Before you start filling in forms for a trip to Suriname, settle one question, because it decides everything that follows: are you applying for a visa at all, or for an Entry Fee voucher? Most visitors are applying for the voucher. Both run through the same portal, and the portal's address changed in August 2026, which is why half the links you will find no longer work.
Step zero: work out which product applies to your passport
The portal publishes a country list, and your line in it tells you what you can apply for. Counted from the Internet Archive capture of 31 July 2026, the list holds 251 countries and territories. 216 of them are listed with Entry Fee (Single + Multiple) / Business / Transit / Short Stay, 90 Days. 21 need a visa before they travel. 14 CARICOM member states are listed as visa exempt except for a short-stay visa. Three — Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela — are offered an E-Tourist Card.
If you hold an American, Canadian, British, Dutch or German passport and you are going on holiday, your product is the Entry Fee. Everything below is written with that in mind, and the visa route is flagged where it differs.
One address, and it moved on 10 August 2026
The ministry issued an announcement from Paramaribo dated 10 August 2026 stating that the VFS Global website used for lodging visa applications and paying the Entry Fee had changed, because existing data was migrated to a new platform, and that with immediate effect only one website is the official and valid one. In its own words: de voorheen gebruikte webpagina is niet langer actief en dient derhalve niet meer te worden gebruikt. The address it names is suriname.vfsevisa.com.
Two sanity checks we ran on 25 October 2026, so you do not run them yourself. evisa.gov.sr and suriname-evisa.org returned no connection at all, not even an error page. vfsglobal.com/suriname returns a page, but the page is VFS Global's own Page Not Found screen: the company publishes no Suriname country page on its corporate site. Our own requests to the official portal met a Cloudflare access check from two separate networks, while the Internet Archive holds a successful capture from 2 October 2026 — so the site is serving, and an ordinary browser should reach it.
The steps, from the walkthrough the ministry itself published
In August 2026 the ministry published a VFS Global walkthrough of the online customer journey on the government site. These are its steps, not ours:
- Step 1. Go to the official Suriname eVisa website.
- Step 2a. Upload the personal-data page of your passport. The system uses optical character recognition to read the key fields automatically, which reduces manual entry. Check what it read and fill in whatever is missing.
- Step 2b. Upload a recent passport photograph, not older than six months.
- Step 3. Register your email address and enter the one-time password.
- Step 4. Upload the required supporting documents. For the Entry Fee the walkthrough states that only the passport holder page and a recent photograph are needed.
- Step 5. Pay by credit card or iDEAL. The walkthrough notes that you leave the page and finish payment in a separate payment portal.
- Step 6. Download the voucher, single or multiple entry, from your email inbox or from the website dashboard.
Note what is absent from that official walkthrough: there is no waiting period in it. Six steps, no stated processing time for an Entry Fee voucher. We say more about that below.
What it costs, from the portal's own fee pages
These are the figures the portal publishes, read from Internet Archive captures of 23 September 2026:
- Single Entry Fee: USD 50 or EUR 50, plus a VFS service fee of USD 8 or EUR 8. Maximum duration of stay 90 days.
- Multiple Entry Fee: USD 75 or EUR 75, plus the same USD 8 or EUR 8 service fee. Five entries, validity three months, maximum stay 90 days.
- Children aged 0 to 2 are exempt from any form of Entry Fee. From age three the fee is due.
The Entry Fee is fixed in law, not by the portal: the fee decree of 22 January 2024 sets it at $ 50 for other countries and € 50 for Europe, and the ministry's announcement of 26 April 2025 confirms both the 50 and the 75. That same decree lists who pays nothing: CARICOM citizens, holders of a still valid visa, holders of a PSA document or card, holders of diplomatic and service passports, and holders of a Vatican City passport. The portal's own page adds UN laissez-passer holders and residents of Suriname, and notes that someone in transit who does not leave the airport needs no visa and pays no Entry Fee, while someone in transit who does leave needs a transit visa and pays no Entry Fee.
