List of All National Highways of Nepal (NH Series) with Rankings

Nepal has 80 numbered national highways, together stretching roughly 11,799 km, according to the Department of Roads' (DoR) Statistics of National Highway (SNH) register. The figure of 80 highways was fixed in the SNH 2020/21 edition, and about 620 km more was added in 2022/23 to reach the current total of approximately 11,799.09 km. Every national highway carries a code in the NH series, written as NH01, NH02 and so on up to the eighties, replacing the older 'H' numbering that most Nepalis grew up with.

National highways form the backbone of the Strategic Road Network (SRN), the top tier of Nepal's road hierarchy. The DoR, which sits under the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport (MoPIT), builds and maintains them; below the national highways sit feeder roads (the old 'F' series), and below those the far larger web of provincial and local roads. A road earns national-highway status when it links provincial capitals, district headquarters, border crossings or major economic corridors, or forms part of an Asian Highway route.

It is worth stressing that '80' is the count in the current numbered register, not a frozen number. Nepal's highway list has grown steadily as the country builds mid-hill, corridor and ring-road projects, and some entries are still partly under construction. Lengths quoted here are indicative figures drawn from the DoR register and standard references; several highways include planned or unfinished sections, so numbers are revised in each annual SNH report.

For decades Nepal recognised just a handful of national highways coded H01 to H12 or so. The Statistics of Strategic Road Network (SSRN) 2004 listed 12 national highways and 51 feeder roads; by SSRN 2017/18 the national-highway count had risen to 18. Around 2020-21 the government carried out a major re-classification, promoting dozens of roads and renumbering the whole set into the modern NH series, which is why the register jumped to 80 highways.

The renumbering means many famous roads changed codes. The East-West Highway, long called H01, is now NH01 (Mahendra Highway). Tribhuvan Highway moved from H02 to NH41; Araniko Highway from H03 to NH34; Prithvi Highway from H04 to NH17; and Siddhartha Highway from H10 to NH47. The Ratna Highway, the old H12 running north from Nepalgunj to Surkhet, was folded into the Karnali corridor and now forms the southern section of NH58. If you learned the old two-digit 'H' codes for a school or Lok Sewa exam, expect them to differ from the codes on new signposts and maps.

The original dozen highways of the classic H-series are still the country's arteries, so they are worth knowing in their old form. They are: Mahendra (H01), Tribhuvan (H02), Araniko (H03), Prithvi (H04), Narayangadh-Mugling (H05), Dhulikhel-Sindhuli-Bhittamod (H06), Mechi (H07), Koshi (H08), Sagarmatha (H09), Siddhartha (H10), Rapti (H11) and Ratna (H12).

The list below catalogues all 80 numbered national highways with their official name (where one exists), route endpoints and approximate length in kilometres, based on the DoR register cross-checked against Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. Roads without a formal name are simply referred to by their code. Several are corridors that follow a river valley (for example the Koshi, Sunkoshi, Tamakoshi, Trishuli, Kaligandaki, Bheri and Seti corridors), while others are ring roads around growing cities such as Bharatpur and Damak.

Because many of these highways include sections that are still gravel, earthen or under construction, treat the lengths as indicative. Where two figures circulate, this catalogue follows the DoR-derived numbering used in the national register.

A small group of highways carries most of Nepal's traffic and history, and searchers often look for them by name. The Tribhuvan Highway (Tribhuvan Rajpath, now NH41) was Nepal's first, opened in 1956 (2013 BS) with Indian assistance to link Kathmandu with the Indian border at Birgunj over the Mahabharat range. The Araniko Highway (NH34), completed in 1967 with Chinese help, runs from Kathmandu to the Tibet/China border at Kodari, while the Prithvi Highway (NH17), Chinese-built and opened in 1973, connects Kathmandu to Pokhara.

The Mahendra Highway (NH01), or East-West Highway, is the single most important road in the country: about 1,028 km of tarmac along the Terai from Kakarbhitta in the east to Bhimdatta (Mahendranagar) in the far west, built in stages from the 1960s to the 1990s with Indian, Soviet, British and American assistance on different segments. The Siddhartha Highway (NH47) links the Indian border at Belahiya/Sunauli to Pokhara, and the Ratna Highway (old H12, now the lower part of NH58) opened up the Karnali region from Nepalgunj.

More recent flagship routes include the BP Highway (NH13), the Banepa-Sindhuli-Bardibas road built over roughly two decades with Japanese grant aid and completed in 2015, and the Karnali Highway (NH58), long the only road to Jumla and the deep Karnali hills. The Kathmandu-Terai/Madhesh Fast Track (NH33), an expressway between Kathmandu and Nijgadh being built by the Nepal Army, and the long Pushpalal (Mid-Hill) Highway (NH03) are the marquee projects still under construction.

The most-searched ranking is simply which highway is longest. Among fully operational roads, the Mahendra Highway (NH01) is the longest at about 1,028 km. On paper the Pushpalal or Mid-Hill Highway (NH03) is longer still at roughly 1,787 km and will become the longest national highway once complete, as it threads the middle hills from the eastern border to the far-western Jhulaghat crossing. Two more highways exceed 1,000 km: the Madan Bhandari Highway (NH09, about 1,200 km) and the Postal/Hulaki Highway (NH05, about 1,016 km), both largely under construction along the northern hills and the deep Terai respectively.

At the other extreme, the shortest national highway is NH46 (Bhumahi-Parasi) at about 9 km. The longest mountain highway is the Karnali Highway (NH58) at about 538 km, and the Kaligandaki Corridor (NH48) is often cited as the highest-altitude motorable national highway. Rankings by province and by builder are less clean, because most long highways cross several provinces and several donors funded different segments of the same road.

Many of the newer national highways are 'corridors' that follow a single river from the Terai to the Himalaya, opening north-south trade routes toward the Chinese border. The four best-known river corridors are the Koshi, Kaligandaki, Karnali and Mahakali, each combining several highway segments. These corridors, along with the East-West Mahendra Highway and the Pushpalal Mid-Hill Highway, form the spatial grid that the DoR uses to plan the network.

National highways are only the top of the pyramid. Beneath them, the Strategic Road Network also contains feeder roads (the 'F' series) that connect district headquarters and important towns to the highways. Below the SRN lie provincial highways managed by the seven provinces, and tens of thousands of kilometres of district and rural roads in the Local Road Network. In total Nepal's road network runs to well over 100,000 km, but only the SRN highways and feeders are managed directly by the central Department of Roads.

For anyone using these codes in practice, remember that signage and maps are still transitioning between the old H numbers and the new NH numbers, and that lengths are revised annually. Always cross-check a specific figure against the latest DoR Statistics of National Highway report before quoting it as exact.