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UK Visitor Visa from Egypt: Fees, Documents, Timing

The answer in short

A UK Standard Visitor visa from Egypt costs £135 for a 6 month visa and is decided usually within 3 weeks. You apply online, from 3 months before you travel at the earliest, then attend a visa application centre in Egypt to give biometrics. The Home Office caseworker guidance says, in terms, "There is no set level of funds required for an applicant to show this." Almost every other page about this route either invents a figure or implies one exists. Neither is true, and the rest of this guide explains what the caseworker actually assesses instead.

What the Standard Visitor visa is for

The Standard Visitor route covers tourism, visiting family and friends, and short business trips. It is a temporary permission: you ask to come for a defined visit, and you are assessed on whether that visit is genuine and whether you will leave at the end of it. Everything on this page hangs off one rule, paragraph V 4.2 of the Immigration Rules, which sets out the genuine visitor test.

Under V 4.2 the applicant must show that they will leave the UK at the end of the visit; will not live in the UK through frequent or successive visits or make the UK their main home; is genuinely seeking entry for a permitted purpose; will not undertake prohibited activities; and has sufficient funds to cover all reasonable costs of the visit without working or accessing public funds. Those costs include the return or onward journey, any dependants travelling with them, and the activities they plan to do.

That list is the whole assessment in miniature. Read it again and notice what is absent: no minimum balance, no salary threshold, no property requirement, no fixed number of months of bank statements. The rules ask whether the visit makes sense as a whole, not whether one document clears a bar.

What it costs

The visa fee is paid to the Home Office through the online application. Visakit does not collect it, cannot pay it on your behalf, and cannot get it reduced or refunded. Visakit charges nothing for its pack and never handles the fee. Anyone who offers to pay the government fee for you is either mistaken about how the route works or taking your money.

The 2 year, 5 year and 10 year visas do not buy longer visits. On every one of them the maximum stay on a single visit is 6 months. What they buy is convenience, one application instead of several.

Each family member needs their own application, their own appointment and their own fee. There is no family application and the table above has no child rate. A couple with two children applying for 6 month visas pays four times £135, before any charges the visa application centre adds for photographs, courier return or other optional services.

The fee comes back only if the application has not yet been processed. If you are refused, you lose it. If you ask for a 5 year visa and are granted a 6 month one, you lose the difference and get no refund of the balance. A refusal is an expensive way to learn that the file was thin.

The funds question: what replaced a fixed number

Here is the sentence, quoted exactly from the Home Office caseworker guidance for visitors: "There is no set level of funds required for an applicant to show this." There is no figure. Not £50 a day, not £1,000 in the bank, not three months of payslips. If a page tells you there is a specific amount, that page is wrong, and if you build your application around that number you may spend money you did not need to spend while leaving the real weakness untouched.

The requirement that replaced a fixed number sits in V 4.2: sufficient funds to cover all reasonable costs of the visit without working or accessing public funds. That wording moves the question from how much to how much for what. Reasonable costs are the costs of your visit: the return or onward journey, your dependants, your accommodation, and whatever you plan to do while you are there.

The guidance then sets out how a caseworker assesses maintenance, which is the practical machinery behind that sentence. Four things are weighed: the likely cost of the stay, whether your income continues while you are away, your ongoing commitments at home including dependants who are not travelling with you, and the condition of the funds you are relying on.

That last point is where most applications quietly fail. Recently deposited funds invite checks on the origin of the money, and the guidance expects bank statements to show where it came from. A balance that jumped two weeks before you applied, with no explanation, is worse evidence than a smaller balance that built up over a year and matches your salary.

So the work is not "reach a number". It is: cost the trip, show the money, show where the money came from, and show that leaving the UK for a month does not wreck your life at home. A modest application that does those four things coherently beats a large balance with no story attached, and it is the second kind of file that gets refused.

There is no sponsorship route on a Standard Visitor application

This is the misunderstanding that costs Egyptian applicants the most money and the most time. There is no sponsorship route on a Standard Visitor application. There is no form on which a UK resident becomes responsible for you, no undertaking, no declaration that shifts the assessment onto their income.

What exists instead is V 4.3, which permits third-party support but only within limits. Support is allowed where the third party has a genuine professional or personal relationship with the applicant, is not in breach of immigration laws, and can and will provide support for the intended duration of the visit. All three conditions have to hold. Support that passes them is considered. It does not replace the applicant's own circumstances.

