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Schengen Visa from Pakistan: Routes, Fee, Documents

There is no single Schengen visa route from Pakistan, because there is no single Schengen consulate here. The country you are actually visiting decides two things: which consulate decides your file, and which visa centre in Pakistan takes your documents and fingerprints. Gerry's Visa, the local operator that runs the VFS Global platform under its own brand, handles twelve Schengen states from Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore. Spain is the one major destination we cannot confirm, and this page says so instead of guessing.

The legal framework is the same everywhere. A short-stay visa costs EUR 90, an appointment should as a rule take place within two weeks of your request, the decision comes within 15 calendar days of a valid application, and the insurance floor is EUR 30,000. Those four numbers come from the EU Visa Code, not from any one consulate.

Which countries can you actually apply to from Pakistan, and through whom

This is the section most pages get wrong, so here is the state of the evidence rather than a confident list.

Gerry's Visa publishes Pakistan offices for twelve Schengen destinations. Separately, VFS Global maintains its own Pakistan portals for four states. Those two facts are not in conflict. Gerry's Austria page links straight through to visa.vfsglobal.com/pak/en/aut/, which shows that Gerry's runs the VFS Global platform locally under its own brand. So when someone tells you "you need VFS for Austria" and someone else tells you "you need Gerry's", they are describing the same queue.

Two honesty notes on that table.

First, the VFS Global Pakistan pages for Czechia, Portugal, Austria and Sweden exist, but visa.vfsglobal.com returns HTTP 403 to automated readers. We have not read them, so we quote nothing from them: no addresses, no fees, no document lists, no appointment rules. If a page tells you what the VFS Pakistan portal says about a fee, ask whether that page actually loaded it or inferred it.

Second, Spain. Spain runs its Schengen centres through BLS International in several countries, including Egypt, Nigeria and Morocco, and those corridors are documented on this site. Pakistan is not one of them as far as we can verify. BLS International's Spain country selector lists, for Asia, only Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. There is no Pakistan entry. Third-party directories mention a Spanish centre in Pakistan; we could not confirm one, and the hostname they cite did not resolve when tested. So we are not going to print a Spanish address, a Spanish service fee, or a Spanish appointment route for Pakistan. A page that does is guessing, or it is copying a BLS entry from a country where BLS really does run Spain's centres. That guess costs you a wasted appointment at best.

If Spain is your main destination, the place to settle it is the Spanish diplomatic mission covering Pakistan and its own published visa pages, not a directory and not us.

The three centres, and the helpline

Gerry's publishes three Pakistan locations:

• Karachi: Ground Floor, Bahria Complex IV, Gizri Rd, Navy Housing Society, 75600.
• Islamabad: Gerry's Building, Park Road, adjacent to Punjab Cash and Carry.
• Lahore: 20 Ex American Centre Building, Queen's Road, opposite Ganga Ram Hospital, 54000.

Helpline: 0900 07860.

Which centre takes your file is usually decided by your stated district of residence, and that catchment split is published per destination by the operator rather than once for all twelve. If you live in Peshawar and assume you must go to Islamabad, or live in Multan and assume Lahore, check before you book, because turning up at the wrong centre is a lost appointment and a lost fee.

Why the destination state decides, not the nearest centre

Article 5 of the Visa Code sets the competent member state: the state whose territory is your main destination, meaning the longest stay. Where two stays are equal, it is the state of first entry.

This is not a technicality. It sets which checklist you follow, which consulate can refuse you, and which state you appeal to under Article 32(3) if it goes wrong. Build the itinerary first, then count the nights, then choose the consulate. Do it in the other order and you produce the single most common structural error on this corridor, which is covered below under refusal ground 2.

Two practical consequences for Pakistan:

• "Can I apply in Karachi for Germany?" Yes, Germany is on the confirmed operator list.
• "Can I apply in Karachi for Spain?" Unknown, and honestly unknown is the answer. See the note above.

