Do US citizens need a visa for Laos?

The usual advice, in most of the world, is to sort the visa online before you fly because it is cheaper as well as calmer. In Laos it is only calmer. The visa on arrival runs at about $40, and the official e-visa at roughly $50.

That is a ten dollar gap per person, so a family of four is looking at forty dollars for the convenience. Worth paying if you land late, travel with children, or simply do not want to hunt for clean notes and photographs before a counter. Not worth paying by accident, which is what happens when you follow generic advice that assumes online is always cheaper.

The on-arrival route is cheaper but it is the one with a shopping list, and every item on it is easier to sort at home than at an airport at the end of a flight:

1. The fee in cash, in clean US dollars or Thai baht. Two accepted currencies is unusually flexible, and useful if you are arriving overland from Thailand with baht already in your pocket.
2. Two passport photos. Two, not one. This is the item people are most often short of, and it is the hardest to fix on the spot.
3. A passport with space in it, plus your onward travel and accommodation details.

This matters more in Laos than it would elsewhere, because the China to Laos railway has made arriving by train a normal thing to do rather than an adventure, and plenty of visitors now cross by land from Thailand as well.

Our sourced figure, about $40 on arrival, is for the airport. We have not verified that the visa on arrival is available, or priced the same, at railway and land crossings. That is a gap in what we know rather than a claim that it is unavailable. If you are arriving overland, the safe move is the official e-visa in advance, and paying the roughly ten dollars extra rather than testing an assumption at a border post. For the trains themselves, see the Laos rail guide.

Separately from the visa, Laos requires a free online immigration form before you arrive. It is a different filing from the e-visa, and it costs nothing.

We have not linked it, deliberately. The rule on this site is that an arrival form is never named without its real government address in the same breath, because a named form with no link sends you straight to a search page, and lookalike sites buy those search terms precisely because these filings are new, obscure and mandatory. Naming it and leaving you to find it would push you into the exact harm the rule exists to prevent.

So: the form exists, it is free, and until we can source its own official portal we point you at the e-visa site above to complete it through the official channel. If any site quotes you a price for a Lao immigration form, that price is the whole product.

The fee itself is real and you will pay it. What is optional is the layer on top. Search for a Laos visa and a good deal of what ranks above the official portal is a reseller, submitting the same application to the same government site and charging you for the keystrokes.

We publish no figure for that markup, because none is sourced for Laos and it varies by reseller. That is on purpose: putting a made-up number on what a middleman charges would be the same fault as the middleman. What we can give you precisely is the official price, about $40 on arrival or roughly $50 online, and the official address, laoevisa.gov.la. Anything above that is somebody's fee rather than Laos's. For how money works once you are in, see the Laos money guide.

Common questions

Quick answers.

More on Laos

The little money things nobody warns you about.

• Do I need cash in Laos, or can I use cards?Cash, and plenty of it. Laos is the most cash-dependent country we cover, and the friction is not acceptance, it is the ATM: low limits and a fee every time. A little planning fixes it.
• Tipping in LaosLaos is not a tipping culture, so there is no percentage to remember and nobody is waiting for one. In tourist areas a small tip has become normal and is genuinely appreciated, which is a different thing from expected.
• Taxis, tuk-tuks and ride apps in LaosMetered taxis barely exist here. Getting around means tuk-tuks, shared songthaews and, in the bigger towns, a local ride app that takes the negotiation out of it. One habit covers the rest: settle the fare first.
• Booking the Laos-China Railway, and why that is the hard partThe Laos-China Railway is fast, comfortable and the obvious way to move between Vientiane and Luang Prabang. Getting a seat is what catches visitors out, because the booking and payment side was not built for anyone without a local phone number. Here is how it actually works.
• Staying connected in Laos.Laos sells data for almost nothing and has less of a network to sell it on than its neighbors. The right move is a cheap local SIM plus the habit of downloading things before you leave a town.
• What does getting sick in Laos cost?Laos has the starkest medical geography of anywhere we cover. Serious care is not in the country, it is across the river in Thailand, and the honest planning question is not what a doctor charges but how you get across and how fast.