Prime Ministers of Nepal: Complete List from Bhimsen Thapa to the Present

Nepal's head of government predates the title "prime minister" itself. In 1804 King Rana Bahadur Shah created the single authoritative post of Mukhtiyar, vesting it with the executive power of the state. The Mukhtiyar served as chief minister and de facto ruler while the Shah kings reigned; the title "Prime Minister" was adopted only in November 1843, by Mathabar Singh Thapa. Because of this evolution, lists of Nepal's heads of government conventionally begin with the first dominant Mukhtiyar, Bhimsen Thapa (from 1806), and treat the Mukhtiyars, the hereditary Rana premiers, and the modern elected prime ministers as one continuous succession.

Under the present Constitution of Nepal (2015), the prime minister is the head of government and chairperson of the Council of Ministers. Article 76 requires the President to appoint the leader of the majority party in the House of Representatives as prime minister; where no single party holds a majority, the President appoints a member who can command a coalition majority, and that appointee must win a vote of confidence in the House within 30 days. A prime minister leaves office on resignation, a lost confidence vote, loss of House membership, or death.

The number of "prime ministers Nepal has had" depends on what is counted. The Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers (OPMCM) publishes an official list of former officeholders that includes Mukhtiyars, Rana chairmen and modern prime ministers in a single numbered sequence. That list runs from Bhimsen Thapa as the first to Sushila Karki as the 39th, which makes the current prime minister, Balendra Shah, the 40th distinct person to hold the office.

Higher figures appear in some reporting because several leaders served multiple, non-consecutive terms — Girija Prasad Koirala held office five times, K.P. Sharma Oli four, Sher Bahadur Deuba five and Pushpa Kamal Dahal three. Counting each separate government (ministry) rather than each person produces a larger total (figures such as 43rd or 47th have been cited). On this site the count of distinct persons is used, matching the OPMCM's official numbering, with repeated tenures noted per individual.

Bhimsen Thapa became Mukhtiyar amid the court turmoil that followed the 1806 Bhandarkhal massacre and dominated Nepali politics for three decades, leading the country through the Anglo-Nepal War (1814–16). His long ascendancy, sustained partly through the regency of Queen Tripurasundari, ended with his dismissal in 1837 and his death in 1839.

The years between Bhimsen Thapa's fall and the Rana takeover were unstable, with the premiership changing hands repeatedly among Thapa, Pande, Chautariya and Shah factions. Ranga Nath Poudyal — remembered as the first Khas Brahmin to hold the office — and Pushkar Shah served in this period, as did Rana Jang Pande and Fateh Jung Shah. The cycle of palace intrigue ended in blood at the Kot massacre of 14 September 1846, after which Jung Bahadur Kunwar was appointed prime minister and commander-in-chief.

After the Kot massacre, Jung Bahadur Rana made the premiership the hereditary property of his family. He was named prime minister for life, granted the hereditary surname "Rana" (1848) and the title Maharaja of Lamjung and Kaski, and devised an unusual roll of succession in which the office passed not from father to son but from brother to brother. For 104 years the Rana prime ministers governed as de facto sovereigns while the Shah kings were kept in ceremonial seclusion.

Rana rule was autocratic and isolationist but produced several landmarks, including Chandra Shumsher's abolition of sati (1920) and slavery (1924–26) and Britain's 1923 recognition of Nepal's full sovereignty. The line ended with Mohan Shumsher, the last Rana prime minister, whose government gave way to the democratic transition of 1951.

The fall of the Ranas in 1951 opened the modern phase of the office. Matrika Prasad Koirala became the first commoner prime minister of the democratic era, and in 1959 his half-brother B.P. Koirala became Nepal's first elected prime minister after the Nepali Congress swept the country's first general election — only to be dismissed in King Mahendra's 1960 coup. During the party-less Panchayat decades (1960–1990) the king appointed prime ministers such as Tulsi Giri, Surya Bahadur Thapa, Kirti Nidhi Bista, Nagendra Prasad Rijal, Lokendra Bahadur Chand and Marich Man Singh Shrestha.

The 1990 restoration of multiparty democracy, the 2006 peace process and the 2008 declaration of a republic produced a fast-turning carousel of prime ministers, with Girija Prasad Koirala, Sher Bahadur Deuba, K.P. Sharma Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal each returning to office repeatedly. The most recent transitions were unprecedented: Sushila Karki, a former Chief Justice, became Nepal's first woman prime minister at the head of an interim government after the September 2025 Gen Z uprising, and Balendra Shah of the Rastriya Swatantra Party became the youngest prime minister in the country's history when he was sworn in in March 2026 following the party's landslide election win.

Across more than two centuries the office has set a string of firsts. Bhimsen Thapa was both the first and the longest-serving head of government, holding power for roughly three decades. The Rana period made Nepal almost unique in passing the premiership by heredity rather than the crown for over a century. The democratic era's defining names are B.P. Koirala (first elected), and, more recently, Sushila Karki (first woman) and Balendra Shah (youngest).

The modern record is also marked by extraordinary churn: with several figures serving three to five separate terms, Nepal saw many more governments than distinct prime ministers in its republican decades, a pattern of coalition instability that the 2015 constitution's confidence-vote rules were meant to discipline.