Kenya Replaced Visa-on-Arrival With a Universal eTA — What Changed

If the last thing you read about visiting Kenya mentioned "visa on arrival," it's out of date. Kenya replaced that system with a near-universal Electronic Travel Authorisation (eTA), and the two work differently enough that assuming the old rule still applies is a real way to get stuck at check-in.

The actual change

Kenya's Citizenship and Immigration (Amendment) Regulations, 2023 — Legal Notice No. 1 of 2024 — established the eTA regime. A later amendment (Legal Notice No. 93 of 2025) added a short exemption list on top of it. The practical result, checked against the eTA portal directly:

• Most nationalities now need an eTA before travel, applied for online in advance — not a stamp you get at the airport.
• A small exempt list (Malaysia and Singapore, among others) gets 90-day visa-free entry instead, under the 2025 amendment's schedule.
• There's a standard single-entry eTA (around USD 30) and a five-year multi-entry option (around USD 185) for nationalities that qualify.

The part almost nobody mentions: how long you can actually stay

This is the detail that gets flattened into a confident "90 days" on most travel sites, and it's wrong. Kenya's eTA portal itself says your length of stay is "determined at the point of entry" — it's the immigration officer's call, not a fixed number the eTA grants you. The underlying regulation caps a visitor's pass at six months at the officer's discretion, but there's no guaranteed figure below that.

We don't publish the commonly-repeated "90 days" for Kenya, because we couldn't find a primary source that actually says it. If you're planning around a specific stay length, that's a conversation to have with your airline or at the border, not an assumption to book around.

What actually to do before you fly

Apply for the eTA in advance at Kenya's official portal — not a third-party "visa service" site, several of which exist purely to charge a markup for a form you can file yourself. Bring the approval, a passport valid well beyond your trip, and be ready for the length-of-stay question to be answered at the desk, not before you land.

Kenya's rule is one of the cleaner examples of exactly why we verify per-destination instead of assuming a region behaves consistently — see our full source list for what backs this and every other destination we cover.