Every fixed Everest Base Camp departure date we have open

Put this page beside the classic trek page and you will find two different lengths for the same walk. Both figures are ours, both are published on purpose, and we would much rather you heard that here than found it yourself. Here is what each one counts.

The dates above run 14 days, and that is what you actually travel. It is counted inclusively, from the start date in Kathmandu to the end date in Kathmandu, and it is the plan our operations desk is running on every date in the table1. Every start and end date above is that plan applied to a Sunday.

Our product record publishes 15 days for this trek. That is the figure in the trip table, the page title and the questions at the foot of the classic trek page, and that page reads it straight out of the record2. It is our own published length for the product. It has not been withdrawn and it is not somebody else’s mistake.

These are two different things, not two answers to one question. The product length is how we publish and sell the trek. The departure length is the set of days you are actually in Nepal on a date from the table above. We hold them as two separate figures in our own records and we publish both, because the alternative is quietly picking the one that suits the page you happen to be reading. We have not averaged them either. An average of two trip lengths describes a trip nobody takes.

If you are booking flights, book them around the table above. Those dates are the ones on your ticket. If any page of ours ever shows you one figure while meaning the other, that is a fault and we would like to be told, because the whole point of this site is that we can show our working.

What is inside the 14 days. 11 of them are walking days, Lukla to Lukla, which is exactly the count our day by day itinerary publishes. The other 3 are the flight down from Lukla, a spare day in Kathmandu, and the day you fly home. That is the whole difference between the two ways of counting, and no page on this site presents one scheme’s number as the other’s.

There is a wider version of this problem and it is worth two minutes of your time. Five operators will quote you five lengths for this walk, and most of them are counting different things rather than lying to you. The itinerary page takes that apart and shows exactly what moves the number.

All 15 dates in the table begin on a Sunday and finish on a Saturday. That is worth knowing before you book a flight, because it means every date on this calendar has the same shape in your week.

Two whole weekends sit inside the trip, one at each end. The working days in between come to 10 working days on every single date, so the leave you need to ask for is the same whichever one you pick. Public holidays where you live are yours to add.

It also makes the flights simpler to think about. Your inbound flight needs to land in Kathmandu on or before the Sunday, and your flight home is booked for the Saturday or later. There is no date on this page where that arithmetic is different.

We publish the weekday pattern rather than leaving you to spot it because it is the kind of thing that quietly costs people a day of leave or a flight change fee. If your leave is fixed and no Sunday works, ask us about your own dates and we will run the same plan around them.

We run this trek both ways and we are happy either way. A fixed departure is a date we have already set and opened, which is what the table above is. A private trip is the same walk on dates you choose.

A fixed departure. The date is already planned and the plan is the one on this page. You ask for a place on a date, we confirm whether it is still open, and the trip runs to the day plan below. Choose this when your travel window has some give in it and you would rather step into something that is already arranged.

A private trip. You tell us the window you can travel in and we build the same trip around it. Nothing about the walk changes. Choose this when your leave is fixed to one particular two weeks, when you are traveling as a family or with friends and want the group to be only you, or when you want to add something to the route such as a second valley or a pass.

What does not change between them. The trail, the villages, the guide standard, both acclimatization days and the spare day are the same in both. Neither one is the discount version of the other. The only real difference is who picked the dates.

If none of the dates in the table fits, that is not the end of the conversation. It is the start of a different one, and the inquiry form is where it happens.

Acclimatization means letting your body get used to less oxygen before you climb any higher, and it takes days rather than willpower. Every date on this calendar has two of those days built into it, and they are the reason the trip is as long as it is.

On both of those days you walk several hundred meters uphill and then come back down to sleep in the bed you slept in the night before. Climbing high and sleeping low is the part that works. Staying in the lodge with a book would be more restful and far less useful, which is why we do not call them rest days.

A departure without them would be cheaper and worse. Take those two days out and the trip is two days shorter to sell, two nights cheaper to run, and a genuinely different product carrying a genuinely different risk. You would be climbing to the highest sleeping altitude of your life having given your body no time to catch up. We will not put your name on that, whatever the calendar at your end looks like.

