Maldives for Indian Citizens: The Visa Is Free, and It Is the Only Free Thing

The Maldives does not sell Indian travellers a visa. There is no portal, no application, no fee and no waiting: you land at Velana, an officer looks at your documents, and you are admitted for thirty days. Maldives Immigration states it plainly — a tourist does not require pre-approval for the visa.

This is the most generous entry policy in this series and it is also the most misleading, because the Maldives collects its money everywhere except the border. Seventeen per cent tax on tourism services. A ten per cent service charge on top of that. Twelve US dollars per person per night in green tax, whether you spend anything else or not. Fifty dollars to fly home. A family of four on a week at a resort pays several hundred dollars in charges that no visa fee ever approached — and none of it appears in the advertised room rate.

So this article spends very little time on the visa and rather more on the three things that actually go wrong: a passport rule written in a sentence most guides omit, a free government form that people are being charged for, and a customs list that bans something many Indian travellers pack without thinking.

The passport sentence that refuses people at the border

Maldives Immigration asks for a passport or travel document with a machine-readable zone and at least one month of validity. One month is unusually relaxed — most of Asia wants six. Then comes the clause, in parentheses, on the government’s own page: passengers with an extended validity in their passports are not allowed to enter.

That is not about how much validity you have. It is about how you got it. A passport whose expiry was pushed out by an endorsement or extension stamp, rather than by issuing a new booklet, is not acceptable for entry to the Maldives however many months it appears to have left. If your passport carries any kind of validity-extension endorsement, replace the passport before you book — this is a refusal at the airport, not a problem you can talk your way through.

The rest of the border requirements are conventional but genuinely checked:

• A complete travel itinerary. Confirmed return tickets, a prepaid confirmed booking at a registered facility — resort, hotel, guesthouse or liveaboard — and proof of funds sufficient for the stay. "We will sort out where we are staying when we land" is not a plan that works here; the booking has to exist and be prepaid.
• Your onward destination’s requirements. Immigration explicitly checks that you satisfy the entry rules for wherever you are going next, including visa and passport validity. A Maldives stopover on the way somewhere else does not exempt you from the somewhere else.
• A passport for every child. Minors must hold their own passports. There is no travelling on a parent’s document.

The IMUGA form is free, and the government is warning you about that

Every arriving traveller must submit the Traveller Declaration electronically through the IMUGA portal, within 96 hours before flight time. You do it again before your departure flight. It takes a few minutes: passport details, flight details, accommodation.

What makes this worth a section is the notice the Maldivian government has put on its own portal. Immigration writes that there have been reports of misleading activities where individuals are asked to pay for submitting the form, that it is a self-declaration form travellers can easily submit themselves, that there are no fees on the official portal, and that travellers should avoid other websites that may charge a fee or provide misleading information.

Where the money actually goes

Three charges stack on a Maldives stay, and only one of them is obvious from a booking page.

• Green tax — USD 12 per person, per night. Levied by the Maldives Inland Revenue Authority on tourists staying in resorts, integrated resorts, resort hotels, tourist vessels, and hotels or guesthouses on uninhabited islands or with more than fifty rooms. It doubled from USD 6 on 1 January 2025. Because every resort island is by definition uninhabited, effectively every resort charges the full twelve. It is per person and per night regardless of what you spend, so a week for two is USD 168 before anything else.
• Green tax — USD 6 at small island guesthouses. Hotels and guesthouses on inhabited islands with fifty rooms or fewer pay the halved rate. This is the single strongest financial argument for the local-island guesthouse trip over the resort, and it compounds with everything else being cheaper there.
• TGST — 17%. The Tourism Goods and Services Tax rose from 16% to 17% on 1 July 2025, under amendments ratified in November 2024 with a transitional period to let the sector adjust.
• Service charge — 10%. Standard on resort bills across the sector, applied before tax.
• Departure tax — USD 50. Foreign passengers leaving in economy pay USD 50, up from USD 30 on 1 December 2024. Business is USD 120, first class USD 240 and a private jet USD 480. This is normally collected inside your airfare rather than at the airport, but it is in the ticket price either way.

Put together, the tax and service charge add roughly twenty-seven per cent to a resort bill, and green tax lands on top of that as a flat per-head, per-night amount. A room advertised at USD 300 a night for two people works out closer to USD 405 to 410 once all three are applied. Anyone budgeting a Maldives honeymoon from advertised rates is short by about a third.

What you cannot bring, verified against the customs list

This section is here because the Maldives Customs Service prohibited list contains an item that matters more to Indian travellers than to almost anyone else, and because customs rules are exactly the sort of thing repeated online long after they change. We checked the current list. It has not changed.

Completely banned from import, per the travellers’ prohibited list:

• Narcotics and psychotropic substances.
• Pornographic material, including books, magazines, films, videos, DVDs, software and sex toys.
• Religious materials offensive to Islam.
• Live pigs.
• Idols for worship.

That last line is on the government’s own list of goods that are banned completely, and it is worth pausing on if you are in the habit of travelling with a small murti, a framed deity image or similar for personal prayer. We are not going to tell you how leniently this is enforced at Velana on any given morning, because we do not know and inventing reassurance would be worse than saying nothing. What we can tell you is what the list says, and that the safest reading of a prohibition is to leave the item at home. The Maldives is an Islamic state and its import rules reflect that; this is not a rule aimed at Indian tourists, but it lands on them.

A related practical point for the guesthouse route: alcohol is not served on inhabited local islands. If a drink with dinner is part of the holiday you are imagining, that is a resort or liveaboard holiday, not a Maafushi or Dhigurah one. Neither is worse — but the two trips are different, and the green tax difference above is not the only thing that separates them.

If thirty days is not enough

The visa on arrival can be extended, and the process got materially better this year. On 23 April 2026, under what the government calls the Maldives 2.0 initiative, Immigration simplified tourist visa extensions: applications are filed by logging into the IMUGA portal, passport and accommodation details are auto-populated from existing records rather than re-entered, and processing is now expected to complete within 48 hours. You upload a passport photograph taken within the last twelve months, and the biodata page only if your passport has been renewed or your details do not match records. If you have changed hotels mid-trip you can update the accommodation in the application.

Two caveats. Extensions are filed only through IMUGA — not through an agent, and not at a desk. And Immigration has not published a revised extension fee on the pages we reviewed, so do not budget from a figure you found on a blog; check the portal when you apply. Reporting commonly describes a total stay of up to ninety days as achievable, which we could not confirm from a primary source.

The short version

• No visa, no fee, thirty days on arrival. Nothing to apply for before you fly.
• Your passport must be machine-readable with a month of validity, and must not be one extended by endorsement.
• Carry a return ticket, a prepaid booking at a registered property, and proof of funds. Children need their own passports.
• Submit the free IMUGA declaration at imuga.immigration.gov.mv within 96 hours, for arrival and again for departure. Pay nobody for it.
• Budget 17% tax plus 10% service on the room, USD 12 per person per night in green tax, and USD 50 each to depart.
• Guesthouses on inhabited islands pay USD 6 green tax instead of USD 12 — and serve no alcohol.
• Leave alcohol, pork and idols for worship at home. Duty-free bottles are confiscated on arrival.
• Need longer? Extend through IMUGA only, now targeted at 48 hours, and check the fee on the portal.

The Maldives is the easiest country in this series to enter and one of the hardest to budget for honestly. Nobody will ask you for a visa fee. Everybody will ask you for something else.