How to get and extend a Nepal tourist visa

For most nationalities the default route is a visa on arrival. You land at Tribhuvan International Airport, complete the arrival formalities, pay the fee for the entry length you want, and are stamped in. The same applies at the designated land border crossings, though opening hours and facilities there are far more limited than at the airport and a late arrival at a quiet border post is a genuinely bad plan.

The Department of Immigration operates an online visa application process that lets you fill the form before you travel and arrive with a submission receipt rather than queuing at a kiosk. This does not pre-approve anything and it does not replace the fee payment on arrival, but it removes the step most likely to go wrong when the kiosks are busy and a wide-body has just landed.

Nepal has also introduced an electronic travel authorisation, and the department maintains a dedicated page describing it. Because this kind of scheme is expanded and amended by notice, check the department's own page for who it currently applies to rather than relying on a travel blog or a booking site's summary.

Not every nationality is eligible for a visa on arrival. The department publishes the categories that must obtain a visa in advance from a Nepali diplomatic mission, and arriving without one when you are on that list means being refused entry and put on the next aircraft out. Check your own nationality against the department's current list before you buy a ticket, not after.

Visa exemptions also exist. Indian nationals do not require a visa for Nepal under a long-standing bilateral arrangement. Certain other categories are issued visas free of charge rather than exempted altogether, which is not the same thing — a gratis visa is still a visa, still counts against your days, and still has to be obtained.

Whichever route applies, arrive with the practical items: a passport with adequate remaining validity and a blank page, a passport photograph, the address where you are staying, and the fee in a currency the counter accepts. Card payment facilities exist but have been known to fail, and a queue is a poor place to discover that.

Children are not automatically free of process. Check the department's requirements for minors travelling with parents, because the documentation expected at the counter is not always what a family assumes.

A tourist visa admits you to Nepal for tourism. It does not permit you to work, whether for a Nepali employer, for an international organisation, or remotely for a company abroad in a way that involves engaging with the local economy. Nepal maintains distinct non-tourist categories for working, for study, for journalism, for business and for family relationships, each with its own recommendation requirements and its own issuing route.

The distinction matters more than visitors expect because it determines what you can do if plans change. Someone who arrives as a tourist and is then offered work cannot simply extend the tourist visa and start; the correct route is a change of category, which requires a recommendation from the relevant ministry or authority and, for employment, a work permit. Attempting to bridge the gap with tourist extensions is exactly the pattern that produces refusals.

Volunteering occupies a grey area that catches out well-meaning travellers. Unpaid work is still work, and organisations that place volunteers should be able to tell you which visa category they expect you to hold. If an organisation is vague about it, that is information about the organisation.

Study is its own category, issued on the recommendation of the relevant education authority. Researchers and journalists similarly need the category matching their activity, with a recommendation from the appropriate department.

Non-resident Nepalis have a dedicated visa category with its own conditions, and there is a residential category above that. If you hold or are entitled to hold NRN status, look at that route rather than repeatedly extending a tourist visa, because it is designed for exactly the long-stay pattern that the tourist cap is designed to prevent.

The department publishes the categories, the eligibility for each and the documents required. Read that page rather than reasoning from what a friend did three years ago — visa categories and their conditions are amended by notice more often than the travel press reports.

Extensions are handled by the Department of Immigration. The main office is in Kathmandu, with a further office in Pokhara. There is no extension counter in most of the country, which is the single most important practical fact in this guide: if your visa expires while you are in Lukla, Jomsom or Ilam, you have a travel problem as well as a visa problem, and the travel problem is the expensive one.

Plan the extension around your itinerary rather than around the expiry date. If you know you will be in Pokhara ten days before the visa runs out and in a remote valley on the day it does, extend in Pokhara. Extending early does not waste the days you have already paid for; the extension adds to the existing visa rather than replacing it.

Extensions are charged per day with a minimum period, so the arithmetic rewards planning. Somebody who needs four extra days pays the minimum block anyway. Somebody who realises this in advance can often use those days rather than buying and discarding them.

