What permits do you need for the Everest Base Camp trek?

The two permits are separate instruments issued by two different authorities. One is a national park entry fee. One is a local government permit. Neither replaces the other, and you are checked for both on the trail.

We publish these in rupees because rupees are the currency the fees are set in. We do not convert them to dollars, because we have no dated exchange rate we are willing to stand behind. A converted figure looks more helpful and is worth less, because it is wrong the week after it is written.

These two fees are the only permit money on the Everest Base Camp trek. Everything else you pay for, the flight in, your guide, your beds and your food, is a separate line and sits on the page about what the trek costs.

SAARC stands for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. In plain words it is the regional group of South Asian countries, and India is one of them. Both fee tables above split the world on that line.

The practical test is your passport. If it was issued by a South Asian country you are in the SAARC column. If it was issued anywhere else, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia or anywhere in Europe, you are in the foreign column and you pay the higher rate on both permits.

China is the one exception worth knowing. China is not a SAARC country, but the Khumbu municipality charges Chinese nationals the SAARC rate on its own permit. Its published fee table names the two categories as SAARC countries and China on one side and every other country on the other.1 The national park fee table does not carry that exception.

We have not published a full SAARC member list on this page, because we have not checked one against a primary source. If you hold a South Asian passport and you want your country confirmed in writing before you travel, ask the issuing authority, or ask us and we will ask them.

A foreign national pays NPR 3,000 per person per entry. A SAARC national pays NPR 1,500.2 Children are exempt. The published child policy is free under 10 years, as at every protected area in Nepal.

The permit is issued by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation. The fee itself is published by the Nepal Tourism Board, on the national park entry fee table we link below. The permit is what lets you walk inside Sagarmatha National Park, and the trail is inside the park from the gate at Monjo all the way to Everest Base Camp at 5,364 m (17,598 ft). The park boundary is the reason this permit exists, so there is no version of this trek that avoids it.

One honest gap. Operators commonly quote a slightly higher park figure that includes value added tax, and you may see that number elsewhere. No government page we reached states a tax on park entry at all, and the official fee table does not mention one. So we publish the fee the authority publishes and we do not publish a tax inclusive total. Budget a little above the published fee if you are paying at a counter yourself, and do not treat the higher number as a fact until an issuer prints it.

Where the park permit is sold is the one detail on this page we have not settled to our own standard. Our store records it as not confirmed against the issuing authority, so we do not state it. What we can tell you is that it is checked at the park gate at Monjo, and that we buy it for every client before the walk starts.

A national of a country outside SAARC and China pays NPR 3,000 per person. A SAARC or Chinese national pays NPR 2,000.1 It is issued by Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality, the local government of the Khumbu, and it is often called the Trek Card.

It is one flat rate. The validity, in the issuing authority’s own terms: One flat rate for the trek. There is no tiering by length of stay. A short trek and a long one pay the same. If a page quotes you a higher rate for a longer stay, that structure does not exist on the issuer’s own page.

There is a second error almost everybody makes with this permit. Many pages tell you the fee rose from NPR 2,000 to NPR 3,000 and then present the higher figure as one universal rate. That is a misreading. The issuing authority publishes both figures as current at the same time, split by nationality, not by year. One of them is not an old price. It is the rate a SAARC or Chinese passport pays today.

The municipality permit is issued in Lukla (2,860 m (9,383 ft)), at the start of the walk. It is not sold in Kathmandu. This is the detail that catches people out, because operator pages routinely tell you it can be arranged in either city, and the authority that issues it names exactly one service location.1

The Khumbu Trek Card is issued at the Tourist Information Center in Lukla, not in Kathmandu. It requires a passport and a recent photograph and takes about fifteen minutes. Online pre-registration is available through the municipality's Trek Card system.

The park permit is a separate transaction and it has to be in hand before you enter the park. Your permits are checked at the gate at Monjo, on the walk between Phakding (2,610 m (8,563 ft)) and Namche Bazaar (3,440 m (11,286 ft)), and again at municipal checkpoints inside the Khumbu. Arriving at Monjo without the park permit is not a conversation you want to have at the gate.

Bring your passport. Bring spare passport photographs, because more than one counter in Nepal will ask for one and the photo booth is not where you need it to be. If you are walking with us, you will not be standing at either counter, because we do that part.

There are two official answers and they contradict each other. We are going to give you both, dated, rather than pick the one that sounds cleaner. TIMS stands for the Trekkers’ Information Management System, and the card is issued by the Nepal Tourism Board and Trekking Agencies Association of Nepal.

What this means for you in practice. The documents actually checked at Lukla and at Monjo are the national park permit and the municipal Trek Card. Carry those two and you are carrying what the checkpoints on this route ask for. If your trek is booked with an agency, ask them in writing which permits they are buying for you and what they are charging for each one.

What we will not do is tell you the TIMS card was abolished in the Everest region and leave it there. It is a popular sentence and the national authority’s own current route list contradicts it. When an authority changes its published position we will change this page and say that we did.

Nepal has required trekkers to walk with a registered guide since 1 April 2023. The rule was decided by the Nepal Tourism Board. Its status, checked against the source on 12 September 2026: In force nationally.4 That much is settled and we will state it flatly.

For our clients the question is academic. We staff every departure with a licensed guide, so the rule is satisfied whichever authority turns out to be right. What a guide does day to day, and what a porter carries, is on the page about guides and porters on this trek.

No. We checked both issuing authorities directly on 12 September 2026. Sagarmatha National Park entry is unchanged. The Khumbu Trek Card is unchanged in both nationality tiers. A foreign trekker still pays NPR 6,000 across the two.

This matters because a large share of the pages competing for this question carry a fee update hook in the title. Any page telling you Everest region permit fees went up for the current year is wrong, and it is wrong in a way you can check yourself on the issuers’ own pages, linked at the foot of this page.

If a fee does change we will change this page, move the review date, and say in the text what changed and when. That is the whole promise. A number on this site either has a source and a date or it is not on the page.

Two large Everest fees turn up in search results next to trekking permits, and a trekker pays neither of them. They belong to people attempting the summit.

The first is the climbing royalty, issued by the Department of Tourism. For a foreign climber on the normal south route in the spring season it is USD 15,0005 per climber. The other seasons are cheaper. The second is the Khumbu Icefall route fee, charged by the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee to every foreign climber on Everest, Lhotse or Nuptse at USD 6006 per person, which pays for the route through the icefall.

The trek ends at base camp. Trekkers do not enter the icefall and do not climb above it, so neither fee applies to you and neither belongs in a trekking budget. If you see a page adding a royalty or an icefall fee to the cost of walking to base camp, it has confused two entirely different trips that happen to share a place name.

Both permits are inside every trek we operate. Our store records both of them the same way: Yes, arranged by the operator. You do not pay either fee at a counter, you do not pay us a markup on either one, and neither is an extra on your invoice.

What that means on the day. You give us your passport details when you book. We register you before you fly. Your park permit is in hand before you reach the gate at Monjo, and your Trek Card is collected in Lukla while you are having the first cup of tea. Nobody in your group queues for a document, and nobody discovers at Lukla that the permit they were told to buy in Kathmandu was never sold there.

We can do this because we are the operator rather than a reseller. everestbasecamp.tours is run by Nepal Unique Treks and Expedition Pvt Ltd, a licensed Kathmandu company and member 2291 of the Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal. Our license numbers and the public member record are on the page about our licenses, and how a departure is actually staffed is on the page about how we run the trek.

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.