The 5-Year India e-Tourist Visa Is Back in 2026: What UK Travellers Get Now

The email arrived at 6am UK time, which is how we knew it mattered to the sender. A retired teacher in Leicester — British citizen, born in Jalandhar, gave up her Indian passport decades ago and, for reasons that are a story for another day, never took out OCI — had been rationing her trips to India around the 30-day e-visa for years. "I've just read," she wrote, "that the five-year tourist visa is back. Is that true, or is it one of those rumours? Because if it's real, it changes everything about how I see my family."

It is real. On 18 May 2026, India reinstated the tourist visa categories it had quietly suspended back in March 2020 — including the long-duration paper sticker visas and, crucially for most UK travellers, the 1-year and 5-year multiple-entry e-Tourist visas. For almost six years those longer tiers simply did not exist on the portal; you applied for a 30-day visa, used it, and applied again. That era is, at the time of writing, over.

This post is the "it's back" explainer: which tiers exist now, what each one actually buys you, and the one detail the celebratory headlines tend to bury — that "five years" is how long the visa lives, not how long you may stay. If what you actually want to know is which airport and seaport gateways accept the e-visa and how the fee bands break down, that is its own subject, covered in our India e-visa entry points and fee changes 2026 guide. And if you are wondering whether to chance a self-application at all, our India e-visa rejections 2026 piece is the honest companion to this one. Here, we are focused on the restored long-duration tiers and how a UK traveller should choose between them.

We are an independent UK agent, not the government, so everything below should be checked against the live portal before you rely on it — and our Indian e-Visa service exists precisely to take that checking off your plate.

What was suspended, and what came back on 18 May 2026#

To understand why this is a genuine event rather than a tweak, it helps to remember what was lost.

Before March 2020, India offered tourist e-visas in three durations: a short 30-day visa, a 1-year multiple-entry visa, and a 5-year multiple-entry visa. When borders closed in the pandemic, the longer tiers were suspended. They stayed suspended long after travel itself resumed — so for years, even seasoned visitors with deep family ties were funnelled onto the 30-day option and made to reapply trip after trip.

The 18 May 2026 restoration brought the full menu back. As reported, the reinstatement covered:

• The longer-duration paper sticker visas lodged through VFS, and
• The 1-year and 5-year e-Tourist visas, applied for entirely online.

There is also a meaningful upgrade buried in the detail: the 30-day e-Tourist visa, historically a double-entry visa, is now reported to be multiple-entry as well. So across the board, the restored tourist e-visa tiers are multiple-entry, which matters a great deal if your travel involves hopping to a neighbouring country and back.

The three tiers, side by side#

Here is the restored menu as it stands at the time of writing. Treat the fee column as relative rather than absolute — the actual figures are set in US dollars and move (more on that below).

A few things deserve spelling out beyond the grid.

The 30-day visa is tied to your arrival: its validity runs from the date of entry, and it is the right tool for a single defined trip. The 1-year and 5-year visas behave differently — their validity runs from the date the electronic travel authorisation is granted, not from when you land. So the clock starts ticking the moment your e-visa is issued, whether or not you have flown yet. Plan your application date with that in mind, especially on the 5-year tier where a few wasted weeks at the start are a few wasted weeks of a five-year window.

The detail the headlines bury: 180 days a year, not five years straight#

This is the single most important sentence in the whole post, so we will isolate it.

We labour this because it is where disappointment lives. People hear "five-year visa" and picture an open door to live in India for five years. What it actually grants is five years of coming and going, with each year's total time inside the country capped. For the Leicester teacher who wants to spend a couple of months with family each winter and another stretch in spring, it is transformative. For someone imagining a permanent move, it is not the answer — that is a conversation about long-stay routes, and for British citizens of Indian origin, very often a conversation about OCI instead.

Worth saying plainly, because we are asked constantly: a long tourist visa is not a back door to OCI or to dual nationality. It confers no residence rights, no right to work, and no path to citizenship. If you are a British-Indian weighing a five-year tourist visa against finally sorting OCI, the trade-offs are real and we lay them out in OCI vs Indian visa 2026.

