This NEFTake is an output of the European Union-funded research project titled “Exploring Trends in Nepali Migration to Europe: Understanding Shifts and Trajectories.
Nepal’s migration landscape is undergoing a significant shift, with Europe emerging as a central axis in this transformation. Migrating to Europe has become a recurring theme among young people, from Sindhupalchok to Solukhumbhu, Kapilvastu to Kathmandu, names like Romania, Cyprus, Germany, Croatia, Serbia, and Portugal appear less as distant dreams than as concrete plans. Flyers promise jobs in Romania and Croatia, posters advertise German language courses, and consultancies advertise studying abroad in Malta. These aspirations and plans come at the cost of leaving home and accepting distance for extended years at a time.
With the support of the European Union Delegation to Nepal, Nepal Economic Forum (NEF) conducted a study to examine the shifts in migration towards Europe. The study found that Europe is widely seen as a safer and more rewarding destination, with higher earning potential, access to social protection, and pathways to long-term residence and naturalization.
For decades, Nepali labor migration and labor diplomacy followed well-established routes to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Malaysia, structured around agency-mediated recruitment into “low-skilled” sectors such as construction, manufacturing, and domestic work. Parallel flows to South Korea and Japan, as well as to destinations like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, have also expanded steadily over time. Globally, there is a race among industrialized nations to attract skilled labor and immigrants. Driven by demographic ageing, the green and digital transitions, and internal mobility from Central and Eastern Europe to wealthier Western member states, Europe faces significant shortages across critical sectors.
Thereby, just within the past decade, labor permit approvals to Europe rose by sixteenfold from 4,585 in FY 2016/17 AD (FY 2073/74 BS) to 77,181 in FY 2024/25 AD (FY 2081/82 BS). Understanding the present state of this corridor, and its future potential, is therefore of strategic importance, not only for Nepal’s migration policy, but also for the Nepalis already living across Europe and many more who plan to follow.
Growth of Europe-Bound Migration from Nepal
Recent data from the Department of Foreign Employment suggests a shift in migration patterns, with fewer workers heading to traditional Gulf destinations compared to last year and a notable increase in migration to European countries, particularly Romania. The ongoing instability across West Asia and the temporary closure of labor recruitment between March to April 2026 have likely contributed to heightened interest in Europe as a more stable and durable alternative.
Europe now accounts for nearly one in ten Nepali foreign labor departures, a share that was negligible just a few years ago. Romania, Croatia, Cyprus, Malta, and Poland together make up roughly three-quarters of these approvals, while countries like Portugal and Spain are emerging as hubs for naturalization.
At this rate, departures to Europe are on course to reach at least 100,000 by the end of the financial year, pushing Europe’s share to around 15% of total labor departures. If realized, this would amount to a near‑doubling in a single year and signal a structural reorientation in Nepal’s migration geography. Strikingly, women account for a higher share of Europe‑bound permits than of those to the Gulf, and in Cyprus, around 70% of permits are issued to women.
Even so, official labor permit figures severely underestimate the true scale of Nepali migration to Europe. For instance, significant portions of Nepalis in Europe reached via GCC states and India, as found in community consultations during the NEF study. Beyond labor migration, many Nepalis are also moving to Europe as students and through family reunification pathways.
Drivers of Nepal’s Migration to Europe
Understanding the growing interest among Nepalis to emigrate to Europe requires examining the nuanced factors at play. Most significantly, people planning to migrate cite insufficient income at home as a primary driver. Youth unemployment sits above 20%, and informality still defines about 84% of employment. Nepal’s median monthly income remains at around EUR 125 (NPR 22,333.75). compared to roughly EUR 1,800 (NPR 3,21,606) in the EU, a difference of about fourteen times.
Similarly, with the European working-age population projected to decline by around one million people annually until 2050, labor shortages are expected to intensify, particularly in healthcare, construction, technology, hospitality, and transport. According to the European Labor Authority, the most widespread labor shortages across the EU currently are in specialized occupations such as welders, flame cutters, construction workers, electricians, nursing professionals, and cooks.
