Nepal Trekking and Tours Permits 2026: Complete Stress-Free Guide

Tourists coming to trek in Nepal need up to three separate permits, depending on the route they are trekking: a national park or conservation area entry permit, a TIMS card for specific routes (Nepal tourism board mentions it as mandatory however it is not get checked in everest region- Khumbu rular municipality completely abide this check, instead they have their own permit system), and a restricted area permit for border zones like Upper Mustang or Manaslu.

The Nepal Tourism Board sets conservation area and national park fees at NPR 3,000 (roughly USD 22) for most major parks and restricted area permits run from USD 20 a week in Kanchenjunga to USD 100 a week in Upper Mustang during peak season.

Demand has swung hard and recovered harder: foreign visitors to Nepal’s national parks and conservation areas fell to just 11,847 in 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic, then rebounded to 464,653 in 2024, according to the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation’s Nepal Tourism Statistics 2024.

Restricted-area trekking permits specifically followed the same arc, dropping to 692 issued in 2020 before climbing back to 28,894 in 2024. We’ve registered TIMS cards and restricted permits for guests heading into Solukhumbu, Manaslu and Mustang every season since we started running treks out of Kathmandu, and the paperwork trips people up more than the altitude does.

Even though it is already 2026, the official data on tourists is available till 2024 only.

We have a real case of a guest flying into Lukla in October 2025 who nearly got turned back at the Monjo checkpoint because his agency hadn’t mentioned the separate Khumbu Pasang Lhamu municipality fee, on top of his Sagarmatha National Park permit. That’s the kind of gap this guide closes. The relevance of TIMS is on paper for the Everest region; it is never checked on the ground that’s the ground reality.

Nepal trekking permits for foreigners depend on your route. Most trekkers need a national park or conservation area permit (around NPR 3,000 / USD 22), and some routes also require a TIMS card (NPR 2,000) or a restricted area permit (USD 20–100 per week). Border regions like Upper Mustang, Manaslu and Upper Dolpo always need the restricted permit plus a licensed guide. More detail below.

Nepal trekking permits for foreigners: the complete 2026 guide

If you’re researching Nepal trekking permits before booking a trek, here’s the short version: what you need depends entirely on where you’re going, and the rules have shifted more in the last three years than in the previous decade. We’re not writing this from a desk in another country. We run treks out of Kathmandu, we send guides and porters up these same trails every season, and we’ve stood at more permit counters than we’d like to admit.

This guide covers every permit category a foreign trekker might run into: national park and conservation area entry fees, the TIMS card, restricted area permits for border regions, and the local municipality fees that trip up even experienced trekkers. We’re leaving work permits and business visas out of this one entirely — that’s a different animal, and not what you’re here for.

Why Nepal’s permit system exists (and why it changed)

Every major trekking region in Nepal sits inside a national park, a conservation area, or a restricted border zone. The fees fund park rangers, trail maintenance, search and rescue coordination, and conservation work — the Annapurna Conservation Area, for instance, is managed by the National Trust for Nature Conservation rather than the government directly, which is part of why its rules read a little differently from Sagarmatha National Park’s.

The bigger shift came in March 2023, when the Nepal Tourism Board’s revised TIMS provision made a licensed trekking guide mandatory on a specific list of protected routes, closing off the old “independent trekker” category on those trails. You can still trek a handful of unrestricted routes without a guide, but for anything in Kanchenjunga, Everest, Langtang, Manaslu, Annapurna’s restricted pockets, Dolpo, Humla and a few others, you’re going through a registered agency now, full stop.

The three permit types you’ll actually deal with and the surprising fourth one – local municipality permits applicable at some local levels

National park and conservation area entry permits

This is the one nearly every trekker needs, because nearly every popular route runs through protected land. You pay it once per park, and it’s checked at the entry gate — Monjo for Sagarmatha, Jhinu or Chame for Annapurna, depending on your route in.

TIMS card

TIMS (Trekkers’ Information Management System) is a safety registration record: your name, route, dates, and emergency contact, issued through a registered trekking agency. As of the current official NTB fee schedule, it costs NPR 1,000 for SAARC nationals and NPR 2,000 for everyone else, paid online through the agency portal. It is not required on every trek — more on that below, because this is where most of the confusion online actually comes from.

