Indian Business e-Visa UK 2026: The Founder's and Professional's Guide

The email lands on a Tuesday: a distributor in Pune wants you in person for three days of meetings, a factory walk-through, and a slot at a trade expo. Your flight is in eleven days. You open the Indian visa portal, see "Business Visa," and assume it's a tick-box version of the tourist e-Visa you used for your cousin's wedding. Then it asks for an invitation letter, a company registration number, and "nature of business," and you realise this is a different animal.

It is. The Indian Business e-Visa is one of the most useful travel documents a UK-based founder, consultant, sales lead, or trade professional can hold — a 5-year, multiple-entry key to the fastest-growing major economy in the world. But it is also the one most often filled in wrong, because applicants treat it like a tourist visa with a job title. This guide is the version we give our business clients: what the visa actually permits, the 1-year versus 5-year decision, the documents the portal lists but never explains, the December 2025 fee jump, and the new arrival card that trips up even seasoned travellers.

If you are a British citizen travelling for any non-business reason, you want the Indian e-Visa for British citizens guide instead. And if your trip is a government-sponsored conference, a research event, or you hold a passport type the e-Visa doesn't cover, read India's paper and conference visa guide — the e-Visa will quietly reject you.

What the Business e-Visa actually permits#

The Business e-Visa exists for people doing business on behalf of a foreign entity. The key mental model: you remain employed and paid abroad, and you are in India to transact, not to be hired. The permitted activities are surprisingly broad:

• Attending technical or business meetings, negotiations, and contract discussions
• Setting up an industrial or business venture, or exploring investment opportunities
• Buying or selling industrial or commercial products
• Attending trade fairs, business exhibitions, and conferences
• Recruiting manpower for your own (foreign) company
• Acting as a partner, director, or expert/specialist on a short-term contract for an ongoing project
• Conducting tours for a foreign tourism agency, or attending pre-sales and post-sales support

What it explicitly does not permit is the line that catches people out:

Other limits worth knowing: the Business e-Visa is not valid for visiting Protected/Restricted Areas (parts of the North-East, Andaman & Nicobar, etc.) without a separate permit, and it is not for journalism, research, or missionary work — each of those has its own category, and the first two usually require a paper visa.

1-year vs 5-year: which to choose#

This is the first real decision on the form. Both are multiple-entry and both allow a maximum continuous stay of up to 180 days per visit. The difference is the validity window and the cost.

	1-Year	5-Year
Validity from grant	1 year	5 years
Entries	Multiple	Multiple
Max stay per visit	Up to 180 days	Up to 180 days
Best for	One project, occasional trips	Ongoing trade, regular travel
Cost basis	Lower government fee	Higher government fee
Renewal hassle	Reapply yearly	Apply once for 5 years

Our rule of thumb: if you will visit India twice or more in the next two years, the 5-year almost always wins on total cost and on the saved hours of reapplying. If this is a one-off project trip with no clear repeat, the 1-year is fine. Note that the 5-year visa's clock starts at grant, not at first entry — so don't apply six months before a trip and waste validity.

The documents that actually matter#

The portal asks for a lot. In practice, a Business e-Visa stands or falls on a handful of items, and the invitation letter is the one that does the heavy lifting.

1. The invitation letter from the Indian company#

This is the document the portal mentions in one line and explains in none. It must come from the Indian business you are visiting (or partnering with), on company letterhead, and should state:

• The full name and registration/CIN of the Indian company
• Your full name (matching your passport exactly) and passport number
• The purpose of the visit, described in business terms ("contract negotiation for the supply of...", "attending our annual distributor conference on...")
• The dates or approximate window of the visit
• A statement that the company is hosting/inviting you
• Signature, name, and designation of an authorised signatory

A vague letter — "We invite Mr Patel for business" — is the single most common cause of manual review and delay. A specific, dated, letterheaded letter sails through.

2. Proof of your own business#

The portal asks for your company's details. Have ready:

• Your business card
• A copy of your company's registration / Companies House number, or a letter from your employer confirming your role and the business purpose of travel
• Your designation and the nature of the business

3. The standard e-Visa basics#

• A passport with at least six months' validity from arrival and two blank pages
• A clear scan of the passport bio page (PDF or JPEG)
• A recent square, white-background digital photo meeting the e-Visa spec (faces full-front, no shadows)
• A UK debit/credit card for the fee

How a Business e-Visa application works

1. Confirm the right category — business on behalf of a foreign company, not local employment. If you'll be paid in India, stop and look at the Employment Visa.
2. Get the invitation letter sorted — ask your Indian host for a specific, dated, letterheaded invitation before you start the form. This is the long pole.
3. Apply on the official portal — complete the e-Visa application at indianvisaonline.gov.in, upload your photo and passport scan, and pay in US dollars.
4. Wait ~72 hours — track the application by your reference number; most are approved within three days, some go to manual review.
5. Print the ETA — when granted, you receive an Electronic Travel Authorisation by email. Print it and carry it; you'll show it at check-in and at the Indian immigration counter.
6. File the e-Arrival Card — separately, up to 72 hours before you fly, complete the free online arrival card.

