Bilateral labour agreements: where Nepal stands with Europe

Nepal sends labour to 178 destinations but holds formal bilateral labour agreements with only 13 of them. Europe accounts for the fastest-growing share of the outflow, 72,953 approvals in FY 2024/25, which is 8.69 percent of the total, up from 25,697 four fiscal years earlier. Almost all of that growth happened without a single government-to-government framework behind it. Romania is the lone European country with a signed bilateral labour agreement. Croatia, which by early 2025 held roughly 35,635 Nepalis in active employment and had become the largest foreign workforce in the country, has no agreement at all. For a destination employer reading this, the practical lesson is short: you do not wait for a treaty to hire from Nepal, and in Europe you will almost certainly be hiring without one.

What a bilateral labour agreement actually does

A bilateral labour agreement, or BLA, is a government-to-government instrument between Nepal and a destination state. It is negotiated by the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security (MoLESS) on the Nepali side and sets the floor for how nationals of one country are recruited and treated as workers in the other. A typical text covers minimum contract terms, a dispute mechanism, the obligation that recruitment costs sit on the employer, and sometimes social-security treatment. The Nepal-Romania agreement, for example, guarantees Romanian-citizen parity on social security for Nepali workers. A BLA is not the same as a memorandum of understanding (MoU) or a joint declaration of intent, which signal cooperation without binding terms, and the distinction matters when an auditor asks what protects a given worker.

It helps to separate two things that are easy to conflate. A bilateral agreement governs the corridor at the state level. A government-to-government, or G2G, corridor is a far narrower thing: a route where a state body, not a private agency, does the recruitment itself. Nepal runs only three true G2G corridors anywhere in the world: South Korea under the Employment Permit System (EPS), Israel for caregivers, and the United Kingdom for health and care workers. Everything else, including every meaningful European construction and hospitality flow, runs as a private corridor: a licensed Nepali agency placing workers with a named foreign employer, supervised by the Department of Foreign Employment (DoFE) at New Baneshwor in Kathmandu.

What Nepal has signed in Europe, and when

The European picture is thin and recent. Listing what exists, with dates, is more useful than any summary adjective.

The Romania pact is Nepal's first and so far only European bilateral labour agreement. Note the date variance: most international reporting puts the signing at 6 October 2023, while Nepali-language sources record 2 October 2023, the equivalent of 19 Asoj 2080 BS. Either way it is recent, and it followed Romania already becoming the leading European destination, with roughly 28,000 Nepali workers in FY 2024/25 against a 100,000 foreign-worker quota Romania held across 2022 to 2025. Nepal was Romania's single largest source country at 20,636 workers, ahead of Sri Lanka at 16,115.

The Nepal-Germany instrument is a joint declaration of intent signed in Berlin, not a BLA. It records the intent of MoLESS and the German Federal Employment Agency, the Bundesagentur für Arbeit, to cooperate on labour mobility. Treating it as a binding agreement is the most common mistake made in employer-facing material, and it is wrong. The Nepal-UK MoU of 22 August 2022 is real and binding but narrow: it covers fee-free recruitment of health and care workers, with nurses earning GBP 27,000 to 32,000 a year and an eligible age band of 20 to 45. It does not reach construction, manufacturing, or hospitality.

The governance gap, named with dates

The honest framing is that Nepal's European migration roughly tripled almost entirely without bilateral agreements or G2G systems. Nepal forwarded draft BLAs to 16 European countries. As of early 2026 only Romania had concluded. MoLESS Joint Secretary Pitambar Ghimire confirmed the position on 16 February 2026, and the effort had by then been routed through the Foreign Ministry after the labour-ministry track stalled. By May 2026, Minister Ramji Yadav said that none of the 16 European countries had responded after more than a year. The named lists of target countries vary by source, which is itself a sign of how informal the push has been: Croatia, Malta, Romania, Poland, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria and Serbia all appear in one version or another. Nepal forwarded a draft BLA package to Croatia, Poland, Portugal, Malta and Spain in February 2024.

There is also no Nepal-EU-wide mobility treaty, and there is no near-term sign of one. The European Union's cooperation with Nepal is grant-based development funding, not labour mobility: EUR 209 million across 2021 to 2024 and a further EUR 113 million across 2025 to 2027, per the European External Action Service. That money funds development programmes, not a recruitment corridor.