Restricted area (special) trekking permits

For border and far-flung regions — Upper Mustang, Upper Dolpo, Manaslu, Tsum Valley, Humla, Kanchenjunga’s outer wards, Nar-Phu, parts of Rasuwa, Bajhang, Mugu and Darchula — you need a separate permit from the Department of Immigration in Kalikasthan, Kathmandu. These are priced per person per day or week, not as a flat fee, and a licensed guide is compulsory throughout.

Local municipality fees

A newer wrinkle: some local governments now charge their own entry fee on top of the national park permit. The Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality is the clearest example — it introduced a local Everest-region entry card that sits alongside the Sagarmatha National Park permit and effectively functions as the region’s replacement for TIMS.

Nepal Trekking Permit costs by region

Fees are drawn from the Nepal Tourism Board’s park entry fee schedule [1] and its restricted area permit fee table [2]. Checkpoint locations are drawn from current operator route guides and our own guides’ route notes [8] rather than a single government list — none of Nepal’s agencies publish an official master checkpoint map, so these reflect where permits are consistently checked in practice as of 2026, not statute. Government fees do change, sometimes with little notice, so we confirm the exact figure with your agency before you fly.

Permit demand is climbing fast — here’s the trend

Source: Ministry of Culture, Tourism & Civil Aviation, Nepal Tourism Statistics 2024, Table 2.5 [3].

Total arrivals tell part of the story. The more relevant number for permits specifically is foreign visitors to national parks and conservation areas — the same gate where your ACAP or Sagarmatha permit gets checked:

Source: Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, as published in Ministry of Culture, Tourism & Civil Aviation, Nepal Tourism Statistics 2024, Table 5.5 [3].

Restricted-area permits specifically — Upper Mustang, Manaslu, Kanchenjunga and the rest — followed the same arc: 24,079 issued in 2019, down to 692 in 2020, and back up to 28,894 in 2024, per the Department of Immigration data in the same report’s Table 5.2 [3]. If you’re planning a Mustang or Manaslu trek expecting a quiet trail because “it’s remote,” the 2024 numbers say otherwise — book your permit and teahouse dates early.

Do you actually need a TIMS card? It depends

This is genuinely one of those situations where the standard advice doesn’t hold for every trekker, and pretending otherwise does people a disservice.

If you’re heading to Kanchenjunga, Makalu Barun, Rolwaling, Panchpokhari, Helambu, Langtang, Ganesh Himal, Manaslu, most of Annapurna’s classic routes, Mustang, Dhaulagiri, Dolpo or Humla, the official NTB list puts you in guide-plus-TIMS territory. No argument.

Everest is the odd one out. It sits on the NTB’s guide-mandatory list, but in practice the Khumbu region runs its own local entry card through the Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality, and that card — not TIMS — is what gets checked at Monjo and Lukla. Some agencies still issue TIMS for Everest routes as a belt-and-braces move, particularly for trekkers continuing over the Three Passes or into Rolwaling, where TIMS checkpoints do exist. Others skip it entirely and rely on the municipality card plus the park permit. Both approaches are defensible. What matters is that your agency tells you which one applies to your specific itinerary, not a generic “Everest trek” template, because a Three Passes trek and a straight EBC-and-back trek can sit on different sides of that line.

If you’re doing a short, unrestricted hike near Kathmandu or Pokhara — Nagarkot, Chandragiri, the Annapurna foothills below Ghandruk — you may not need TIMS at all. Ask before you assume either way.

Mythbusting: “TIMS is mandatory everywhere in Nepal”

We hear this one constantly, usually from trekkers who read three blog posts that each say something different and picked the strictest-sounding one out of caution. The reality is narrower: TIMS is mandatory only on the specific route list the NTB publishes, and several of Nepal’s most-walked trails — including the Everest Base Camp route as it’s actually enforced on the ground — run on a different permit entirely. Overpaying for a card nobody checks doesn’t make your trek safer. Carrying the right park permit and, where required, a licensed guide does.

What happens when your trek crosses two permit zones

Most blogs skip this because most trekkers do a single out-and-back trek. But if you’re doing something like Manaslu into Annapurna over the Larkya La, or Nar-Phu connecting into the Annapurna Circuit, you’re crossing from one restricted zone into a conservation area — sometimes into a second restricted zone — mid-trek. Every zone needs its own permit stamped and active before you cross the line, and the Manaslu restricted permit specifically is date- and week-bound, not open-ended.