Nepal’s growing technical graduate cohort increasingly meets the profile of Europe’s vacancies. Vocational training in hospitality, caregiving, electrical trades, and food services is already training Nepalis who are finding employment in exactly the sectors European employers most urgently need to fill. Furthermore, the NEF study found that years of Gulf migration experience have left many Nepalis who re-migrate to Europe with practical, tacit knowledge and competences in construction, manufacturing, and services.
Beyond structural labor market factors and the draw of a higher income, migration aspirations in Nepal are increasingly intertwined with greater opportunities for personal and career growth, stability, and long-term settlement objectives, as well as socially constructed norms of status. What further makes European destinations attractive is the possibility of family reunification and a pathway to citizenship, which traditional destinations such as Gulf states, Malaysia, or East Asia structurally preclude. Stakeholder consultations from the NEF study consistently surfaced social protection, political stability, personal safety, and long-term residency prospects as significant motivations.
The growth of a Nepali diaspora across European cities, in Lisbon, Brussels, Leuven, Barcelona, Valletta, and Bucharest, to name a few, has also reinforced this through social networks, with settled migrants actively sharing information and in some cases facilitating pathways for relatives and community members.
Social media amplifies these circuits. On TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, Europe appears in a steady stream of short clips and vlogs, with workers filming their night shifts in Romanian factories, students walking to class in Portuguese towns, and families celebrating Dashain in flats in Barcelona. These images compress distance and make migration feel both accessible and normal. These images do not always show the debt, the risk, or the disappointment, but they do powerfully shape the sense that Europe is where the future lies.
A Recruitment System in the Shadows
In Nepal’s foreign employment system, people can migrate in two ways: through a licensed recruitment agency operating via an institutional channel, or as individual applicants who secure their own foreign job and then apply directly for a labor/work permit from the Department of Foreign Employment (DoFE).
Nepal’s formal labor migration architecture hinges on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MoFA) embassy attestation in destination countries. In principle, every job offer is supposed to be verified by Nepali missions abroad before a labor permit is issued in Nepal. On paper, this creates a chain of accountability in which employers are vetted, agencies are licensed, and contracts are standardized. Apart from this, it appears that formal demand attestation frameworks are not sufficiently implemented for European destinations.
The MoFA is currently more prepared to manage Gulf-corridor migration than they are toward Europe. Europe represents a geographically dispersed, legally complex, and significantly more expensive destination than other key destinations for labor migration from Nepal. Nepal’s missions across Europe are under-resourced, with limited staff, budget, and capacity. DoFE’s Foreign Employment Search currently only shows job vacancies for Cyprus through the institutional channel, yet many more people apply for individual permits to other countries.
What looks like a surge of individual work permits in the official DoFE data is, in reality, mediated by layers of brokers, agents, consultancies, and recruitment firms assembling documents and shepherding files through the system on migrants’ behalf. In a largely unregulated market, with few clear rules on fees, contracts, or compliance, intermediaries hold most of the information and most of the leverage. Recruitment may also be facilitated by Nepali community members in Europe and through platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and TikTok, where individuals aim to find supposedly legal, better‑paid work.
The NEF study found that intermediaries charged fees ranging anywhere from NPR 500,000 (approx. EUR 2,830) to 1,500,000 (approx. EUR 8,480), depending on the destination country in Europe. Few households can shoulder these sums without borrowing. Research findings from the NEF study found that a significant percentage of migrants rely on informal loans, frequently at high interest rates, to finance their journey. Arriving abroad with high debt creates immediate financial pressure on workers who are thereby less able to leave exploitative jobs and less likely to report abuse.
Stories of Deception
Due to the lack of oversight of the recruitment practices and governance structure, there have been documented instances of misleading job contracts and exploitative situations.
In Romania in 2022, a group of Nepali workers paid around EUR 3,500 (NPR 6,25,345) each to local agents for jobs advertised in hotels and car workshops, only to be brought in as “unskilled” labor for a construction firm that then sent them to a bread factory under a service contract between companies. When their 90‑day visas expired, several were told to leave the factory and return to a crowded workers’ house while they survived on remittances from their families in Nepal, and waited months for residence permits.
Similarly, in December 2025 in Albacete, Spain, 322 migrant workers, the majority Nepali, were found to have been placed in agricultural work under conditions described as “slave-like” by Spanish police, with 294 lacking valid documentation. Some of the workers received no wages despite working 12-hour days and living in poor conditions. It is reportedly the first trafficking case of Nepali agricultural workers in Europe documented and pursued at this scale through formal law enforcement.
