Visas for a Destination Wedding in India 2026: A Host's Guide

The group chat that nobody warned you about#

Six months before the wedding, the venue is booked in Udaipur, the mehndi artist is confirmed, and the menu tasting is done. Then the WhatsApp group lights up. Your fiancé's university friends in Manchester want to know what visa they need. Your aunt in Toronto is asking the same. A cousin's American partner has never been to India and is nervous about the paperwork. And somewhere in the middle of it all, you realise your own fiancé — a British citizen with no Indian background — is asking the most important question of all: "Wait, what visa do I need to actually get married?"

Here is the first thing to tell everyone, and it saves a remarkable amount of panic: there is no such thing as a "wedding visa" for India. Nobody is applying for a special category, nobody needs a sponsorship letter from the Indian government, and the process for most guests is genuinely simple. Foreign guests attend a wedding on the ordinary e-Tourist visa, which covers tourism and visiting friends and relatives — which is, of course, exactly what attending a wedding is.

This guide is the host's cheat-sheet. It tells you which visa each type of guest needs, what your foreign fiancé needs to actually marry in India, and the two steps that trip people up at the last minute. Where it helps, our Indian e-Visa service can handle guest applications so you are not playing tech support from across an ocean.

The default answer for almost every guest: the e-Tourist visa#

For the overwhelming majority of your guest list — friends, foreign-citizen relatives, plus-ones — the answer is the e-Tourist visa. It is applied for online, there is no in-person appointment for most nationalities, and "visiting friends and relatives" is a stated purpose it covers. A wedding is a textbook use case.

The e-Tourist visa comes in a few durations, and which one a guest picks depends entirely on how long they are staying and whether they will be back.

British-citizen fees after the December 2025 reciprocity changes#

If your guests are British citizens, note that India revised its visa fees on a reciprocity basis with effect from 23 December 2025, and the British-citizen rates moved meaningfully. As approximate 2026 figures at the time of writing:

• 30-day e-Tourist — about US$10 for arrivals April to June, rising to roughly US$25 for July to March. This variant is double-entry.
• One-year e-Tourist — around US$40.
• Five-year e-Tourist — approximately US$484.

On top of any of these, expect a bank charge of around 2.5 percent. These are estimates that float with the exchange rate and periodic revisions, and the UK-specific surcharge on the shorter variants is not fully confirmed — so treat the above as the general published rate and always confirm the live fee on the official portal before paying.

The honest takeaway for hosts: for a guest flying in for a week or two of festivities and nothing else, the 30-day double-entry option is almost always the right and cheapest choice. The double-entry feature is quietly useful at weddings, where it is common to dart across a land or sea border for a couple of days — a quick trip to a neighbouring country between the engagement and the ceremony, say — and re-enter for the main event. The longer durations only make sense for guests who will genuinely return to India repeatedly over the months or years ahead; for a one-off wedding, paying for five years of validity is simply wasted money. Our companion guide on the Indian e-Visa for British citizens walks through the duration trade-off in detail.

Two things every single guest must do — visa or not#

Two requirements catch people out precisely because they sit outside the visa itself, so guests assume they are handled. They are not.

The second is the passport itself. Every guest's passport must be valid for at least six months beyond travel and have at least two blank pages. And critically, an e-Visa permits entry only through designated airports and seaports — not land borders. A guest planning to enter overland from Nepal or via a non-designated port on an e-Visa will be turned away. For a wedding, where everyone is flying into a major hub anyway, this rarely bites — but it is worth flagging to any adventurous guest combining the trip with regional travel. The list of permitted e-Visa entry gateways is worth sharing.

The special case: a foreign fiancé marrying in India#

This is the question that matters most, and the one with the most misunderstanding around it. If you are marrying a foreign citizen — say a British partner with no Indian origin — and the wedding is in India, here is the honest sequence.

There is no fiancé visa and no marriage-entry visa for India. Your fiancé does not apply for any special status to attend their own wedding. The path runs like this:

The thing to internalise is that the tourist visa is only the entry for the wedding. It is not a long-term status, and your new spouse should not try to live in India on rolling tourist visas. The proper route afterwards is the Entry (X) visa, and eventually OCI. Our dedicated guide on the Entry (X) visa for a foreign spouse and the OCI path covers that transition in full — it is essential reading for any couple in this position.

Choosing the right status for each guest#

Different guests need different things, and over-buying is common — people reach for the five-year visa "to be safe" when a 30-day double-entry would have done. Here is the honest framing for a single guest, depending on their relationship to India.

The pattern is clear. For a one-off wedding trip, the cheap short visa wins. For a guest who travels to India a couple of times a year, a longer e-Tourist visa saves repeat applications. But for Indian-origin family — and especially children who will grow up visiting India — OCI is in a different league entirely: no visa ever again, lifelong multiple entry, and no recurring fee. If grandparents are bringing grandchildren who will be back every other year, sorting OCI for the children is the smartest long-game decision a family can make.

The host's pre-wedding visa checklist#

Hosting means herding a guest list through paperwork they have never seen. A little structure six to eight weeks out prevents a frantic week-of scramble.

• Sort guests into buckets — OCI holders (no visa), one-off attendees (30-day double-entry e-Tourist), and frequent visitors (one- or five-year e-Tourist). This single triage answers most questions.
• Apply early. The portal, the photo and document specifications, and the upload rules trip people up — a rejected photo or a passport scan in the wrong format can cost days. Building in a buffer matters far more than people expect.
• Make the e-Arrival Card non-negotiable in your guest pack, with the 72-hour window spelled out.
• Check every passport for six months' validity and two blank pages, well before anyone books.
• Handle the fiancé route as its own project — tourist visa now, Entry (X) and OCI later, with the marriage certificate guarded carefully.

This is exactly the kind of multi-person, multi-format admin where our Indian e-Visa service earns its keep. Rather than you fielding the same questions twenty times in a group chat — and re-doing rejected photo uploads from three time zones away — we can run guest applications cleanly so you can get back to the seating plan.

DIY or get help — an honest call#

Plenty of confident, tech-comfortable guests will breeze through the e-Tourist application themselves in twenty minutes, and they should. The application is online and genuinely manageable for a straightforward case.

Where help earns its fee is volume and edge cases: a large international guest list with mixed nationalities, older relatives who cannot navigate the portal or the photo rules, a tight timeline where a rejection cannot be afforded, or the foreign-fiancé pathway where getting the sequence wrong has real consequences. As the host, you do not want to be the unpaid visa agent for forty people while also planning a wedding — that is precisely the load we can take off you.

If your wedding paperwork comes down to wrangling a guest list through Indian visas, talk to us about our Indian e-Visa service and we will tell you honestly which guests can do it themselves and which are worth handing over.

This guide reflects Indian visa and entry requirements as observed by NriDirect in 2026. There is no dedicated wedding visa, and rules, fees and timelines — including the December 2025 reciprocity changes — change without notice. Verify current details on the official Indian visa portal↗ before applying. NriDirect is an independent UK agent and is not affiliated with VFS Global or the Indian High Commission.