Pay attention to the currency. The portal states that the fee can be paid only in American Dollars (US$) and Euro, by MasterCard, Visa or Maestro, on a card enabled for international transactions and 3D Secure. The card does not have to be in your name. Any guide quoting you a fixed amount in Surinamese dollars is quoting a figure that does not exist in the rules. The fee is set in dollars and euros, so a fixed SRD price is wrong by construction, and we are not converting it for you.
The voucher is not the only thing the border wants
Two more published requirements, and travelers miss the second one constantly.
First, the entry conditions. The ministry's instructions effective 1 May 2023 require a passport valid for at least six months, a valid visa or Entry Fee voucher, evidence of having sufficient funds to cover the entire stay, and yellow fever vaccination if you arrive within six days of leaving or transiting an infected or endemic area. The portal adds that the passport needs at least one blank page for the immigration officer.
Second, the Immigration and Customs Form. This is separate from the voucher and separate from the portal. It was launched at Johan Adolf Pengel International Airport on 15 January 2025, replacing the familiar yellow and white paper forms, and it is filled in online at icf.sr; on arrival you show the generated QR code. The government's report of the launch states it can be completed up to 72 hours before departure and is available in seven languages, and that both arriving and departing passengers must complete it, Surinamese nationals leaving the country included. A ministry announcement of 2 April 2025 confirms the window — ten minste drie (3) dagen voor de reisdatum — and records that the mandatory photograph upload field was removed for the time being.
What we are not telling you, and why
Three gaps, named rather than filled.
- No processing time for an Entry Fee voucher is published anywhere we could read. Not in the ministry's walkthrough, not on the fee pages. The portal's FAQ answers the question only for an eVisa, where it says a visa can be issued within 72 hours of payment and to contact the service desk if an application has exceeded five working days. Read that as the portal's own conditional wording, not as a promise, and note the portal separately warns that for the 21 visa countries the process may take longer than 72 hours.
- No fee is published for the e-visa or the tourist card in anything we could read. The 2023 decision points to the Staatsbesluit Heffing Kanselarijrechten; the readable table in that chain covers only the Entry Fee and the PSA document, and the further amendment the chain names is not on the state's legal information site, measured on 25 October 2026.
- No photograph dimensions. The official walkthrough says a recent photograph not older than six months, and that is all it says. Any measurement in centimeters you see elsewhere is not from these sources.
Where to ask instead. The ministry published service-desk numbers on 24 July 2026: +597 414179 for Suriname, +31 20 532 2407 for the Netherlands and +1 313 879 6485 for the United States, with a ministry WhatsApp text number +597 8834903. Be warned that an earlier announcement of 26 April 2025 lists different numbers for the same service, so confirm on the portal before you rely on one. The portal also offers a live support chat, and an earlier announcement gave its service hours as Monday to Friday, 06:00 to 14:00.
What expats should know
- Most visitors are buying an Entry Fee voucher, not a visa. 216 of 251 listed countries.
- There is one official address, named in the ministry's announcement of 10 August 2026; the previous page is dead.
- Two lookalike addresses answered nothing at all when we measured on 25 October 2026, and VFS Global's corporate site has no Suriname page.
- USD 50 or EUR 50 single, USD 75 or EUR 75 multiple, plus USD 8 or EUR 8 service fee.
- Payment is only in dollars or euros, by MasterCard, Visa or Maestro, 3D Secure, international transactions enabled.
- Children aged 0 to 2 pay nothing; from three they do.
- Fill in the ICF at icf.sr separately, for arrival and for departure, from three days before.
- Do not plan on a processing time for the voucher. None is published. Pay before you fly, as the ministry advises.
Where to check
The steps are the ministry's published Suriname E-Visa and Entry Fee walkthrough. The address change is the announcement of 10 August 2026, and the official portal is suriname.vfsevisa.com. The fees are the portal's single-entry and multiple-entry pages, read from Internet Archive captures of 23 September 2026, with the statutory tariff in the fee decree of 22 January 2024 and the ministry's announcement of 26 April 2025. The entry conditions are the instructions effective 1 May 2023. The processing-time wording is the portal's own FAQ, captured 15 September 2026. The ICF is the government's launch report of 15 January 2025 and its announcement of 2 April 2025, with the form at icf.sr. The service numbers are the announcement of 24 July 2026. All read on 25 October 2026.
