Nepal's labour migration, by the numbers

Nepal issued a record 839,266 labour approvals in fiscal year 2024/25, the highest annual total the Department of Foreign Employment (DOFE) has ever recorded. That figure is the load-bearing number for any employer weighing a Nepal corridor, because it sets the size of the legally documented outbound pool in a single year. It undercounts the workforce already abroad, which is larger, and it carries no forecast about next year, which would be softer ground. What it counts exactly is the workers who passed through the regulator at New Baneshwor and the DOFE office at Maharajgunj with a stamped labour permit (श्रम स्वीकृति, shram swikriti) in hand. This briefing reads that pool the way a procurement lead should: how big it is, where it goes today, what underwrites the whole system, and why the European share is the line on the chart that is moving.

A note on the calendar before the numbers, because it trips up most first reads. Nepal's fiscal year runs mid-July to mid-July, so FY 2024/25 covers roughly mid-2024 to mid-2025 and is written 2081/82 in the Bikram Sambat calendar. Every approval and remittance count below is labelled by fiscal year for that reason. A bare Gregorian year against these figures is almost always a misread.

The size of the outbound pool

The 839,266 approvals in FY 2024/25 split 744,811 men and 94,455 women, and they break into 505,957 first-time permits and 333,309 renewals. The split matters operationally. First-time approvals are the genuinely new entrants to foreign employment, the candidates with no prior contract abroad; renewals are workers returning to the same channel. An employer recruiting fresh crews is drawing chiefly on that 505,957 first-time cohort, not the headline total.

The single-year record sits on top of a deep base. DOFE issued 741,297 approvals the year before, in FY 2023/24, a slight dip from the prior year (661,125 men, 80,172 women). Across FY 2022/23 and 2023/24 combined, the Nepal Labour Migration Report 2024, published by the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security (MoLESS), counts 954,319 new plus 558,297 renewed approvals. Step back further and ILO Nepal and DOFE put cumulative approvals at 5.7 million over FY 2008/09 to 2023/24, with 1.51 million of those in the two most recent years alone. The flow is not a recent spike, it is a fifteen-year structural outflow that has accelerated.

The stock of Nepalis already working abroad is harder to fix precisely, and the honest range is wide. Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) and DOFE estimates put 3.5 to 4.4 million Nepalis in foreign employment, roughly 1.3 million in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and more than 500,000 in Malaysia. For a sense of velocity, the first quarter of FY 2024/25 alone, mid-July to mid-October 2024, saw 170,593 workers depart, per DOFE Director Gurudatt Subedi. That is sustained outflow above 2,000 workers a day, every day, including renewals.

Where the pool goes today

Concentration is the defining feature of the destination map, and it favours the Gulf and Malaysia by a wide margin. The Nepal Labour Migration Report 2024 puts the GCC plus Malaysia at 81.3 percent of new approvals. The top of the FY 2024/25 league table reads United Arab Emirates first, then Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Malaysia, Romania, Japan, South Korea and Croatia. The notable move at the top is the UAE overtaking Malaysia, which had long held the lead, as the single largest destination.

The shape of that concentration is clearer one year back, where DOFE's FY 2022/23 top five carry hard numbers: Malaysia 202,674, Qatar 90,472, UAE 74,703, Saudi Arabia 74,352, and Kuwait 31,624. Five destinations, all in the Gulf or Southeast Asia, absorb the overwhelming majority of the flow. For an employer, the read is blunt: the established machinery, the medical panels, the orientation centres, the agency relationships, all of it is calibrated for those corridors first. A European corridor draws on the same worker pool but runs against infrastructure built for the Gulf.

The composition of the pool also shifts by destination. Women were 12.9 percent of total approvals in FY 2023/24. The split by region is sharper than that average suggests: women made up roughly 24 percent of Europe-bound approvals in FY 2024/25 against 9.3 percent of Gulf-bound. An employer recruiting for hospitality, care, or housekeeping roles where the candidate pool skews female will find the European corridor structurally more aligned than the Gulf one.