For completeness, the older non-European corridors that do carry agreements set the contrast. Qatar signed an MoU on 21 March 2005, the UAE on 3 July 2007 (renewed 14 June 2019), Bahrain on 29 April 2008, Jordan on 18 October 2017, Malaysia a zero-cost MoU on 29 October 2018, Mauritius on 11 June 2019, Japan a Specified Skilled Worker memorandum on 25 March 2019, and Israel a framework agreement on 30 September 2020. The newest addition is the Nepal-Saudi Arabia BLA signed in Riyadh on 25 or 26 January 2026, sought for roughly a decade, which guarantees unskilled workers 1,000 Saudi riyals plus 300 riyals for meals and covers the roughly 400,000 Nepalis already in Saudi Arabia. With the Saudi deal, the count reached 13 agreement countries against 178 approved destinations. Europe sits almost entirely outside that count.

What this means for an EU employer

The absence of a bilateral agreement does not block you, and the presence of one in Romania does not change your mechanics much. The Nepal side of an EU hire runs through DoFE the same way whether or not a BLA exists. The two things you genuinely need are a DoFE-licensed Nepali recruitment agency and a DoFE-verified Job Order, sometimes called the demand letter, tied to your attested employment offer.

• The licensed agency. Nepal had 1,019 active recruitment-agency licences as of 14 January 2025. Only a licensed company can lawfully recruit and process workers for you, and only a licensed company can lodge your Job Order. Sub-agents (dalals) were banned by a March 2019 amendment to the Foreign Employment Act 2007. Verify the licence by name or number at dofe.gov.np before you sign anything. See how to verify a licensed Nepali recruiter.
• The verified Job Order. Your offer documents are attested and the agency files for DoFE Job Order approval. The verification window runs 14 to 28 days in normal months and 35 to 45 days at the September to October peak around Dashain and Tihar. A headcount mismatch between your demand letter and the signed contract forces a refile and costs 7 to 10 days. The full sequence is set out in the DoFE permit guide for employers.
• The cost obligation. In the Gulf and Malaysia, the duty to pay visa and ticket flows from Nepal's Free Visa Free Ticket policy. In Europe, that statutory scheme does not apply, because it covers only seven destinations and no European country is among them. That trap is unpacked in the Free Visa Free Ticket explainer. The employer-pays obligation on an EU placement therefore rests on international standards and on the recruiter's own model, not on a Nepali statute or a BLA.

That last point is where a missing agreement matters least. Werklist applies the Employer Pays Principle to every corridor it runs, including the EU, aligned with the IOM International Recruitment Integrity System (IRIS). The worker pays nothing toward documentation, attestation, visa, travel, medical, or orientation. The recruitment fee sits on the employer side, where IRIS-aligned standards require it. A bilateral agreement would write that obligation into a treaty; in its absence, the recruiter writes it into the contract and the audit file. For an EU employer the outcome is the same, and it does not wait on diplomacy.

How Werklist runs a Europe corridor without a treaty

Werklist's Kathmandu branch operates as Blusift Nepal, holds a DoFE recruitment licence, runs in-country casting and trade-testing, and walks files through the DoFE office at Maharajgunj every week. That is the practical answer to the governance gap. Where Nepal lacks a G2G framework with your country, a licensed agency supplies the structure the treaty would otherwise provide: an attested Job Order, IRIS-aligned zero-cost recruitment, pre-departure orientation aligned with HELVETAS and the Safer Migration (SaMi) programme, and a 90-day replacement guarantee re-mobilised under the original terms with no second sourcing fee. Croatia, with the largest Nepali workforce in Europe and no BLA, has been run this way for years, and the Croatia hiring guide sets out that route in detail. The benchmark from a signed demand letter to a first shift is 95 to 120 days, compressing to 50 to 70 days against a standby roster. The same milestones appear in the Nepal-to-EU mobilisation timeline.

If you are weighing a Nepal corridor into an EU country that has no bilateral agreement, which is almost all of them, send a brief to the Kathmandu branch through /contact-companies with the destination, the trades, the headcount, and the target start date. The licensed-agency route, not a treaty, is what moves the file.