Of course, such cases are not representative of the corridor as a whole, which for hundreds of thousands of Nepali workers has also delivered genuine welfare gains and improved living standards. However, these cases are a warning about what happens when a large, fast-growing migration corridor operates without the proper governance infrastructure to protect the people moving through it.
Pathways towards a Structured Corridor
Migration is one of the oldest expressions of human agency, the decision to move, to seek, to build something better. For Nepal, movement has long been a source of household resilience and, increasingly, broader social and economic transformation. What is happening along the Nepal–Europe corridor is a continuation of Nepal’s migration story, playing out at a new scale and in a new direction. Large numbers of Nepalis and their families are eager to migrate and are willing to invest significant resources to do so. The question now is about how the government will be accountable to its citizens, reduce harm in the recruitment process, support its citizens abroad, and facilitate investment and remittances by realizing the potential of the Nepal-Europe migration corridor.
Most importantly, Nepal needs a migration governance framework genuinely designed for the European context. The path forward is not to suppress migration, but to bring it within a governance framework that makes actors within the system accountable. Several targeted interventions could improve the governance of the Nepal-Europe migration corridor.
Strengthen Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET). Nepal’s TVET landscape has greatly improved in the past decades and must remain a key priority moving forward. The 2025 National Labor Migration Policy calls for expanding and improving skills training for both domestic and foreign employment. The spread of unregistered or unlicensed training institutes makes it harder to ensure quality and undermines trust in certifications. Oversight of such training institutes must be brought forward. Most fundamentally, the issue is not a lack of skills in Nepal, but how those skills are recognized, such as through the National Qualification Framework, which has yet to be sufficiently implemented by Council for Technical Vocational Education and Training (CTEVT). Moving forward, the government must prioritize implementing the National Qualifications Framework, enforcing regulation of training institutes, and aligning certification systems with international labor market standards.
Boost Government-to-Government mechanisms and Support Labor Demand Attestation
Nepal should prioritize the expansion of formal bilateral G2G arrangements with European countries, particularly where proposals are already under consideration, including Albania, Austria, Turkey, Malta, Serbia, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Belgium. These pending agreements present immediate opportunities for scaling migration pathways and should be actively pursued through diplomatic engagement. The bilateral framework signed with Germany in 2023 and the Memorandum of Understanding with Romania offer a starting point.
The study points to the urgency of future bilateral agreements, particularly skills-based mobility partnerships that could deliver real mutual benefit if the right institutional foundations are in place. Construction and hospitality represent the most immediately actionable sectors for future skill-based bilateral agreements. Agriculture also offers a viable near-term pathway through seasonal and circular arrangements. Healthcare, carrying the highest EU demand, may also be an actionable sector, but it requires careful bilateral design to avoid depleting Nepal’s own fragile domestic health workforce. Bilateral skills partnerships can also be designed to better align training systems with labor market demand while offering clearer and more regulated pathways for workers.
Furthermore, Nepal’s MoFA and DoFE has made some progress, but coverage of labor demand attestation remains far below what the corridor’s current scale and accelerating trajectory demand. Amid the current context of downsizing diplomatic missions abroad for budget cuts, it is essential that the government’s decisions not curtail dedicated attestation capacity across key destinations with high volumes of Nepali migrants in Europe. This is needed to ensure formal channels are genuinely competitive with informal recruitment channels, in which people must rely on intermediaries.
Furthermore, Nepal is not currently included in an EU Talent Partnership, an instrument the EU has applied in countries such as Bangladesh and Pakistan to support skills-based mobility, and exploring the potential for Nepal’s inclusion may be worthwhile for relevant Nepali and European stakeholders. Framing Nepal’s engagement around the scale of existing migration flows, areas of skills complementarity, and the role of the Nepali diaspora could help assess whether similar approaches would offer tangible benefits for both Nepal and EU member states.
Manju von Rospatt is a Kathmandu-based research fellow at the Nepal Economic Forum. She is interested in international affairs, climate justice, arts and culture, and migration studies. She has an MA in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Netherlands focusing on social policy and writing her thesis on the Nepali diaspora in the US.
