Free visa, free ticket: what Nepal's policy means for EU employers

Nepal has a policy that obliges the foreign employer to pay for a worker's entry visa and air ticket. It is called Free Visa, Free Ticket, it has been on the books since 2015, and the first instinct of a European procurement lead reading about it is to assume it governs the Nepal to EU corridor. It does not. The policy covers exactly seven destinations, all of them in the Gulf or Malaysia, and the European Union sits entirely outside its scope. The reason an EU employer still needs to understand it is twofold. First, it is the clearest statement in Nepali statute of how the country thinks about who pays to move a worker, and that logic carries into every corridor including the EU. Second, the most common budgeting error on an EU placement is to assume either that this policy makes the ticket someone else's problem, or that the worker simply absorbs the residual costs the policy leaves behind. Both assumptions cost money at the wrong moment.

What the policy actually says, and the seven destinations it binds

The Ministry of Labour and Employment, the body that later became the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security (MoLESS), announced Free Visa, Free Ticket on 9 June 2015 and implemented it on 6 July 2015. The mechanism is simple. For a worker bound for a covered destination, the foreign employer must bear the cost of the entry visa and the round-trip air ticket, and the Nepali recruitment agency may charge the worker a service fee of no more than Rs 10,000, and only where the employer refuses to pay it. That Rs 10,000 ceiling replaced the pre-2015 caps of Rs 70,000 for the Gulf and Rs 80,000 for Malaysia, so the headline change was a roughly seven-fold reduction in what an agency could legally charge a worker.

The seven destinations are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Malaysia. Those seven absorb something like 95 to 97 percent of Nepali labour migrants once India is set aside, which is why the policy reads, on paper, as if it covers almost everyone. It does not cover the corridor that matters to a European buyer. No European destination is named in the 2015 directive, and the Centre for the Study of Labour and Mobility (CESLAM) is explicit that Croatia, Romania, and the rest of the EU were never written into it.

This is the single most important point for an EU employer to internalise. The statutory obligation to pay the visa and the ticket does not automatically attach to a Nepal to EU placement. A claim you may encounter, that Free Visa, Free Ticket was reactivated in 2024 and now pulls Croatia into scope, does not match the directive or the MoLESS record. The policy remained a seven-country Gulf and Malaysia instrument throughout, and it is now being unwound rather than widened.

How the policy encodes the Employer Pays Principle

Strip away the destination list and what Free Visa, Free Ticket expresses is a principle, that the cost of moving a worker belongs on the employer side of the ledger, not the worker side. That principle has a name in international recruitment, the Employer Pays Principle, and it long predates the Nepali policy. Its cleanest articulation is Principle 1 of the Dhaka Principles for Migration with Dignity, launched by the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) on 18 December 2012, which states plainly that no fees are charged to migrant workers.

Nepal had already written the same logic into hard law. The Foreign Employment Act, 2064 (2007) prohibits worker-paid recruitment fees, and the ILO Global Study on recruitment costs scores Nepal at the strictest end, fees not allowed. Free Visa, Free Ticket is the operational expression of that prohibition for the seven covered destinations, naming the visa and the ticket specifically and capping the residual service fee at Rs 10,000. The historical taproot runs further back still, to the 2007 Nepal to Qatar memorandum of understanding, which stipulated that all the cost of migration was to be borne by the employer.

For an EU employer the practical reading is this. The Employer Pays obligation on a Nepal to EU placement does not flow from Free Visa, Free Ticket, because the EU is out of scope. It flows from the international standards that govern fair recruitment, the ILO General Principles and Operational Guidelines for Fair Recruitment adopted in September 2016, the definition of recruitment fees and related costs adopted in November 2018, and the IOM International Recruitment Integrity System (IRIS). Werklist applies that model to every corridor it runs, the EU included, regardless of whether a destination sits inside Nepal's statutory scheme. The recruitment fee is placed on the employer side, where IRIS-aligned standards require it, and the worker pays nothing toward documentation, attestation, visa, travel, medical, or orientation. For the full toolkit an audit file needs, see ethical recruitment in Nepal and the zero-cost model.

Why this is a CSR advantage, not a cost surprise

A buyer who only reads the policy summary tends to land in one of two wrong places. Either the policy makes the EU employer think the visa and ticket are statutorily someone else's problem, which is false because the EU is out of scope, or it makes the employer think the worker absorbs whatever the policy does not name, which is also false under a fair-recruitment model. The correct framing sits in between, and it is a commercial advantage rather than a cost shock.

