance and pay the Foreign Employment Welfare Fund contribution. Both are conditions of the permit and both are protections for you and your family. Keep the receipts and tell your family where they are, because they are the documents your family will need if something happens to you.

Complete the pre-departure orientation training where it is required for your destination and job category, and keep the certificate.

The permit is then issued through FEIMS. Get a copy — digital and printed — before you fly, along with copies of the contract, insurance certificate, welfare fund receipt and medical report. Leave a full set with your family in Nepal.

Nepal caps what a worker can be charged as a recruitment service fee, and has pursued a free visa, free ticket policy for a number of destination countries under which the employer rather than the worker bears the visa and air-ticket cost. The specific cap, the destinations covered and any exceptions are set by government notice and have changed more than once, so confirm the current position for your country rather than trusting what a broker tells you.

What does not change is the principle: every payment must have a receipt identifying who received it and what it was for. A payment with no receipt is a payment that did not happen as far as any complaint process is concerned, and demanding cash without documentation is the defining behaviour of the people who cheat migrant workers.

The costs that are legitimately yours are generally the passport, the medical examination, the insurance premium, the welfare fund contribution, the permit fee itself and the capped service fee where one applies. Costs presented as unavoidable extras — an urgent processing fee, a visa stamping charge, a payment to someone at the embassy, a fee to jump a queue — are the classic pattern of extraction.

Beware of debt. A very large share of the harm done to Nepali migrant workers comes not from the job but from the loan taken to reach it. A worker who borrows heavily at high interest to pay illegal fees arrives already committed to sending everything home, which is precisely the position that makes it impossible to walk away from an abusive employer. Reducing what you pay before departure is the most effective protection available to you.

If you have already paid something you should not have, keep the evidence anyway. It is the basis of a complaint to the department, and complaints with documents behind them are the ones that go somewhere.

Finally, be sceptical of a salary that is far above the going rate for that job in that country. It is the oldest recruitment lie, and the contract you eventually sign will quietly say something else.

If the job on arrival is not the job in the contract — different employer, different work, lower pay, different country — that is a substitution, and it is a breach. Document it immediately: photograph the contract you were given on arrival, keep messages, and record dates. Contact the nearest Nepali embassy or consulate and the Department of Foreign Employment.

The department handles complaints against licensed recruitment agencies, and the Foreign Employment Tribunal hears foreign employment cases. Both are considerably more useful to a worker who holds a permit, a contract and receipts than to one who left informally with nothing.

The Foreign Employment Welfare Fund is the mechanism through which families receive compensation when a permitted worker dies abroad, is disabled, or needs repatriation, and it also supports return and reintegration. Your family needs to know the fund exists, that you contributed, and where the receipt is. Families who do not know have failed to claim entitlements that were paid for.

Nepali diplomatic missions in major destination countries have labour attachés or officers dealing with worker welfare. They are the practical first contact when you are abroad and in trouble, and reaching them early is better than reaching them after you have absconded from an employer.

Keep documents where your family can reach them, not only on your own phone. A phone confiscated by an employer or lost in transit takes the evidence with it. Email scans of everything to a family member before you fly.

Finally, if you are already abroad without a permit, that does not mean nothing can be done — but it narrows the options considerably, and it usually means dealing with the destination country's own regularisation or exit arrangements rather than with Nepali protections. That asymmetry, more than any legal penalty, is the real argument for doing this properly before you leave.