Extending after your visa has expired is possible but attracts a late fee for each day of the overstay, charged in addition to the ordinary extension fee. This is why a traveller who returns from a trek two days late is better off going straight to the immigration office than waiting until departure day and settling up at the airport.

A multiple-entry endorsement is a separate add-on. If your plan involves crossing into India or Tibet and returning to Nepal, you need it, and you need it before you leave rather than at the border. Without it, a single-entry visa is consumed on exit and you are buying a new one to come back.

Bring the passport, the visa, a photograph and payment. Fees are set by the department and revised, so check the current visa fees and documents page before you go rather than budgeting from an old forum post. Allow for the office being closed on public holidays, of which Nepal has a great many, and for extension processing to take longer in peak trekking season.

Finally, the annual cap is real and it is enforced. Once you have used your permitted tourist days for the visa year, further extension is not available as of right, and leaving and re-entering does not reset the count within the same calendar year. If your plans require a longer presence than the cap allows, the answer is a different visa category, arranged properly, not a series of exits and returns.

Overstaying a Nepali visa is not treated as a trivial administrative slip. A daily fine applies for each day beyond expiry, on top of the extension fee for regularising the period. The longer the overstay, the more likely it is that the matter is handled as an immigration offence rather than a fee, with the possibility of detention, a formal penalty and difficulty obtaining future visas.

The fine is normally settled at the Department of Immigration rather than at the airport, and settling it before you reach the departure hall is both cheaper in stress and safer. Travellers who plan to sort it out at check-in discover that immigration control at the airport is not a payment counter and that missing a flight is a realistic outcome.

Losing your passport does not pause the clock. If your passport is stolen you need a replacement travel document from your embassy and then a fresh visa endorsement from the Department of Immigration before you can leave, and the days spent arranging that count. Report the theft to the police immediately and start the immigration side the same day.

Being hospitalised, caught by a landslide, or grounded by a cancelled mountain flight are all real and all common in Nepal, and none of them extends a visa automatically. Contact the Department of Immigration as soon as you know you will be late, keep documentary evidence of the cause, and expect the process to be discretionary rather than automatic.

If you are travelling on a visa obtained through an agent, confirm yourself that the visa in your passport says what you were told it says. Category, validity dates and entry count are all printed on the endorsement. An agent's assurance is not a defence at the airport.

Foreign nationals in difficulty in Nepal should also know that their own government's travel advice pages carry current entry and exit requirements and consular contacts, and those pages are updated faster than most third-party summaries.

A valid visa gets you into Nepal. It does not get you into the mountains. National parks and conservation areas charge their own entry fees, collected by the managing authority, and trekking routes are additionally covered by a permit system administered alongside the tourism authorities.

Restricted areas — Upper Mustang, Upper Dolpo, Manaslu and several others — require a special permit that is not issued to individuals. You must travel through a registered agency, usually with a minimum group size and a licensed guide, and the permit is obtained in advance in Kathmandu. Turning up at the trailhead and hoping to sort it out locally does not work, and checkpoints do check.

The Department of Immigration publishes trekking route and permit fee information alongside its visa pages, which is a useful cross-check when an agency quotes you a figure. Where the agency's number and the department's differ significantly, ask why before paying.

Timing matters here too. Permits are issued during office hours on working days, Nepal observes a long list of public holidays, and the days around the major festivals bring administration to a halt. A trek that starts the morning after a holiday needs its paperwork finished several days earlier.

Carry the permits with you and keep them accessible. Checkpoints along the main trekking routes record every trekker passing through, and the record exists for search and rescue as much as for revenue. A trekker with no permit record is a trekker nobody is looking for.

The Nepal Tourism Board publishes current travel updates covering route conditions, closures and requirements, and it is worth reading immediately before departure rather than at the point of booking. Conditions in the mountains change with weather, road damage and local decisions, and none of that reaches the international press.