The advantage is that an employer-pays corridor produces a clean compliance file. The cost categories the ILO enumerates, medical, insurance and the migrant welfare fund, skills tests, training and orientation, equipment, travel and lodging, and the administrative load of contracts, identity documents, visas and permits, are exactly the line items a destination CSR or audit team will ask about. When those costs are documented on the employer invoice rather than buried in a worker's debt, the file passes. When they are pushed onto the worker, the corridor fails. A 2,244-worker survey found Nepali migrants paying around Rs 100,000 on average, roughly ten times the legal cap, and Nepal's own National Statistics Office Return Migration and Recruitment Cost Survey, completed in November 2023 with ILO support, found average costs above NPR 100,000 with fewer than 2 percent of workers paying nothing. Those are the numbers a worker-pays corridor generates, and they are the numbers an auditor flags.

The contrast tells the buyer something. A corridor priced near the policy's notional Rs 10,000 ceiling, or near the original launch target of roughly USD 75 in total worker cost, is a corridor where the real costs have gone somewhere. In the Gulf they went onto the worker, who in practice paid USD 1,500 to USD 2,200 against a Nepal GDP per capita of USD 1,324 at the end of 2023. An EU employer that wants the opposite, a corridor where the costs are visible and on its own books, is buying the CSR advantage on purpose.

The failure mode, under-budgeting the ticket and the welfare levy

Here is where a first-time EU buyer loses money, and it is specific. The placement budget gets built around the visa and the gross salary, the two largest and most obvious numbers, and two smaller items get treated as rounding error. They are not. They are gating items, and they surface at the worst possible moment, the week of departure.

The first is the air ticket. On a Gulf placement the policy forces the employer to carry it, so a buyer copying a Gulf cost model into an EU deal assumes the same and leaves the ticket out of the EU budget. On the EU corridor no statute carries it, so unless the employer has explicitly agreed to bear it, the line is simply missing. A Kathmandu to a European hub one-way fare, routed and timed against a fixed fly date, is not trivial, and discovering the gap three days before departure forces a scramble that delays the cohort.

The second is the Foreign Employment Welfare Fund levy, paid before labour approval is granted. This is not a number an employer can negotiate or skip, the labour permit will not issue without it. The contribution was revised on 31 July 2024 from a flat NPR 1,000 to a tiered figure, NPR 1,500 for contracts up to three years and NPR 2,500 for contracts over three years. EU contracts typically run beyond three years and fall in the higher tier. Sitting next to it is the mandatory Foreign Employment Term Life Insurance premium, roughly NPR 3,500 to NPR 5,500 depending on the worker's age, and a Social Security Fund contribution. None of these is large on its own. Together they are the difference between a permit that issues on schedule and a file that stalls at the Department of Foreign Employment (DOFE) office at Maharajgunj while a payment is chased.

The concrete consequence is a timing failure, and it costs more than the overrun itself. If the welfare-fund levy and the insurance premium are unbudgeted and unpaid, the labour approval does not issue, the worker cannot clear departure formalities at Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA), and a fly date booked weeks earlier is lost. Rebooking a cohort's flights and resequencing the DOFE file behind it costs days the project plan did not have. The two cheapest items on the stack gate the most expensive one, the salary-earning start date. For how each of these lines is invoiced and where it sits, see the cost of hiring Nepali workers in the EU and the breakdown of the welfare fund and insurance.

Where the policy is heading, and why it does not change your EU file

The seven-country scheme is now under reversal. On 3 February 2026 the minister, Rajendra Singh Bhandari, announced scrapping Free Visa, Free Ticket within a month, describing such schemes as defrauding the youths, with MoLESS to provide medical, orientation and permits directly instead. By April 2026 the cabinet had turned over and the Labour Minister, Dipak Kumar Sah, reaffirmed the Rs 10,000 service-fee cap in a video message on 5 April 2026, with DOFE having sent inquiry letters on 17 March 2026 and complaint lines open through Hello Sarkar on 1111 and the Foreign Employment Call Centre on 1141. The two ministers are different post-holders across a cabinet change, not a contradiction, and the direction of travel is a redesign of how the Gulf corridor handles worker costs.

For an EU employer none of this moves the file. The scheme that is being unwound never covered the EU, and the obligation that does apply to a Nepal to EU placement, that the worker pays nothing and the costs sit on the employer side, comes from the IRIS-aligned model and the ILO standards, not from a Nepali Gulf scheme that may not exist by the end of the year. The numbers that bind your placement are the welfare-fund tier, the insurance premium, the SSF line, and a ticket you should assume is yours to budget.

If you are scoping a Nepal to EU corridor and want the visa, ticket, welfare-fund and insurance lines mapped against a real fly date before you commit, send a brief to Werklist's Kathmandu branch via contact companies. The team works files through the DOFE office at Maharajgunj every week and will tell you which lines are statute, which are commercial, and which one is the one buyers forget.