Everest Base Camp Trek

Two permits cover the entire route in 2026: the Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality permit at NPR 2,000 (about USD 15) and the Sagarmatha National Park entry at NPR 3,000 (about USD 23). The municipality permit replaced TIMS in the Khumbu in 2018 and is issued only in Lukla or at the Monjo checkpoint, never in Kathmandu. The national park ticket can be bought in advance at the Nepal Tourism Board office in Kathmandu or at the Monjo park gate on the walk in.

Both permits are checked twice on a standard itinerary, at Monjo and at the Namche exit post, so keep them accessible rather than packed in a porter load. Ramesh Rai, who processes around 900 permits a year for our departures, covers photographs, payment currency, and checkpoint details in the full Everest Base Camp permit costs guide. No restricted-area permit applies to this route, and solo permit rules changed in 2023, covered in our solo trekking guide requirement page.

TAAN-registered operators quoted USD 1,200 to 1,800 for a 14-day group EBC departure in spring 2026; private departures ran USD 1,500 to 2,200. Our own group price sits inside that range and the table below shows where each dollar goes, because a quote near USD 1,000 usually removes the porter or books unheated dormitory rooms at Gorak Shep, and a quote above USD 2,500 is paying for a Kathmandu hotel upgrade, not a better trek.

The single largest line is the Lukla flight at USD 360 to 440 round trip, a fixed fare band for foreign nationals that no operator can discount. Guide and porter wages follow TAAN's 2026 recommended rates of USD 35 to 40 and USD 25 per day respectively. Water strategy changes the food budget by USD 80 or more: bottled water climbs from NPR 100 in Lukla to NPR 500 at Gorak Shep, while purification tablets cost USD 15 for the whole route. A private departure at the USD 1,500-2,200 end of that range, run on its own schedule with a dedicated guide, is the tier this site curates into its Luxury Nepal Travel Packages.

Late September to early December and February to May are the two windows we run scheduled departures, and the shoulder of that second window is moving earlier. A 2026 Nepal Tourism Board release put January arrivals at 92,573, up 15.7% year over year, and February 2026 was the highest February on record. Our January and February EBC departures since 2024 have run at full booking with daytime trail temperatures of -5 to 10 C, near-empty teahouses, and the clearest summit views of the year; the trade is night temperatures to -20 C at Gorak Shep and occasional snow above Tengboche.

October remains the busiest single month on the route, with the trail carrying roughly a third of the year's trekkers. Monsoon months (June to mid-September) bring daily rain below 4,000 m, leeches to Phakding, and cloud-obscured views, so we route monsoon clients to rain-shadow treks during monsoon in Upper Mustang instead. Month-by-month data for every season sits in our trekking Nepal in winter and seasonal guides.

The season choice also decides which flight terminal you use. Ramechhap (Manthali), a 4 to 5 hour drive from Kathmandu, has carried most high-season Lukla traffic since 2022, and spring or autumn departures typically drive out the evening before to catch a 6 am departure from there. Winter departures generally fly from Kathmandu directly instead, since passenger volume drops enough that the capital's airport can absorb the Lukla sector without the Ramechhap relief system. Either way, Lukla flights operate in a single morning window only, before afternoon cloud closes the valley, a scheduling reality covered in full in our Lukla flight guide.

Moderate-strenuous is our grading: 130 km round trip, 6,015 m of cumulative ascent, walking days of 5 to 7 hours, and 11 nights above 3,000 m. No day requires technical skill or scrambling, and the trail is a maintained mule-and-yak path the entire way. The physical work concentrates in three days: the 800 m climb from the Hillary Bridge to Namche, the ascent from Tengboche to Dingboche, and the base camp day itself, which runs 7 to 8 hours at over 5,000 m.

Altitude, not fitness, turns trekkers around on this route. Acute mountain sickness (AMS) affects some trekkers above 3,000 m regardless of conditioning, which is why our itinerary ascends sleeping altitude by less than 500 m per day above Namche, matching the Himalayan Rescue Association's Pheriche clinic guideline. Symptoms, prevention, and our guide protocols are detailed in the altitude sickness prevention guide, and training advice for the three hard days is in our fitness notes on that page. A reasonable benchmark: if you can hike 15 km with 800 m of ascent on back-to-back weekend days carrying 6 kg, you are fit enough.

