US Visa Bond Countries List 2026: The B-1/B-2 Bond, Explained for the People Who Have to Post It

If you have read anything about the US visa bond in the past year, there is a good chance what you read is now wrong.

For twelve months this was a pilot programme, and almost every article ranking on Google still describes that pilot: bonds of $5,000 to $15,000, a single-entry visa valid for three months, a thirty-day stay, and entry allowed only through three named airports. Those were real rules. They are no longer the rules.

On 3 August 2026 the State Department published a final rule making the programme permanent, and it changed the amounts and most of the travel restrictions at the same time. Some of the changes are worse for applicants. Several are considerably better, and if you have been avoiding applying because you read about the old thirty-day limit, you have been avoiding a rule that no longer exists.

This guide covers the current country list, how your amount actually gets decided, what the bonded visa lets you do, and the conditions attached to getting your money back.

The full visa bond countries list

Fifty countries are currently designated. Grouped by region for readability:

Africa (30)

Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Gabon, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Asia and Central Asia (9)

Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Nepal, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan

Pacific (5)

Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu

Americas and Caribbean (6)

Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Nicaragua, Venezuela

One important caveat about this list: it moves. The State Department can add a country with fifteen days' notice and remove one with immediate effect, and it has revised the list at least three times since the programme began. Twelve countries were added as recently as April 2026. Before you pay for anything, check the official list on travel.state.gov, because a blog post is a snapshot and the government's page is the live version.

Note also that designation follows your passport, not where you live. A Nepali citizen applying from Dubai is still a Nepali citizen for this purpose.

What actually changed on 3 August 2026

This table is the reason most of what you have read elsewhere is out of date.

Read the bottom four rows carefully, because they are the ones that change whether a trip is worth taking.

Under the pilot, a bonded visa was close to unusable for an ordinary family visit: one entry, three months to use it, thirty days on the ground. Under the permanent rule you may receive a multiple-entry visa valid up to a year, and CBP admits you for a normal visitor period, which is typically six months, at the officer's discretion, exactly as it would be for any other visitor.

The money got worse. The travel got substantially better.

How the officer decides your amount

This is the part written nowhere else, and it is the part that belongs to you rather than to a lawyer.

The bond is not a fixed fee. There are three tiers ($10,000, $15,000 and $20,000), and the consular officer chooses which one applies to you, during your interview, based on how they assess your risk of overstaying. The State Department has signalled that $15,000 is the expected standard, with the other two tiers used for applicants who present notably lower or higher risk.

Two consequences follow, and both matter.

First, you cannot know your number in advance. You will not find your amount on a fee schedule, because it does not exist until an officer decides it. You can budget for $15,000 and hope for $10,000, but anyone who tells you your country has a set amount is guessing.

Second, and this is the important one, the interview is not only about approval any more. It has always been a yes-or-no decision under section 214(b). For applicants from these fifty countries it is now also a pricing decision, and the same things that make an officer confident you will leave are the things that push your bond down a tier. Strong employment, property, a specific and short itinerary, family remaining at home, a clean travel history: these were always worth demonstrating. Now they are worth demonstrating in cash.

That reframes preparation entirely. A well-prepared interview might be worth $5,000 to you, in a way it never was before. Our existing guides on how long do you plan to stay, how will you sponsor your trip and what are your plans after the visit cover the three questions most directly tied to overstay risk.

The number nobody writes down

The bond is assessed per person, not per application or per family.

At the expected standard amount, a couple travelling together is $30,000. Two parents and two siblings attending a graduation is $60,000, held by the US government for the duration of the trip and returned some time after everyone gets home.

That is the figure that actually decides whether a visit happens, and it is missing from essentially every article on this subject. If your family is planning a group trip, do this arithmetic before anyone books an appointment.

Who this does not apply to

Worth stating plainly, because the panic spreads further than the rule does.

