United Kingdom visitor visa from India

The UKVI fee is £135, about ₹17,500, for a Standard Visitor visa allowing a stay of up to six months. Long-term visitor visas cost £506 for two years, £903 for five and £1,128 for ten, roughly ₹65,600, ₹1,17,000 and ₹1,46,100, and each of those still allows only six months per visit rather than a longer stay. The fee is set in sterling and collected in rupees at the Home Office rate on the day, so the rupee figure you pay will not match the one you read here. It is not refunded if you are refused. VFS charges its own service fee on top, which varies by centre and by whether you use any of its optional services, and our service charge is ₹14,500. Budget for all three rather than the headline number alone.

UKVI publishes a service standard of 3 weeks from your biometrics appointment for the Standard Visitor route, last revised on 26 June 2026. Read that carefully, because it is a target UKVI commits to rather than an observed average, and it is stated worldwide rather than for India specifically. It is not the same kind of number as a Canadian processing time, which is measured from files that have actually been decided. The clock also starts at biometrics, not at the moment you begin gathering documents, so the appointment date is the one to work backwards from. Priority and super priority services exist for an extra fee where availability allows, and availability is the operative word: they are not always open on the India route and they are worth checking rather than assuming. Apply early and treat the three weeks as the best case.

The UK no longer puts a visa sticker in a visitor's passport. From 25 February 2026 the UK stopped issuing visa vignettes for visitors, and permission is granted digitally instead. You will not get anything in your passport, which unsettles people who have been travelling for thirty years on the assumption that a visa is something you can see. Your visa lives in a UKVI online account linked to your passport number, and airlines verify it electronically when you check in. Two things follow. You need to create that account rather than assume it exists, and you need to confirm the correct passport is linked to it before you travel, because a renewed passport whose number has changed will not match. Do both well before the day of the flight. A check-in desk is the wrong place to discover that the document proving your permission is attached to a passport in a drawer at home.

It is the requirement that you will actually leave the UK at the end of your visit, that you will not live in the UK through frequent or successive visits, that you have enough money for the trip without working or claiming public funds, and that the activity you are coming for is one a visitor is permitted to do. It is the ground most Indian refusals turn on, which makes it worth understanding rather than skimming. A bank balance alone does not answer it, because the question is not whether you can afford the trip but whether you will come back. Employment you would lose, property you own, family who depend on you and a coherent reason for this particular trip at this particular time are what answer it. The second limb catches people too: a pattern of long, repeated visits starts to look like living here.

There is no published minimum, and any figure you are quoted as one is somebody's guess. UKVI assesses whether your funds are enough for the specific trip you have described and consistent with the income you have declared, which means the same balance can be plenty for one application and thin for another. A balance that matches six months of ordinary salary credits is stronger evidence than a large sum that appeared shortly before you applied, because sudden unexplained deposits are flagged as potentially borrowed and put the whole file in doubt rather than only the money. What matters is that the funds are plainly yours and plainly sufficient for this trip. If a genuine large deposit does appear, document where it came from and submit that alongside the statement rather than leaving an officer to draw the obvious conclusion.

Do not buy flight tickets before your UK visitor visa is decided. GOV.UK states that flight bookings are not among the documents that count as useful evidence, so buying them early does not help your application in the way people assume it does. Book refundable or tentative travel only, and hold the real purchase until the decision is in. The arithmetic is worth spelling out, because it is what changes minds. If your visa is refused you lose the money on non-refundable tickets, and the visa fee is not returned either, so an early purchase converts one loss into two without improving your chances of avoiding either. The instinct behind it is understandable: a paid ticket feels like proof that the trip is real. It is not read that way. A coherent itinerary and evidence of the life you are coming back to do the work a ticket cannot.