The Business of Immigration in Ethiopia

In the 2025/26 fiscal year, the Immigration and Citizenship Service (ICS) collected more than 42.7 billion birr from passport, visa, and related services. That is roughly $262 million at the current exchange rate of about 163 birr per dollar. To put that in perspective, it is close to what some mid-sized African nations collect in total customs revenue in a year, generated almost entirely from stamping documents and printing booklets.

This article breaks down where that money comes from, how fast it is growing, and what the numbers actually tell us once currency depreciation is factored out.

The headline numbers

ICS had a record year. According to its own annual performance review, the agency:

Revenue has followed a steep curve. ICS collected 14.7 billion birr in 2023/24, 34.1 billion birr in 2024/25, and 42.7 billion birr in 2025/26. In nominal birr terms, that is a 190% jump in two years.

The currency asterisk nobody mentions

That growth number looks dramatic until you account for the birr itself. In July 2024, Ethiopia floated its currency as part of an IMF and World Bank reform package, and the birr lost roughly 30% of its value overnight, then kept sliding. The official rate moved from around 57 birr to the dollar in 2023/24 to about 135 by mid-2025, and it now sits above 160.

Run the three years through their approximate contemporary exchange rates and the picture changes considerably:

In dollar terms, immigration revenue has barely moved in three years. What looks like a 190% surge is mostly the birr losing value, not the government suddenly capturing three times more real economic activity from passports and visas. This is worth remembering anytime an Ethiopian government agency announces a "record" birr figure. The volume growth (more passports, more travelers, more branches) is real. The revenue explosion, in dollar terms, is not.

Why the fees jumped anyway

Part of what kept dollar revenue stable rather than falling was a deliberate repricing. On August 7, 2024, just days after the currency float, ICS overhauled its fee schedule under Council of Ministers Regulation No. 550/2024. Standard passport issuance and renewal jumped to 5,000 birr, a rise legal commentators calculated at 733% from the old base fee. Expedited service climbed to 25,000 birr for two-day delivery and 20,000 birr for five days. Corrections and lost-passport replacements now run as high as 40,500 birr.

Diaspora Ethiopians pay in hard currency. A regular passport from abroad costs $200, and expedited service within 15 days costs $350. Given how many Ethiopians live overseas and need documents renewed, this diaspora channel is a quiet but meaningful source of foreign exchange for an economy that is chronically short of it.

The fee hikes were not popular. Critics, including some supporters of the ruling party, argued the new prices were unaffordable for ordinary citizens and effectively taxed the right to travel. The government's response was to point to service upgrades: a biometric e-passport launched in February 2025, faster processing, and a growing branch network.

What visas actually cost a visitor

On the inbound side, Ethiopia runs its visa system almost entirely through its e-visa portal. A single-entry, 30-day tourist e-visa costs $62, down from $82 after a 2024 price cut. A 90-day version costs $152. Business, investment, and conference visas are priced separately and were left untouched during that reduction. Applications processed directly through an embassy, such as the one in Washington, cost $60 for single entry and $150 for multiple entries.

With roughly a million visas issued to foreign nationals in 2025/26 alongside 7.2 million total border crossings, visas are the smaller half of ICS revenue by volume, but they are collected almost entirely in foreign currency, which makes every dollar of visa revenue worth more to the National Bank than a birr collected domestically from a citizen.

How this fits into the national accounts

Ethiopia's federal government approved a 1.93 trillion birr budget for 2025/26, and the Ministry of Revenues separately collected 1.518 trillion birr in tax revenue for the year. Against those figures, immigration's 42.7 billion birr looks modest, equal to roughly 2.2% of the federal budget and 2.8% of total tax collection. But immigration revenue is not tax revenue. It is fee-based, non-tax income, and it comes with far lower collection costs than income tax or VAT, which the government is still struggling to raise past single-digit shares of GDP. For a finance ministry trying to plug a widening deficit, a service fee that citizens cannot avoid paying, because you cannot travel, work abroad, or register a birth event without touching ICS, is close to the easiest revenue a government can collect.

Ethiopia is not alone in leaning on passport fees for revenue, but the reaction elsewhere has been different. Kenya raised its standard 34-page passport fee from Ksh 4,500 to Ksh 7,500 in 2024, and passport issuance then fell 36.7% in 2025, from 621,794 to 393,567 documents, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. Nigeria raised its passport fees to N100,000 and N200,000 in September 2025 depending on validity and page count.

Ethiopia's own fee increase was proportionally larger than either of these, yet passport volume kept climbing, from 1.4 million to 1.6 million in the same window Kenya's demand was collapsing. That suggests Ethiopian demand for passports is driven less by discretionary travel and more by necessity: labor migration to the Gulf, family reunification, and a growing digital ID requirement that now makes a birth certificate and digital ID sufficient to apply. When the product is close to compulsory, price increases do not suppress demand the way they do for optional travel documents.

What comes next

Ethiopia has been building toward local e-passport production, targeting an October 2025 rollout of domestically manufactured biometric booklets through a partnership between Ethiopian Investment Holdings and Toppan Security. Producing passports domestically, rather than importing booklets, should improve margins on every document issued, since the government stops paying a foreign printer for physical stock.

With customer satisfaction at only 70.4% despite the branch expansion, and with a passport that ranks around 96th globally for travel freedom, offering visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to under 50 destinations, the ICS growth story is really about volume and pricing power rather than the value of the document itself. Ethiopians are paying considerably more for a passport that opens fewer doors abroad than most, and the government has found that this is a business it can keep growing regardless.

The real number to watch going forward is not the birr total. It is the dollar figure. If ICS revenue in hard currency terms breaks meaningfully above the roughly $260 million it has held at for three straight years, that will be the first real sign this is growing government income rather than a currency illusion wearing a bigger number.