How much does a visa actually cost? The full bill
isvisarequired.com · 2026-09-16
Say you live in the United States and you're applying for a Schengen visa to spend a week in Norway. The visa fee is €90, set by EU law. Then the application centre adds its own charge, and offers you courier delivery, photographs and text-message updates on top of that.
Visas run from nothing to well over US$1,000 an application. The UK charges £1,128 for a ten-year visit visa. The headline fee is rarely what leaves your account, though. The issuing government publishes its price, the company that takes your fingerprints lists its charges on a different website, fast-track fees sit in another schedule, and US student visas come with a fee owed to a separate agency. Every one of those pages is accurate, and none of them adds it up for you.
Four common applications, with the second charge added. The totals are our arithmetic, not a government's.
| Application | Government fee | Second charge | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Norway short-stay visa, applied for in the US | €90 | €26 service fee | €116, or €192.50 with courier in the city, photos and SMS |
| US B1/B2 visitor visa with an expedited interview | US$185 | US$750 expedite fee | US$935 |
| US F-1 student visa | US$185 | US$350 SEVIS fee | US$535 |
| Canadian visitor visa, one adult | CAD 100 | CAD 85 biometrics | CAD 185 |
What a Schengen visa really costs
Under EU visa rules the fee is €90 for an adult. It went up from €80 on 11 June 2024, and the European Commission has to reassess it every three years, so don't treat €90 as permanent. Children aged six to under twelve pay €45 and under-sixes pay nothing. School pupils and students travelling to study, researchers travelling for research and a few other groups are exempt.
The second bill comes from the application centre. EU law caps its service fee at €45, half the visa fee, and the cap applies even when your visa fee has been waived, so a student who owes the consulate nothing still pays the contractor. In principle the cap rises to €80, or exceptionally €120, where the country you're applying to has no consulate collecting applications in yours and no other Schengen country represents it there.
The same contractor charges what it likes by country: €26 for a Norwegian visa lodged in the US, €22 in India and €32.10 in Nepal for the identical French visa.
The cap binds the service fee and nothing else, which is where the rest of your money goes. On the Norway route from the US, the optional extras include courier delivery at €52 within the city or €63 outside it, four photographs at €17.50 and SMS updates at €7. VFS says on that page that none of them has any bearing on how fast or how favourably your visa is decided, so buy them only if you'd use them anyway. Courier alone is more than half the government fee again.
You'll often be told to skip the outsourcer and apply at the consulate. EU rules say a country may keep that option open, not that it must, so check it exists before you plan around it.
Nor does €90 always reach your card as €90. Consulates charge in euro or local currency at the European Central Bank reference rate and are allowed to round up. The Italian consulate in Los Angeles charged US$104.90 for a short-stay visa in the quarter to 30 September 2026, and resets the figure every quarter.
Repeat applicants get one real saving. Fingerprints must be given in person on a first application, but if yours went into the EU's visa database less than 59 months earlier they're copied across. Inside that window you need not attend at all, and the courier and photographs drop off the bill along with the appointment.
€90 is the fee the Visa Code sets. The application centre bills separately, and its cap is €45. Photo: Friedrich Haag / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
How much a US visa costs
The State Department's fee table sets the application fee at US$185 for visitor (B), transit (C-1), student (F and M) and exchange (J) visas. Petition-based categories, including H, L, O, P, Q and R, pay US$205, and E treaty trader and investor visas US$315.
Since July 2026 you can also buy your way up the queue. From 1 July to 31 December 2026, selected posts charge US$750 for an expedited B1/B2 interview appointment, on top of the US$185, as a pilot ahead of the 2028 Olympics. That gives a US tourist visa a published price of US$935 if you want to be seen sooner. Worth it if your post is quoting months and the flights are booked. Not worth it if you're merely a fortnight late. The wait is the thing to price first; we set out the realistic lead times in how early to apply for a visa.
The fee is non-refundable, and it doesn't follow you: the US Embassy in London warns that if you move your application to another embassy, you'll pay a new fee and complete a new DS-160 form. Decide where you'll interview before you pay.
Students owe a second agency. The I-901 SEVIS fee is US$350 for F and M applicants and US$220 for J applicants, collected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement separately from the visa fee, so an F-1 student is US$535 down before a consular officer has opened the file.
If your passport lets you skip the visa, ESTA now costs US$40.27, made up of three separate statutory charges, against US$21 before July 2025. And the US$250 visa integrity fee you may have read about has no published way to pay it yet, on which more below.
UK visa fees and the health surcharge
A UK visit visa costs £135 for up to six months and £1,128 for up to ten years. An ETA costs £20.