In practice: a brother in Birmingham sends a letter, his bank statements, his payslips and a promise to cover everything. V 4.2 still asks whether you have sufficient funds for the visit. The caseworker looks at your income, your account, your commitments and your reasons for returning. The brother's file is evidence about the brother. It can support your case where the relationship is genuine and the offer is credible, and it is worth including for exactly that reason, but it cannot answer the question the rule asks.

The relationship condition also rules out a common workaround. A friend of a friend, a company client you have never met, or an agency offering to host you for a fee is not a genuine personal or professional relationship, and paying for support undermines the credibility of the whole file.

There is a second condition in V 4.3 that applicants miss: the third party must not be in breach of immigration laws. A host who is overstaying, working without permission or otherwise irregular cannot support anyone, and naming them in your application can damage it. If you are not certain of a host's status, ask before you put their name on a form.

What you cannot do on this visa

V 4.4 lists what a visitor may not do. No work in any form, and that includes work placements and internships, which catches students and recent graduates who think an unpaid placement is not work. No study outside the activities the route permits. No medical treatment other than private treatment. No marriage or civil partnership.

V 4.6 adds a financial prohibition that surprises people visiting family. There must be no payment from a UK source for the visit, subject to the exceptions listed in the rule. The effect is to keep the visit from being financed by a UK income stream.

For a tourism application this mostly matters at the edges, and the edges are where files break. A form that mentions helping in a family shop, a placement at a design studio, or a six week course is telling the caseworker about activity the route does not cover. Prohibited activity is not only about what you do. It is about what your application says you will do. If you intend to keep working remotely for an Egyptian employer, get the wording right before you submit.

Documents: the checklist

The published document lists for this route are long and they change. Rather than copy a list that will go stale, the checklist below follows the limbs of V 4.2 and the maintenance factors, so it stays right even when the presentation changes.

1. Application form, completed and submitted online before you travel. Mandatory.
2. Passport or travel document. Mandatory.
3. Biometrics at a visa application centre in Egypt. Mandatory.
4. Evidence of funds, meaning bank statements that show the origin of the money, not just a closing balance. Mandatory in substance.
5. Evidence that your income continues while you are away: an employer letter, payslips, or business registration and tax records if you are self-employed. Commonly requested, and the single most useful document for most applicants.
6. Evidence of commitments at home: dependants who are not travelling, property, a lease, ongoing obligations. Commonly requested.
7. Purpose evidence: itinerary, accommodation, and an invitation from your host with the relationship explained. Mandatory where you are staying with someone.
8. Return or onward travel evidence. Commonly requested.
9. Certified translations of anything not in English or Welsh. Mandatory.
10. Third-party support documents where you are relying on them under V 4.3, including evidence the supporter can and will provide for the whole visit.

Two items on that list are formal requirements people skip. Anything not in English or Welsh needs a certified translation, and an untranslated Arabic bank statement is not evidence of anything to a caseworker who cannot read it. The passport is the other one: check it is the document you will actually travel on, and that the details match your application exactly.

The items people skip are the ones that answer "why you" and "why back". An invitation letter with a photograph of you and your cousin is charming and proves little. A letter that states the relationship, how you stay in touch, where you will sleep and who pays for what is evidence. The same logic applies to your ties: a mortgage, a job with approved leave, children in school and a parent you support are all facts a caseworker can weigh. The full item list, with the wording to use for each, is in our UK visitor visa documents checklist.

The three things that actually cause refusals

Three patterns account for most refusals on this corridor. None of them is about paperwork volume.

One. You let someone else's money do the talking. The application contains a UK relative's statements and little about you. Under V 4.2 the question is whether you have sufficient funds, and under V 4.3 support only counts where the relationship is genuine and the third party can and will provide it. A file built on a relative's balance, with no account of your own income or commitments, answers a question nobody asked. The refusal describes insufficient funds, and the applicant never understands why, because the money was clearly there. The money was there. It was not theirs.

Two. Your story does not survive being read twice. The caseworker reads the form, the invitation letter and the bank statements as one document. Discrepancies between applicant and sponsor are a named doubt factor in the guidance: different dates, different plans, a host who says you will stay three weeks while your form says six, a salary figure that does not match the payslips. Each one looks small. Together they read as a story assembled by more than one person.

Three. The pattern says you are moving, not visiting. V 4.2 requires that you will not live in the UK through frequent or successive visits or make the UK your main home. There is no rule of the form "6 months in any 12", and page after page claims there is. What exists is a judgement about pattern, and the guidance names long stays as a doubt factor. Two month long visits in a year with thin ties at home look different from one two week holiday with a job, a mortgage and school age children waiting.