What it costs in 2026#

Here is the news that surprises returning business travellers. On 23 December 2025, India moved to reciprocity-based pricing for British citizens, aligning Indian visa fees with the UK's own fee schedule for Indian nationals. The result is a sharp increase across categories.

• e-Business visa: approximately US$242, plus a 3% bank transaction surcharge.
• For comparison, the 5-year tourist e-Visa for Brits jumped to roughly US$484 (from around US$80 before), the 1-year tourist to about US$40, and the 30-day tourist to roughly US$10–25 depending on season.
• The e-Medical visa sits around US$129.

Fees are billed in US dollars on the portal and converted by your card issuer, so the sterling amount you see on your statement will vary with the exchange rate on the day. Budget the surcharge in — it is not optional, and it catches people who planned to the last pound.

Processing time: the ~72-hour reality#

The headline is genuinely fast: most Business e-Visas are granted within about 72 hours of a clean submission. But "clean" is doing work in that sentence. Applications get pulled into manual review — adding days — when the invitation letter is vague, when the stated purpose doesn't match the documents, when there's a common surname or a birthplace that triggers extra checks, or when the photo fails the spec.

Our standing advice for business travel: apply at least 5–7 days before departure. The e-Visa system has no reliable expedite lever once you've submitted, so the buffer is your only insurance. If your trip is sooner than that and the e-Visa stalls, the fallback is a paper business visa through VFS — slower and more expensive, but with a human you can chase.

The separate e-Arrival Card — don't forget it#

This is the 2026 detail that trips up even monthly flyers. India has phased in a mandatory e-Arrival Card: an online arrival declaration that every foreign national flying into India must complete, up to 72 hours before arrival, entirely separate from the visa.

• It is free.
• Portal: indianvisaonline.gov.in/earrival, or the Su-Swagatam app.
• It was phased in from 1 October 2025 and is fully mandatory from around April 2026.
• It applies even to OCI holders — so if you travel with an OCI-holding spouse, they need one too.

Think of it as the digital replacement for the paper landing card you used to fill out on the plane. Skipping it doesn't void your visa, but it does mean joining the slow queue at immigration while you complete it on your phone. We cover the mechanics in our dedicated walkthrough referenced from the e-Visa for British citizens guide.

Business e-Visa vs Tourist e-Visa vs Paper/Employment visa#

The clearest way to choose is to line them up:

	Business e-Visa	Tourist e-Visa	Paper / Employment
Purpose	Meetings, trade, conferences	Sightseeing, family, short courses	Paid work, journalism, govt events
Local salary allowed	No	No	Yes (Employment)
Invitation letter	Required (Indian company)	Not required	Often required + clearances
Validity	1 or 5 years, multi-entry	30 days to 5 years	Per grant
Typical processing	~72 hours	~72 hours	2–4 weeks via VFS
Apply via	Online portal	Online portal	VFS appointment

The decision tree is short. Being paid by an Indian entity, doing journalism or research, attending a government-sponsored conference, or holding certain passport types pushes you off the e-Visa entirely and onto the paper route — covered in our paper and conference visa guide. Everything else commercial and self-funded is a Business e-Visa.

When DIY is fine, and when an agent earns the fee#

We will be honest: for a confident traveller with a clean profile and a solid invitation letter, the Business e-Visa is a DIY-able task. The portal works, the fee is clear, and 72 hours is fast.

The agent route earns its fee when:

• Your invitation letter is weak and you need it redrafted to portal standard before you upload — the single biggest cause of delay.
• You have a tight travel window and cannot afford a manual-review surprise.
• Your profile is review-prone (common surname, certain birthplaces, prior visa issues) and you want the application built to pre-empt the questions.
• You are coordinating multiple colleagues travelling together and need consistency across applications.

We prepare Indian Business e-Visa applications end-to-end, including vetting and tightening the invitation letter, building the application to avoid manual-review triggers, and walking you through the e-Arrival Card before you fly.

If you have a date in the diary and an invitation in your inbox, the worst thing you can do is leave the visa to the last 48 hours. Get the invitation letter right, apply with a week's buffer, file your arrival card, and your meetings in Pune, Bengaluru, or Gurugram start the way they should — on time.

For the broader picture of travelling to India on a British passport in 2026, see our e-Visa for British citizens guide, and if any part of your trip looks like it needs a sticker visa, the paper and conference visa guide will tell you before the portal does.

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This guide reflects the Indian Business e-Visa rules, fees, and processing norms observed by NriDirect in 2026, including the reciprocity-based fee revision for British citizens effective 23 December 2025. Fees are charged in US dollars, attract a 3% surcharge, and change without notice — verify the current schedule on the official Indian visa portal↗ before applying. NriDirect is an independent agent and is not affiliated with VFS Global or the Indian government.