The bond applies only to B-1, B-2 and combined B-1/B-2 visitor visas. If you are applying for a student visa, an exchange visa, or a work visa, this programme does not touch you. F-1, J-1, M-1, H-1B, L-1 and the immigrant visa categories are all outside it. A Nepali or Nigerian student applying for an F-1 does not post a bond.

It also does not apply retroactively to a visa you already hold, and it is not a punishment or a finding against you personally. Designation is based on the country's overstay statistics and its identity-verification and information-sharing systems. It says nothing about your individual application beyond which rules govern it.

How you actually post the bond

The sequence surprises people, so take it in order.

1. You interview normally. Nothing about the bond changes how the interview is conducted. You are assessed under the same standard as any other visitor applicant.

2. You must first be found otherwise eligible. The bond is not a way to buy a visa. If you are refused under 214(b), you are refused. There is no bond that fixes it, and you pay nothing. The bond requirement only attaches to applicants the officer has already decided to approve.

3. The officer sets your tier and you receive instructions. This happens at or immediately after the interview.

4. The bond is filed on DHS Form I-352 and paid through Pay.gov. Form I-352 is the standard immigration bond form; Pay.gov is the US Treasury's payment portal. The consulate provides the specific instructions for your case. Follow those rather than anything you read online, including this page.

5. Your visa is issued once the bond is posted. Not before. Until the money is in, you have an approval and no visa.

Budget for the timing as well as the amount. The funds must be available in a form you can send to a US government payment portal, and they will stay there for the length of your trip plus however long the cancellation takes afterwards. This is not a fee you pay and forget. It is a large sum of your own money, immobilised, for months.

The visa you actually get, and how it changes your trip

Three restrictions ride along with a bonded visa. The first two are mild. The third catches people out.

Validity and entries. You may receive a three-month single-entry visa, a three-month multiple-entry visa, or a multiple-entry visa valid up to twelve months, depending on the reciprocity schedule for your country. Better than the pilot's flat single entry, but still far short of the ten-year visas issued to many other nationalities.

Length of stay. Set by CBP at the airport in the normal way, commonly six months for a visitor, though the officer decides. The pilot's thirty-day cap is gone. Your bond obligation runs to the date on your I-94, not to any date on your visa, and if you are unclear on the difference between those two, read this first. Under a bond, confusing them is a $15,000 mistake rather than a paperwork one.

Ports of entry: the one that catches people. You must enter and depart through a commercial airport, including CBP preclearance locations. Land and sea ports are prohibited.

Think about what that rules out. You cannot drive across from Canada or Mexico. You cannot arrive or leave on a cruise. And the departure half of that rule is the genuinely dangerous part: if you leave the United States by land (a day trip to Niagara Falls that turns into flying home from Toronto, say), your exit may never be recorded against your I-94.

An unrecorded departure looks identical to an overstay in the system. You will have complied with every substantive condition of your visa, gone home exactly when you said you would, and still be at risk of forfeiting the entire bond because of how you crossed the border. Fly in, fly out, and keep your boarding passes.

Getting your money back

The bond is refundable in full. The conditions are narrower than most people assume, but they are not complicated.

You get the whole amount back if you comply with the terms of your visa and your bond, and then do one of two things:

• Depart the United States on time, on or before the admit-until date on your I-94; or
• File a timely and proper application to extend your stay or change your status before that date passes.

That is the test. Comply, then leave on time or file on time.

Note what the second condition does and does not give you. Filing an extension protects the bond; it does not have to be approved to protect it, but it does have to be filed properly and before your deadline. If a change of status is denied, a short departure window, reported as ten days, is what stands between you and forfeiture, so a denial is a same-week travel emergency, not something to think about later.

What forfeits the bond

Four things, in rough order of how often they will happen:

Overstaying your I-94. The core breach. One day past your admit-until date and the bond is exposed.

Filing late. An extension or change-of-status application submitted after your deadline does not protect you. The date it was filed is what counts.

Departing by land or sea. As above: a compliance failure that can occur while you are doing everything else correctly.