The remittance backbone

Nothing about Nepal's labour migration makes sense without the money it sends home, because that flow is what makes the system politically permanent. In FY 2024/25 remittances reached a record Rs 1,723.27 billion, about USD 12.64 billion, up 19.2 percent in rupee terms and 16.3 percent in dollar terms, per NRB. That is not a side effect of migration, it is one of the largest single lines in the national economy.

As a share of GDP the figure depends on who is measuring, and the source must always be named. The World Bank put remittances at 26.89 percent of GDP in 2023 and 26.2 percent in 2024. NRB's own reading for FY 2024/25 runs higher, near 28.6 percent. Some cited figures reach into the low thirties on different methodologies. The honest framing is a band of roughly 25 to 29 percent depending on institution, against a world average near 5.1 percent. Whichever number you take, Nepal sits among the most remittance-dependent economies on earth.

For an employer, the relevance is not abstract macroeconomics. It is that 35.6 percent of Nepali households received remittances in 2023, averaging Rs 185,852 per remitter, per the Nepal Labour Migration Report 2024. Foreign employment is a mass household strategy across the country, not a niche. That depth is what keeps the candidate pool replenishing year after year, and it is why a well-run corridor finds trade-tested crews rather than scraping a thin market.

The European line on the chart

The Gulf is the volume, but Europe is the trajectory, and trajectory is what a forward-looking supply plan reads. The European corridor has roughly tripled in four years: 25,697 approvals at 4.0 percent of the total in FY 2021/22, then 45,302 (6.0 percent) in FY 2022/23, then 57,146 (7.7 percent) in FY 2023/24, then a record 72,953 at 8.69 percent in FY 2024/25, per CESLAM and DOFE figures. The share has roughly doubled while the absolute count grew about 184 percent.

Two destinations drive most of that line. Romania leads Europe with roughly 28,000 Nepali workers in FY 2024/25 and holds a 100,000 foreign-worker quota for which Nepal is the single largest source. Croatia recorded 14,240 in the most recent year, a remarkable climb from just five permits seven years earlier. The growth has happened largely without the bilateral scaffolding the Gulf corridors enjoy, which is both the opportunity and the risk: the pool is willing and the demand is real, but the governance is thinner. We cover the drivers behind that pivot, the wage gap, the heat, and the EU labour shortages pulling workers north, in Nepali workers, the Gulf to Europe shift.

For an employer the takeaway is timing. The European share is small in absolute terms but rising fast, and the corridors are not yet crowded with destination employers competing for the same crews. The first movers into a trade, a welder line, a steel-fixing crew, a housekeeping roster, are building roster relationships in a market that will be tighter in three fiscal years than it is today.

What the numbers mean for a supply plan

The data resolves into a few operating facts. The pool is large and renewing, more than half a million genuinely new approvals a year. The default machinery points at the Gulf, so a European corridor borrows the same workers but needs its own discipline on documentation, medical screening, and the cost stack that sits on top of every departure, which we break down in the welfare fund and insurance guide. And the European line is the one moving, which makes corridor entry a question of when, not whether, for employers in shortage trades.

The headline number also flatters how fast a file actually clears, and a single documentary error proves it. When the headcount on the employer's demand letter does not match the figure on the DOFE Job Order submitted at Maharajgunj, the office returns the file for correction rather than verifying it, and the worker count never reaches the 839,266 tally on its first pass. A refile resets the verification clock, which runs 14 to 28 days in normal months and stretches to 35 to 45 days at the September to October Dashain peak, so one mismatched number on one form can cost an employer three to six weeks against a planned start date. The annual record describes a pool; it says nothing about whether a given file will pass on the first submission.

The mechanics of actually running a Nepal-to-EU placement, from demand letter to first shift, sit in How to hire Nepali workers for Croatia, complete 2026 guide, with the corridor benchmark of 95 to 120 days from signed demand letter to landing. An employer ready to test a trade against the live pool should send a short brief, headcount, trade, and target start date, to Werklist's Kathmandu branch via contact companies. We read it against the current roster and tell you whether the crew exists before anything signs.