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2026 costs for Kathmandu
Kathmandu in 2026: world's most polluted major city on some mornings, and the permits above it got far more expensive
By RuinMyTrip Editorial
Kathmandu is a city of 856,767 people at roughly 1,400 metres, in a bowl-shaped valley holding around four million. It is the entry point for essentially all Nepal tourism, and Nepal took 1,158,459 international arrivals in 2025, about 97 percent of the pre-pandemic 2019 level, led by India with 292,438 visitors (25.2 percent), then the United States with 112,316 (9.7 percent), China with 95,480 (8.2 percent), the U…
What nearly ruins it: The air, plainly. Kathmandu sits in a bowl that traps pollution, and IQAir put it among the world's ten most polluted major cities repeatedly through 2026, including on February 1…
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Written by RuinMyTrip Editorial from published research and official sources, not from a personal trip. It is not a traveler review and is never counted in the community rating. How we research.
Practical tips
Editorial- Check the AQI before you commit to dates. IQAir ranked Kathmandu the world's most polluted major city on March 8, 2026 with AQI over 200, and among the top ten on February 12 and April 22, 2026.
- Avoid January through May and November to December if air quality matters to you. Those are Kathmandu's worst months, driven by winter inversion and then fires, stubble and waste burning and brick kilns.
- Bring a proper N95-class mask, not a cloth one. PM2.5 is the dominant pollutant, and it was measured at 4.9 times the WHO guideline as far back as 2013.
- Budget separately if you are climbing rather than trekking. Nepal's spring Everest royalty rose from $11,000 to $15,000, plus a $4,000 waste management fee, a mandatory Nepali guide and body-repatriation insurance.
- Ordinary trekking is still cheap: the Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality permit is NPR 3,000 (about $23) for the first four weeks and Sagarmatha National Park entry is NPR 3,000 plus 13 percent VAT (about $28).
- Plan around the monsoon. Roughly 65 percent of the valley's annual precipitation falls between June and September, which clears the air but closes the mountain views and triggers landslides on road routes.
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