The most expensive tourist visas for Americans, as of 2017

Nigeria charged US tourists more for a visa than any other country in 2017, according to a ranking that circulated widely that year. Re-checking every figure against contemporaneous sources confirms Nigeria's position at the top — but also turns up at least one entry, a few places down the same list, that was flatly wrong.

Nigeria tops a genuinely expensive list

In April 2017, visa-referral service VisaHQ priced the cheapest tourist visa available to US passport holders in each of the world's visa-charging countries. Nigeria came out most expensive at $265, for a multiple-entry visa valid for two years. A separate compilation published the same year, drawing on the same underlying US State Department reciprocity-fee data, put the figure slightly lower at $253 — a gap that reflects a different sampling month and possibly a different visa class, rather than a data error on either side.

Below Nigeria, the next tier of expensive countries is corroborated by at least one independent 2017 source apiece:

• Pakistan — $192. Matched the reciprocal fee the US then charged Pakistani visitors; replaced by a far cheaper e-visa in 2019.
• Democratic Republic of Congo — $175. Confirmed by an independent January 2017 compilation of the same reciprocity data.
• Brazil — $160. A long-standing reciprocal fee, mirroring what the US then charged Brazilian tourists.

Where the original ranking got it wrong

Not every entry holds up. A widely repeated figure put the Cook Islands second on the list, at $200. But the Cook Islands has never required tourists to buy a visa: US citizens, like nearly all visitors, receive a free permit on arrival, valid for up to 31 days and extendable to 180. The $200 figure looks like a mix-up with a reciprocity charge applied to a different nationality somewhere in the underlying dataset, not a fee tourists actually pay to enter the Cook Islands.

One of the ranking's two priciest entries was a country that has never charged tourists a visa fee at all.

A second entry, labelled "Congo Republic" in the original dataset, in fact carried the ISO country code belonging to the Democratic Republic of Congo. That is a labelling slip rather than a pricing one: the $175 fee matches DR Congo specifically, not its smaller northern neighbour, the Republic of Congo, whose own tourist-visa fee has historically run separately from that figure.

Why 2017 visa-fee lists rarely agree with each other

Fee compilations from that period generally draw on the same source: the US State Department's visa reciprocity schedule, which lists what each country is understood to charge American travellers for parity with what the US charges that country's citizens. But the schedule is revised piecemeal throughout the year, and different trackers sampled it in different months. Some also report a business-visa or multiple-entry fee rather than the single cheapest tourist option a traveller could actually book — a methodological gap that shifts a country's headline number without making any one source simply wrong.

The trouble with turning a fee into a revenue estimate

The 2017 dataset behind this ranking also tried a second calculation: multiplying each country's US-visitor visa fee by its total inbound tourist arrivals from all nationalities, to estimate potential visa revenue. Its own author flagged the flaw at the time. China's case shows why. At $140, that is a fee still charged to US passport holders. China's tourism authorities credited the country with around 138 million inbound visits in 2016 — but a large majority of that total arrived from Hong Kong and Macau under separate travel-permit arrangements that carry no such visa fee, not as foreign tourists paying $140 apiece. Applying one nationality's fee to every visitor of every nationality overstates any resulting total many times over, and the same problem applies wherever a country's inbound arrivals are dominated by visa-exempt or visa-waived neighbours.

What has changed since

None of the figures above should be read as current pricing. Turkey's e-visa cost Americans $20 in 2017 and has since risen to $50. Pakistan overhauled its entire visa system in 2019, introducing online e-visas that undercut the $192 fee recorded here for many applicants. Nigeria and Brazil have each revised their own fee schedules more than once in the years since. Visa costs, unlike a country's borders, do not stay fixed for long.

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