If you have been reading about trekking in Nepal you will have seen the TIMS card mentioned everywhere, usually as the first thing to sort out. You can stop worrying about it. TIMS is no longer required anywhere in Nepal. Nobody will ask you for one, and you do not need to buy one.
This page used to explain how to get a TIMS card. It now explains why you do not need to, because that is the more useful answer and because almost every other website still gives the old one.
What TIMS was
The Trekkers' Information Management System was a register of who was on which trail, introduced in 2008. You filled in your route, your dates and an emergency contact, and that went into a database so that if there were an earthquake or an avalanche somebody knew roughly where to look. For years it was a genuine errand: queue at the Nepal Tourism Board or a TAAN office, hand over a photograph and a passport copy, pay for a card.
It was a reasonable idea. It was also solving a problem that has since been solved a different way.
What replaced it
Two changes made the card redundant.
The first was local. The Khumbu stopped using TIMS and brought in its own permit, the Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality permit, collected at Lukla or at the Monjo checkpoint. Everest trekkers have not needed a TIMS card for years.
The second was national, and it is the one that finished TIMS off. Since April 2023 a foreign trekker in a national park or conservation area walks with a licensed guide hired through a registered agency. That agency already holds your passport details, your route, your dates and your guide's licence number, and the park and conservation permits are issued and checked against exactly that. A separate register of the same information stopped earning its keep, and the checkpoints stopped asking.
What you actually need
The permit for wherever you are walking, and a guide.
- Everest: the Sagarmatha National Park permit and the Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality permit
- Annapurna: the ACAP permit
- Langtang: the national park permit
- Manaslu, Upper Mustang, Narphu, Upper Dolpa: a conservation area permit and a restricted area permit, which can only be issued through an agency
The fees are all on permits and park passes, and what the guide rule asks of you is on do you need a guide to trek in Nepal.
Why so many websites still say otherwise
Because permit pages are written once and rarely revisited, and because a card that existed for fifteen years leaves a lot behind it. There are agency websites, guidebooks and forum threads still describing the queue at the Nepal Tourism Board, still quoting the old US$20 and US$10 cards, still listing TIMS as the first item on a packing checklist.
None of it is malicious. It is just old. If a page is telling you to budget for a TIMS card, that is a fair sign of how recently anything else on it was checked.
If you are trekking with us, permits are part of what we arrange, and there is nothing here for you to do. Tell us where you are headed and we will tell you exactly what your route needs.