Who this is really for: the UK British-Indian without OCI#

The audience that benefits most from the restored tiers is specific: UK passport holders who travel to India often but do not hold OCI. That includes British citizens of Indian origin who surrendered their Indian passports years ago and never took out an OCI card, as well as British travellers with strong family, business-social or cultural ties who simply visit a lot.

For this group, the old 30-day-and-reapply grind was a real tax on time and money. Every trip meant a fresh application, a fresh fee, and a fresh wait. A 1-year or 5-year multiple-entry visa replaces that with a single grant and years of freedom to fly on short notice.

That said, if you are eligible for OCI, it is usually the better long-term answer — lifelong, no per-trip visa, no 180-day cap. OCI is not dual citizenship (no voting, no agricultural land, no government jobs, no constitutional office), but for visa-free lifetime travel it is hard to beat. The honest framing for many readers is: a 5-year tourist visa is the excellent interim answer while you decide on, or work towards, OCI. We unpack the eligibility and the choice in Indian e-visa for British citizens 2026.

Fees: set in dollars, so quote yourself a range#

We will hedge this hard, because the numbers genuinely move.

The e-Tourist visa fee is set in US dollars by the Bureau of Immigration, varies by nationality and visa length, and the published schedule was last revised on or around 20 February 2026. Three consequences flow from that:

• The 5-year tier costs more than the 1-year, which costs more than the 30-day — the ordering is reliable even when the exact figures are not.
• Because it is dollar-denominated, the sterling you actually pay drifts with the GBP/USD exchange rate on the day, on top of any card or gateway charge.
• The schedule is revised periodically, so a figure that was right last year may be stale now.

For all those reasons we deliberately do not print a hard pound figure here. The only reliable number is the live fee shown on the official portal at the moment you apply — every serious application should start by reading that, not a blog's cached estimate. The bands and gateway-linked costs are broken down further in our India e-visa entry points and fee changes 2026 guide.

How to apply, in order#

The mechanics are not complicated, but sequence and timing matter — especially the application window.

One more piece of the puzzle that is easy to miss at the border in 2026: arriving travellers are increasingly expected to have completed India's digital arrival formalities before or on landing. We cover what that means in practice in India e-arrival card mandatory 2026 — read it alongside this so your smooth new five-year visa is not let down by an unfilled arrival card.

DIY or use an agent — the honest call#

We always tell readers where the line sits.

DIY is perfectly reasonable if you are a straightforward case: a clean UK passport, no awkward travel history, no past Indian-visa refusals, and you are comfortable reading the portal carefully and getting the photo specification exactly right. For a one-off 30-day visa, most confident travellers should just do it themselves.

The agent route earns its fee when the stakes or the complexity rise: a 5-year visa you cannot afford to get rejected and have to restart; a prior refusal that needs handling honestly; a British-Indian background where the system sometimes asks for extra detail; or simply no appetite for the risk that a small form error costs you the application fee and your travel window. On a long-duration visa, the difference between a clean grant and a rejection-and-reapply is exactly the kind of thing a pre-submission human check prevents.

That is the whole of what our Indian e-Visa service does: pick the right tier for how you actually travel, complete the application accurately, sanity-check your photo and passport data against the spec, and confirm the live fee before you pay — so your restored five-year window opens cleanly the first time.

The Leicester teacher, for the record, did not need the 5-year after all — once we walked her through it, the 1-year multiple-entry matched her travel pattern better and cost less, and she would reassess at renewal. That is the point of choosing honestly rather than reflexively reaching for the longest tier. The visas are back; the right one for you is the one that fits how you really travel.

If your only question before booking flights is which restored tier suits you and whether your application will pass cleanly, that is precisely what we sort — quickly, and without the guesswork.

This guide reflects the restoration of India's tourist visa categories announced on 18 May 2026 and the e-Tourist visa tiers, stay limits and fee structure as observed by NriDirect in 2026. The reinstatement is recent and several figures here — including the fee schedule revised around 20 February 2026, the roughly 180-day annual stay cap, and the 120-day application window — are drawn from official and secondary sources and float with exchange rates and periodic revisions. Rules, fees and timelines change without notice, so verify current details on the official India e-Visa portal↗ before applying. NriDirect is an independent UK agent and is not affiliated with VFS Global, the Bureau of Immigration or the Indian High Commission.