India’s e-Tourist Visa (eTV) is one of the most-searched entry permits in the world, and one of the most misunderstood — because the maximum length of a single visit depends on which passport you hold. We re-verified the rule against India’s official sources and corrected the per-nationality stay figures on our India pages, which had a machine-generated error showing the wrong number for several countries.
The rule: 180 days for four nationalities, 90 for the rest
For the 1-year and 5-year e-Tourist Visa, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs sets the continuous stay per visit as follows: nationals of the USA, UK, Canada and Japan may stay up to 180 days continuously on each visit; nationals of all other eligible countries may stay up to 90 days continuously on each visit. The visa is multiple-entry, but each individual stay is bounded by that per-visit limit.
The separate 180-day-per-calendar-year cap
There is a second, independent limit that applies to everyone holding the 1-year or 5-year e-Tourist Visa: total time in India during any one calendar year should not exceed 180 days. So a US, UK, Canadian or Japanese visitor could in principle take a single 180-day stay, while a visitor from elsewhere could combine, say, a 90-day and a separate visit — but neither should exceed 180 days aggregated across the calendar year. Registration with the FRRO/FRO is only required if you intend to stay beyond 180 days.
What we corrected
Our India Tourist e-Visa page had inherited a generated per-nationality layer that showed a flat 30-day maximum stay for around 40 nationalities — including, wrongly, the very four (USA, UK, Canada, Japan) that actually receive the longest allowance. We fixed it at the source: US, UK, Canadian and Japanese travellers now correctly show 180 days, and every other nationality now shows the verified base of 90 days per visit. A visitor from France, Germany or Australia, for instance, now reads 90 days; a visitor from the United States reads 180.
Which visa this applies to
This is specifically the e-Tourist Visa — for tourism, visiting friends and family, short yoga or recreational courses, and casual business meetings the tourist category permits. It is not the route for paid work (that is the India Employment Visa), study (the Student Visa), formal business activity (the e-Business Visa) or medical treatment (the e-Medical Visa). A separate 30-day e-Tourist Visa product also exists, but that is a different visa with its own validity — not the per-visit limit on the 1-year/5-year visa discussed here.
How we verify this
The figures come from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs e-Visa conditions and the official e-Visa portal (indianvisaonline.gov.in), cross-checked across independent references, and we dated the correction to today. Our full process is in our Editorial & Data Standards; start from the India destination hub. If you are comparing how long different passports can stay around the world, see our longest visa-free stays data set.