Filing for asylum or other humanitarian protection. This one is absolute and deserves emphasis, because it is not intuitive and it is not a technicality. Under the rule, applying for asylum forfeits the full bond. Whatever your view of that, know it before you enter: a person who arrives on a bonded visitor visa and later has genuine grounds to seek protection faces the loss of $10,000 to $20,000 as a direct consequence of asking. If that possibility is anywhere in your thinking, take proper legal advice before you travel, not after.

Also worth knowing: nobody has published reliable timelines for how long cancellation and repayment actually take once you are home, because the permanent programme is two weeks old. Plan on the money being gone for a long while, and do not commit it to anything else.

If your parents are coming for your graduation

This is the situation that brings most readers of this site to this page, so let us be concrete about it.

You are studying in the US on an F-1. Your family is in Nepal, Bangladesh, Nigeria or one of the other forty-seven countries. They want to attend your graduation, which is a fixed date that cannot move.

Four things to plan around:

The money is per person, and it is large. Two parents at the standard amount is $30,000 held for the duration. Decide early whether that is possible at all, because it may change who travels. One parent instead of two is a legitimate answer, and it is better reached in advance than at the consulate.

Start much earlier than you think. You are now stacking an appointment wait, an interview, a bond posting step before issuance, and travel booking, all against a date that will not move. Check the current wait times for your consulate and work backwards from the ceremony.

Book flights, not a road trip. No land crossing in either direction, however convenient it looks on a map.

Prepare the interview properly, because the tier is decided there. For retired parents, homemakers and self-employed applicants, the standard "strong ties means a salary slip" advice fits badly. Our graduation-ceremony interview questions and the guide to applying for a visitor visa for a graduation both cover this case specifically.

Our document checklist generator will assemble the B-1/B-2 folder, and the community experience database has reports from applicants at your consulate, including, increasingly, from people who were asked to post a bond.

Quick answers

Which countries need a US visa bond? Fifty, as of August 2026: 30 in Africa, 9 across Asia and Central Asia, 5 in the Pacific, and 6 in the Americas and Caribbean. The full list is above, and the live version is on travel.state.gov. Nepal, Bangladesh and Nigeria are all included.

How much is the US visa bond? $10,000, $15,000 or $20,000. The State Department expects $15,000 to be the usual amount. The pilot's $5,000 tier no longer exists.

Does everyone from a listed country have to post a bond? No. The officer decides case by case, and the bond is only required of applicants who are otherwise eligible for the visa.

Do students from these countries need a bond? No. It applies only to B-1 and B-2 visitor visas. F-1, J-1 and M-1 applicants are unaffected.

Do I pay the bond before my interview? No. You interview first. The bond comes after the officer has decided to approve you and set your tier, and your visa is issued once it is posted.

Is the visa bond refundable? Yes, in full, if you comply with your visa terms and either depart before your I-94 expires or file a timely, proper extension or change of status. It is forfeited for overstaying, filing late, leaving by land or sea, or applying for asylum.

Can I drive to the US from Canada on a bonded visa? No. Entry and departure must both be through a commercial airport or a CBP preclearance location.

Is this in addition to the MRV fee and the visa integrity fee? Yes. The bond is separate from the MRV application fee, and separate again from the $250 visa integrity fee. The bond is the only one you get back.

The one-sentence version

If you hold a passport from one of the fifty designated countries and you are applying for a visitor visa, assume $15,000 per traveller held by the US government for the length of your trip, understand that your consular officer sets that figure during the interview based on how convinced they are that you will leave, and then protect it by flying in, flying out, and departing before the date on your I-94.

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Applying for a B-1/B-2 from a bond country? The interview now sets your price as well as your outcome. Read what other applicants at your consulate were actually asked in the community interview experience database, then practise the full interview out loud with our AI visa officer. The first session is free.

This article explains general rules and is not legal advice. The final rule took effect on 3 August 2026 and the country list changes on a rolling basis, so verify the current list and your own bond instructions with the US embassy or consulate handling your case, or with a licensed immigration attorney, before acting on anything here.