Investment guide

Foreign investment is governed by the Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer Act (FITTA 2075 / 2019). Outside negative-list sectors, 100% foreign ownership is permitted. Repatriation of profit, capital and capital gains on share sale is provided for in Article 8 of the same Act.

Your counterparty depends on deal size. Foreign investment above NPR 2 billion sits with Investment Board Nepal (IBN); below that, the Department of Industry (DoI) is the filing authority. Most Japanese SME and mid-cap projects fall on the DoI route. Establishing which side of that line you are on changes the sequence of everything that follows.

Company registration goes through the Office of Company Registrar (OCR), and Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) is involved in registering the investment and the inbound capital.

The reason to look at Nepal for people is not labour cost. It is that the country trains more qualified engineers each year than its own economy has work for, and that the surplus is concentrated in exactly the disciplines Japanese companies are short of.

Civil and structural engineering is the deepest of them. Nepal's road, bridge, tunnel and hydropower programmes have been running for decades, a large share of them under Japanese supervision — the Nagdhunga tunnel alone put Nepali engineers and site staff on a Japanese-specification project for seven years. These are people who have already worked to JIS-adjacent standards, to Japanese drawing conventions and to Japanese quality control, and who did so on their own soil rather than as trainees abroad.

Software and IT is the fastest growing. IT and ITES exports reached USD 515 million in 2022, up 64.2% in a year, from 106 companies employing around 14,700 people, alongside roughly 51,800 freelancers billing foreign clients directly. Several Kathmandu development centres are Japanese-owned and run Japanese-language training in house. Mechanical, electrical, agricultural and healthcare disciplines sit behind those two, smaller but with the same profile.

Language is the part that usually surprises people. More than 100,000 Nepali students are enrolled in Japanese higher education and more than 273,000 Nepali nationals live in Japan. That produces a steady flow of returning engineers who hold JLPT N2 or N1 and, more usefully, know how a Japanese workplace runs — reporting rhythm, 報連相, what a deadline means.

There are two ways to employ this pool, and they carry different rules. Hiring in Nepal — through your own entity or a development centre — sits under Nepali labour law and needs no Japanese residence status at all. Bringing people to Japan does. For degree-holding engineers the relevant status is Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services (技術・人文知識・国際業務), which is not restricted to designated industry fields. Specified Skilled Worker (特定技能) covers the designated fields and keeps expanding, most recently by cabinet decision in January 2026; Technical Intern Training (技能実習) is being abolished and replaced by Employment for Skill Development (育成就労) on 1 April 2027, with progression into Specified Skilled Worker (i) expected to require a skills examination and Japanese at roughly A2. Since July 2025 Nepal has also required demand letters to be authenticated at its embassy in Japan for Specified Skilled Worker hiring, which makes a government-recognised sending organisation the practical route.

The residence-status rules are legislatively active. The above reflects our understanding as of August 2026; confirm against the Immigration Services Agency and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare before finalising a hiring plan.