Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan is among the hardest visas in the world to obtain, and the visa is not the gate - the LETTER OF INVITATION is. A licensed Turkmen agency applies to the State Migration Service on your behalf for an invitation covering a specific, approved itinerary with named dates; three to six weeks later it is granted or it is not, with no reason given and no appeal. Only then is a visa issued, at a consulate or on arrival against the letter, paid in US dollars in cash at a counter that does not take cards. Without an invitation there is nothing to apply for. A guide accompanies you throughout the trip - that is the condition of the tourist visa rather than an upsell - and the itinerary you were approved for is the itinerary you travel. The alternative is a three- to five-day TRANSIT VISA, applied for at a consulate with the visa for the next country already in your passport, valid for a fixed route you may not deviate from; it is refused at least as often as it is granted and there is no way to ask why. The stored figures here are an approximation rather than a tariff: the consular fee, the agency's charge and the arrival fee are three different numbers, quoted in dollars, and a guided week costs a multiple of any of them. Twenty-one days is a typical issue. The passport should be valid six months. Currency must be declared on entry, registration with the migration service is required for stays beyond a few days and is handled by the agency, and photography near government buildings, airports and borders is genuinely restricted rather than merely discouraged. Central Asia is not one visa area. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan each answer for themselves, the answers differ by weeks of allowance and by whether anything has to be bought at all, and every border between them is an ordinary international crossing with its own queue, its own opening hours and its own list of who may use it. A joint regional visa on the Schengen model has been announced more than once; at the time of writing none can be bought, so plan each country's entry separately and check the specific crossing rather than the region.

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Entry details: Editorial synthesis - Turkmen consular guidance, State Migration Service invitation procedure, licensed agency reports (2025–2026) · compiled 18 Sept 2026

Holding a passport that is not listed? The picker above answers for any of them. See where your passport takes you. Source: Passport Index, updated 14 Aug 2026.

There is no meaningful seasonal pricing - visitor numbers are tiny and rates are set by a handful of licensed agencies. What varies is the visa outcome, not the price. Note that the official and street exchange rates for the manat have diverged widely for years, so any figure quoted in local currency is ambiguous; these are agency prices in hard currency.

Updated Aug 2026 · Editorial synthesis - licensed agency quotations, consular visa fees (2025–2026) · confidence low

Excludes international flights - they depend on where you fly from.