The reasoning behind each of these, and what a refusal actually says, is set out in UK visitor visa refusal grounds.

The doubt factors, stated plainly

The caseworker guidance is unusually direct about what creates doubt, and it is worth reading the list without flinching. A pattern of long stays or extended visits. Several family members in the UK set against few family and economic ties at home. Discrepancies between what the applicant says and what the sponsor says. Recently deposited funds that prompt checks on where they came from.

Read that list as a description of a file, not a list of accusations. Several relatives in the UK is not a problem in itself; most applicants for this route have them. The problem is several relatives in the UK plus nothing on the other side of the scale: no job letter, no dependants, no property, no reason the trip has to end on a particular date. The guidance is telling you which side of the scale to load.

It follows that an honest, slightly weak file is worth more than a polished vague one. If your ties are thin, address it: who cares for your mother while you are away, what your employer expects on your return, when your lease renews, what you have already paid for that cannot be moved. A caseworker is deciding on the balance of probabilities, not on whether the file looks expensive.

Applying from Egypt: timing and appointments

The application is made online, before you travel. The earliest you can apply is 3 months before the date you intend to arrive. Applying earlier than that is not possible, and turning up at a centre without a completed online application is not a way around it.

After the online form and the fee, you attend a visa application centre in Egypt to give biometrics: fingerprints and a photograph. Which company operates that centre, and where it is, could not be confirmed for this page. Do not travel to an address you found in a forum.

The decision is usually made within 3 weeks. That is the published standard, not a commitment to your particular file. gov.uk also lists a faster route for an additional charge.

If the visa is granted you do not get a sticker in your passport. Successful applicants get an eVisa, held online, and you need a UKVI account to view it and to prove your status at the border. Create the account, check the details match your passport exactly, and keep access to the email address you used.

Timing reality on this corridor: the three week decision time is the part applicants plan for, and the part that goes wrong is the preparation before it. Bank statements need to explain where the money came from, translations need to be certified, and a letter from an employer needs someone senior to sign it. Each of those takes days in Cairo. Start with the documents, then the form, then the appointment.

UK visitor visa or Schengen visa: the difference that decides files

Many Egyptian applicants run a UK file and a Schengen file in the same month, usually because the trip involves both. The two systems look similar from the outside and work differently underneath. If the Schengen file is the one you are building first, read the Schengen visa from Egypt pillar alongside this page.

The deeper difference is the evidence logic. The UK assesses the person. A caseworker reads the whole file against V 4.2 and decides whether the visit is genuine, which is why a document can be present and still not answer the question. Schengen assesses against a list: the Visa Code sets the categories in Article 14 and Annex II, and the centre publishes a numbered checklist. If every numbered item is in the folder and internally consistent, the file usually holds. A Schengen refusal tends to name the item that was missing or unconvincing. A UK refusal tends to describe a conclusion about you.

Fees differ in structure as well as in amount. The Schengen fee is set in euro and collected in cash dollars at the Egyptian centre, with a separate service fee capped at half the visa fee. The UK fee is fixed in pounds, paid online to the Home Office, with no equivalent cap on what a centre may charge for optional services. Budget per person for the UK route, because there is no family discount on the fee table.

Timelines change the order you should work in. Schengen publishes 15 calendar days from an admissible application, extendable in individual cases; the UK publishes usually within 3 weeks. If both files matter, the Schengen file has the tighter booking window and the earlier decision, and the UK file can be lodged in the same period because the two are decided by different authorities.

The mistake that carries across is assuming the UK will accept a Schengen style file. A folder that satisfies a numbered checklist is the starting point for a UK application, not the finish. The UK caseworker is looking for the argument that ties the documents together, and that argument is yours to make. A direct UK visitor visa compared with a Schengen visa breakdown sets the two side by side.

What Visakit does, and what it does not

Visakit is not a government body, not a consulate and not a law firm. We do not give legal advice, we do not file applications, and we do not book appointments at any visa application centre. We cannot influence a decision and we do not pretend otherwise.

What we do is prepare documents for one corridor: Egypt to the UK, Standard Visitor, tourism. The pack is free. It contains an eligibility pre-check, the document checklist for this route, your form data prepared as a PDF, and an automated review before delivery. We never collect the £135 or any centre fee. Revenue comes from affiliate commission on flights and hotels booked through partner links, at no extra cost to you. If your case is complicated, a licensed immigration adviser is the right call, and we will say so.