What happens on each of those two days, hour by hour, is on the day by day itinerary. Why the body needs the time at all, and what to watch for if it is not going well, is on the page about altitude sickness on this trek.

Day 13 of the plan starts in Kathmandu and ends in Kathmandu, and nothing is scheduled on it. It looks like padding on a comparison table. It is the single most useful day on the whole itinerary.

Here is what it is for. The airstrip at Lukla closes for weather, sometimes for a day and sometimes for several, and when it closes every trip on the mountain slides back by the same amount. That is not a rare event and it is not a footnote. It is the least reliable part of this trip and everybody who runs it knows that.

An itinerary with no spare time in it is quietly betting your international flight home on the weather in a mountain valley. If the flight does not go, the day you lose comes straight out of the end of the trip, and the end of the trip is your flight home.

Ours carries its margin at the Kathmandu end. A delay at Lukla costs you a day in a city with a hot shower and somewhere to eat, instead of a missed connection and a rebooking fee. If the flight goes on time, which it usually does, you get a day in Kathmandu with nothing to do in it, and almost nobody complains about that.

When you compare two calendars, find the spare day in each one before you compare anything else. A trip without one is not a shorter trip. It is a thinner one. What that flight is actually like, and what we do when it does not go, is on the page about the flight to Lukla.

Every date on this calendar starts in September 2026, October 2026, November 2026 and December 2026, and the last one finishes on 2 January 2027. That covers the autumn season and the early winter behind it. Here is what each of those stretches is like, in outline.

The end of September. The monsoon is clearing out of the valley. The hillsides are still green, the air is washing clean through the month, and there can still be cloud and rain low down. Fewer people are on the trail than there will be in a month.

October and November. This is the main season and it is busy for a reason. The air is at its most settled and the mountain views are at their most reliable. It is also when the lodges fill, when the trail has other groups on it, and when the Lukla flights carry the most people, which is worth remembering when you read the previous section again.

December. Cold, quiet and often very clear. There are fewer people on the trail and more choice of beds. The nights high up are the hard part, and the right sleeping bag stops being a detail.

What we will not tell you is a temperature. Every temperature figure we found for this route traces back to a claim that nobody measured, including the ones on our own older pages, so no page on this site publishes one as fact. The page on weather on the Everest Base Camp trek sets out that gap honestly instead of filling it. Which month suits you, and the argument between autumn and spring, is on the best time to trek page.

There is no checkout on this site and that is deliberate. You send us the date you want, a person reads it, and a person answers with the trip in writing before any money moves.

One. Send us the date. Use the inquiry form and give us the start date from the table, how many of you there are, and anything about fitness or health that bears on it. If the honest answer is a different date or a different trip, that is the answer you get back.

Two. We confirm the place and the terms. You get the day plan, what is included and what is not, and the price for your group in writing. What the classic trek includes and excludes is published in full, line by line, on its own page.

Three. A deposit secures it. A place on a fixed date is held with a deposit of 30 percent of the trip price3. Until that deposit is paid the date is not held for you.

What happens if you cancel is settled before you pay, not afterward, and it is this: Deposit never refunded. 60 or more days before departure, the deposit only. 30 to 59 days, 50 percent of the balance. 15 to 29 days, 75 percent of the balance. Under 15 days, the full balance.3 We would rather you read that now than find it in a document later. What each point costs, worked through in dollars, is on our booking terms.

One more thing that is not optional. You need travel insurance that covers you to 6,000 m (19,685 ft) and names helicopter evacuation. We will ask to see it, and we do not sell it or earn anything from it. What a policy actually has to say is on the page about travel insurance for this trek.

The price. The published price of this trek is on the classic trek page. Your written quote states the price for your date and your group before you pay anything.

Every number above is listed here with the body that publishes it and the date we last read it. If a figure has changed since, write to us and we will correct the page and say that we did.