Our guides score symptoms twice daily above 4,000 m using the Lake Louise scale, which rates headache, gastrointestinal upset, fatigue, and dizziness from 0 to 3 each against a recent altitude gain; a score of 6 or higher means descent, not negotiation. HAPE (fluid in the lungs, presenting as breathlessness at rest and a wet cough) and HACE (fluid on the brain, presenting as confusion and a stumbling gait) are the two emergency forms we train for specifically, and both are treated identically: immediate descent, oxygen if available, and evacuation. In four coordinated evacuations above 5,000 m on our departures, all four clients made a full recovery, which is the standard our acclimatization schedule exists to protect.

Our departure records from 2024 to 2026 show Lukla flights leaving on their scheduled day 83% of the time in February, 76% in October, 68% in April, and 61% in May, when pre-monsoon haze builds. On our last three EBC departures, the Lukla flight left on time twice; the third waited four hours for the Lukla valley to clear. These are single-operator numbers from 41 departures, not airline statistics, and they are why every itinerary we sell carries two spare days in Kathmandu at the end.

Ramechhap (Manthali) airport, a 4 to 5 hour drive from Kathmandu, handles most Lukla flights in the high seasons since 2022, and its morning fog delays differ from Kathmandu's. When a flight cancels outright, passengers roll to the next morning's manifest in booking order, and a helicopter seat at USD 500 to 700 per person is the paid alternative. What happens in a cancellation, hour by hour, is covered in the FAQ below.

Gorak Shep's four lodges, roughly 250 beds at 5,164 m, fill by early afternoon through October, and unbooked trekkers sleep in dining halls on those nights. Namche, Dingboche, and Lobuche hold more capacity but their better rooms (attached bathroom, gas heater) go to groups whose guides phoned ahead from two villages down the trail. Our guides hold standing relationships with specific lodges in every village on this route, which is what a licensed guide's fee buys beyond navigation.

Independent trekkers in October should reach each village by 1 pm or carry a contingency plan one village short. Off-season, from December to February, every lodge has rooms and several offer NPR 500 rates on the condition you eat dinner and breakfast in-house, the standard teahouse economics throughout the Khumbu. Room rates on this route run NPR 300 to 1,500 a night depending on altitude, and that lower figure almost always comes with the same condition: eat dinner and breakfast at the lodge, or pay the higher end and risk losing the room if the village fills. The full pricing model, including why a Gorak Shep dal bhat costs roughly double the same plate in Phakding, sits in our Khumbu teahouse guide.

Staying connected costs more the higher you climb. Everest Link WiFi cards run NPR 600 for 10 GB and work in most lodges to Gorak Shep, though the signal thins to message-only above Dingboche. Device charging costs NPR 300 to 500 at Lobuche and Gorak Shep specifically, since lodges above Dingboche run their sockets off solar with limited daily storage. Budgeting NPR 1,000 to 1,500 for connectivity across the full trek covers this comfortably.

A four-season sleeping bag rated to at least -15 C comfort is the single item that matters most, because teahouse bedrooms are unheated at every altitude on this route even though dining halls stay warm by stove until around 9 pm. Layered clothing, a down jacket for evenings, broken-in waterproof boots, and trekking poles for the long descents round out the core kit; the full checklist, including route-specific extras, is in the Nepal trekking packing list.

Two items earn their weight specifically on this trek: a headlamp with spare batteries for the pre-dawn Kala Patthar climb, and sun protection strong enough for the high-UV, low-humidity stretch above Dingboche, where snow glare adds to direct exposure. A water purification method (tablets or a SteriPEN) covers the whole route for about USD 15, against bottled water that climbs past NPR 500 a bottle above Namche and is banned from sale entirely in the upper villages under the municipality's plastic rules.

A duffel bag for porter-carried gear, capped at the standard 12 to 15 kg shared load limit most operators enforce, and a separate daypack for what you carry yourself, water, camera, extra layers, complete the split most trekkers settle into by day 2. Camp shoes or sandals for evenings at teahouses are a small comfort worth the extra half-kilogram, since boots come off the moment the day's walking ends, and trekking poles earn their place on the long descents from Kala Patthar and back through Namche on the final days.