The Home Office publishes its own estimated cost of handling each application alongside its prices, in its visa fees transparency data. In the edition published in September 2026, a six-month visit visa and a ten-year one each cost the department £116. The ten-year visa costs you more than eight times as much for the same work. The Home Office puts the ETA's own unit cost at £10 and sells it for £20.
That makes the ten-year visa a bet on your own travel plans, and one with a catch: if you pay for ten years and are granted a shorter visa, you don't get the difference back.
On longer UK routes the visa fee isn't even the biggest number. The immigration health surcharge is £1,035 a year, or £776 for students and their dependants, Youth Mobility Scheme holders and under-18s, and it's paid up front for the full length of the visa. Three years at the standard rate comes to £3,105, against a £2,064 application fee for the Route to Settlement.
Visa fees in Canada and India
Canada splits its prices into separate lines. IRCC's fee list charges CAD 100 per person for a visitor visa, or CAD 500 for a family of five or more, then CAD 85 per person (CAD 170 per family) for biometrics. A single adult who has to give biometrics pays CAD 185, which is 85% more than the headline. An eTA is CAD 7.
India's e-Tourist visa has a seasonal price for most nationalities. The 30-day visa is US$10 from April to June and US$25 from July to March. A one-year visa is US$40 and a five-year visa US$200. UK nationals, along with those of Gibraltar, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and Jersey, pay US$484 for five years. Twenty-two nationalities pay nothing, and several more, including Malaysia, Thailand and South Africa, pay nothing for the 30-day visa.
India's own portal is also unusually blunt about what you shouldn't be paying for. The official e-visa portal says no intermediary or travel agent is needed, and the government makes no provision for an emergency or express fee at all, so any such line is the seller's own.
Will you get a refund if your visa is refused?
Almost certainly not.
Under EU rules the Schengen fee comes back in two situations only: you applied to the wrong consulate, or your application was inadmissible and never examined. A refused application has been examined, so it fits neither. The rules say nothing about refunding the service fee, and VFS marks its €26 on the Norway route as non-refundable.
The State Department's page on visa denials answers the refund question with a flat no. If you reapply, you normally pay again, with one exception covered in the questions below. ESTA at least tells you the price of a no: US$10.27 of the US$40.27 is a cost-recovery charge you pay even if you're denied.
A UK visitor visa fee isn't refunded if you're refused. The health surcharge is the exception, refunded in full if your application is refused or withdrawn before a decision, normally within six weeks. On a refused Route to Settlement application with three years of surcharge paid up front, the UK returns the £3,105 and keeps the £2,064 fee.
A refusal costs you the whole fee, which is the argument for spending an extra week on your documents rather than US$750 on a faster appointment. If it's already happened, our guide to what happens after a visa refusal sets out your options.
Dublin's Custom House, built in 1791 to tax goods moving through the port and still in government hands. Visa fees are set the same way: by a department, in a published schedule, and revised on its own timetable. Photo: Christian David / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
How to work out your own total
Start by checking whether your passport needs a visa at all — our visa checker covers 195 passports — then take the government fee from the issuing government's own page and add only the application-centre lines you'll use.
What not to trust is a third-party listing for the government fee. When we checked 37 digital nomad visa programmes against official sources, 218 field values changed, fees among them. Thailand's long-term resident visa was widely listed at US$200, when the Thai Board of Investment charges nothing to apply and 50,000 baht (about US$1,500 at September 2026 exchange rates) once the visa is issued.
If a figure you find online looks tidy, check it against the issuing government's page before you budget on it.
Common questions
Does a 10-year Schengen visa cost more?
No, it's the same €90. EU rules price the application rather than the validity, and there's no higher tier for multi-entry or long-validity visas.
Do tourists have to pay US$250 to enter the US?
Congress enacted a Visa Integrity Fee of at least US$250 in July 2025 that can't be waived or reduced. USCIS then deferred it pending cross-agency coordination, nothing has been published since, and no State Department or embassy page tells applicants how or when to pay it.
Do I have to pay again if my US visa is refused?
Usually, yes. A 221(g) refusal for missing documents can be reassessed on the original fee if you supply what's missing within one year of the refusal. After that year, or after a 214(b) refusal, you file a new application and pay again.
What's the most expensive visa?
Of the fee schedules we read, the steepest are the UK's £3,635 for a Route to Settlement application in the "other dependant relative" category, £3,226 for indefinite leave to remain (which doesn't attract the health surcharge), and Thailand's 50,000 baht long-term resident visa issuance fee. For a visitor visa, the highest is the UK's £1,128 ten-year visa, and the dearest US figure is US$935 with an expedited appointment.