We’ve had groups get this wrong by assuming their Manaslu permit “covers the rest of the trek” once they’re through Larkya La. It doesn’t. Your guide needs the Annapurna Conservation Area permit sorted before you descend into ACAP territory, and if weather holds you an extra two or three days at high camp, that Manaslu weekly rate resets into a daily rate beyond the first week — worth budgeting for, not discovering at a checkpoint.

One more practical point worth knowing before you commit to a multi-zone route: several restricted area permits, Upper Mustang and Manaslu among them, are historically only issued to parties of two or more trekkers travelling together through a registered agency, not solo [5][6]. If you’re planning to trek alone, confirm this with your agency for your specific route before you build an itinerary around it.

Inside the permit office: what your guide already knows

A detail most travel blogs miss because they’ve never actually queued for a permit: the Department of Immigration office in Kalikasthan, where restricted area permits are issued, doesn’t process on Nepali public holidays or Saturdays, and during Dashain and Tihar it effectively shuts down for the better part of two weeks. Agencies who’ve been doing this a while build a buffer into the itinerary automatically — new operators sometimes don’t, and a trekker arriving three days before a Mustang trek during Tihar can find themselves stuck in Kathmandu waiting on paperwork instead of walking.

The other one: the Khumbu Pasang Lhamu municipality card genuinely cannot be bought in Kathmandu. Some Everest-bound trekkers assume they can pre-arrange everything at the Tourist Service Center on Pradarshani Marg the way they can for the Sagarmatha National Park permit. You can’t — that card is only issued at the registration counter in Lukla, on arrival [7], which is why your guide will usually handle it in the ten minutes after you land rather than before you fly.

How permits actually get arranged

In practice, your trekking agency handles nearly all of this — passport copies, photos, TIMS registration, restricted area applications through Immigration, and the park entry fee. That’s genuinely one of the better reasons to book through an established operator rather than piecing a restricted-zone trek together independently, since several of these permits legally can’t be issued to unaccompanied solo trekkers in the first place.

If you’re planning a route like the Everest Base Camp trek or Annapurna Base Camp with us, we’ll confirm the exact permit stack for your dates as part of booking — you can see how we structure that on our Everest Base Camp 12 Days trek. For your own trip planning beyond permits, checking conditions on DHM Nepal’s weather and hydrology service and reading up on the region through resources like the Annapurna Conservation Area’s background on Wikipedia rounds out the picture nicely before you commit to dates.

Permits are paperwork. They’re not the trek. Get them sorted early, hand the details to someone who does this every week, and spend your actual planning energy on your legs, your boots and your acclimatization schedule instead.

Check samples of different types of Nepal Trekking Permits in the gallery below:

Sources

1. Nepal Tourism Board, Park Entry Fees, accessed 2026.
2. Nepal Tourism Board, Trekking Permit — Restricted Area Fee Schedule, accessed 2026.
3. Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, Government of Nepal, Nepal Tourism Statistics 2024 (published 2025). Table 2.5 and Table 5.2 credit the Department of Immigration as data source; Table 5.5 credits the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation. Full PDF: Nepal Tourism Statistics 2024.
4. Nepal Tourism Board, TIMS Card — Revised Provision effective March 31, 2023, accessed 2026.
5. Manaslu Circuit minimum group-size rule, restricted area permit regulations, Department of Immigration, as reflected in current registered-agency permit applications.
6. Upper Mustang minimum group-size rule, restricted area permit regulations, Department of Immigration, as reflected in current registered-agency permit applications.
7. Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality entry card, issued on arrival in Lukla; confirmed against multiple current operator route guides and our own guides’ route notes.
8. Manaslu, Upper Mustang, Kanchenjunga, Langtang, Dolpo, Humla, Makalu Barun and Nar-Phu checkpoint locations (permit costs by region table): compiled from current operator itineraries and route guides, cross-checked against our own guides’ on-the-ground notes. No single government source publishes a consolidated checkpoint map, so these reflect standard practice as of 2026 rather than a statutory list.

Government fees, checkpoint locations and enforcement practices can change with little public notice. We confirm current figures with your registered agency before every departure; treat this article as a planning reference, not a final word.