Indonesia visitor visa from India

Indian passport holders need a visa on arrival, which is granted at all the main airports and seaports including Bali, Jakarta and Surabaya. So the visa is not in doubt and the trip is not at risk. The only real question is where you obtain it. The sensible approach is the electronic version applied for in advance at the Indonesian government portal, which costs exactly the same IDR 500,000 but lets you walk past the payment queue at the airport rather than joining it at the end of a long flight. It gives 30 days, single entry, and can be extended once by a further 30 days from inside the country. Doing it in advance also means a card problem is discovered at home rather than at a counter in Denpasar with a queue behind you.

IDR 500,000, which is roughly ₹2,700 to ₹3,000 depending on the exchange rate on the day. The amount is the same whether you apply online in advance or pay at the airport counter, so applying early buys you time rather than a discount. An extension for a second 30 days costs another IDR 500,000 and is applied for from inside Indonesia rather than arranged beforehand, which makes the real budget for a long trip double the headline figure. The fee is not refunded if you are refused entry, which is the ordinary rule for visa fees and is still worth stating. Payment on the online portal is by Visa, Mastercard or JCB, and an Indian card that has never been used for a foreign transaction is the usual point of failure. Check that the card works for international payments before you sit down to apply, not during.

Thirty days, extendable once by a further thirty, giving a maximum of sixty days in a single visit. The extension has to be applied for from inside Indonesia before the first thirty days expire, and it is not a formality you can leave to the last week. Since June 2025 it requires attending a local immigration office in person rather than being completed entirely online, so it costs you a morning and a trip wherever you happen to be staying. Build that into the plan if you are going for longer than a month. Overstaying is fined at a daily rate collected at the airport before you are allowed to leave, which turns a forgotten date into a queue, a payment and a missed flight rather than a quiet warning. The date to diary is the expiry, not the departure.

Single entry. It is consumed the moment you leave Indonesia, even if you have three weeks of your thirty days remaining, and nothing is carried over. So a side trip to Singapore or Malaysia in the middle of your stay means buying a second visa on arrival to come back, at the full fee again. This catches out travellers building a multi-country Southeast Asia itinerary, who reasonably assume the thirty days can be spent in pieces across the trip the way an allowance usually works. It cannot. If the plan involves leaving and returning, either sequence the trip so Indonesia comes last, or budget for the second visa from the start. Working it out at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, with a flight back to Bali already paid for, is the version of this that costs the most.

An Indonesian visa on arrival does not permit work, including remote work from Bali. The visa on arrival does not permit work of any kind, and Indonesian immigration has been actively enforcing this against foreigners working remotely from Bali, with deportations and re-entry bans rather than warnings. The enforcement is the part worth taking seriously, because the rule has existed for years and the practice has changed. The volume of digital nomad content about Bali gives a badly misleading impression of what this permit allows, and much of it was written by people describing what they got away with rather than what they were entitled to do. A genuine plan to work from Indonesia needs a different visa arranged before you travel, and those exist. Sorting it out beforehand costs a fee and some paperwork. Sorting it out afterwards can cost your ability to return to the country at all.

Get it before you fly. The cost is identical either way and the approval is usually returned within hours, so there is no saving and no real waiting to weigh against it. The difference is what happens when you land. At Denpasar in high season the payment queue for a visa on arrival sits ahead of the immigration queue and regularly runs to an hour, and you join it at the end of an overnight flight with children, luggage and a driver waiting outside. Applying in advance means walking straight to immigration with the approval on your phone and being out of the airport while the same flight is still queuing. There is a second, quieter benefit: a card that will not process an international payment is a problem you can solve at home and cannot solve in that queue.