If you legally reside in a third country, you may have a second route, applying where you reside rather than in Pakistan. Whether a given destination accepts that depends on its own rules and on your residence permit.

What a Schengen visa from Pakistan costs

The visa fee is charged in euro or in national currency and is non-refundable (Article 16(7)), except in the two narrow cases in Articles 18(2) and 19(3). A refused application does not get the fee back, and neither does an appointment you miss.

The rupee figure you will actually pay in Pakistan bundles the EUR 90 with the operator's service fee and is set locally. We do not print a converted figure because a conversion is not a price.

Visakit never collects the visa fee or the service fee. Both are paid to the consulate and to the centre. Our revenue is affiliate commission on flights and hotels booked through partner links, at no extra cost to you, which is why the pack itself is free.

Also worth knowing: Article 16(9) requires the Commission to review the fee every three years by delegated act, so a page quoting EUR 90 without a date is not telling you much. This one was checked on 8 November 2026.

Document checklist

The Visa Code does not print one universal checklist. Article 14 and Annex II require proof of purpose, accommodation, means of subsistence and intention to return, and each consulate turns that into its own list. What follows is the common core that holds across the twelve confirmed destinations, split into what the Code makes mandatory and what centres in practice ask for.

Mandatory under the Visa Code

1. Passport. Valid at least three months beyond your intended departure, issued within the previous 10 years, with at least two blank pages (Article 12). Pakistani passports with ten-year validity are common, so check the issue date and not just the expiry date.
2. Visa application form, completed and signed. Where you sign it is set by the centre, and some centres require signing in front of staff.
3. Photographs to the current specification of the centre handling your destination.
4. Travel medical insurance covering at least EUR 30,000, valid across the whole Schengen area, for the entire stay, including repatriation for medical reasons, urgent medical attention, emergency hospital treatment or death (Article 15). A policy that covers only your main destination, or only part of the trip, fails the Article 15 test even if the sum insured is high.
5. Proof of purpose of stay: a day-by-day itinerary naming the destination state and the number of nights in each country.
6. Proof of accommodation for every night claimed, with the guest's name matching the passport.
7. Proof of means of subsistence: personal bank statements, stamped by the bank.
8. Proof of intention to return: employment, business or study evidence in Pakistan, plus family and property ties.

Commonly requested in practice

9. Employment letter on company letterhead, signed and stamped, stating your position, salary, joining date and approved leave dates.
10. Business owners: business registration plus current tax documentation.
11. Students: enrolment letter from the institution.
12. Evidence of the origin of any recent large deposit, such as a sale deed, a salary credit trail, a remittance record or a maturity statement. This is the document that decides the refusal ground discussed below.
13. Sponsor documents, if someone else is funding the trip: the sponsor's bank statements, the sponsor's ID or passport, and evidence of the legal relationship between you.
14. Evidence of the family relationship where a sponsor or host is a relative: birth certificate, marriage certificate, or a family registration certificate.
15. Previous passports showing earlier visas and travel, if you have them.
16. Minors: birth certificate and consent documentation for the parent not travelling.
17. Copies of the passport biographic page and of every non-blank page.

Do not submit a document you cannot explain. A thin file that is consistent beats a thick file with one item that does not fit, because the officer reads for inconsistency and not for volume.

The three things that actually cause refusals on this corridor

Refusals on this route are not mostly about money in the bank. They are about a file that does not hold together. Three patterns account for a large share of the letters we see described, and each has a precise legal hook.

1. A sponsor's affidavit with nothing behind it (ground 11)

A notarised affidavit from a relative in Europe saying "I will pay for everything" is one of the most common documents in Pakistani applications and one of the weakest on its own. The refusal ground that catches it is the one covering the sponsor's relationship to you and the basis on which support is offered: ground 11 on the current refusal form.

The fix is not a better affidavit. It is evidence of the legal relationship and of the sponsor's ability to pay. Birth certificates and marriage certificates that establish the link, the sponsor's residence status in the destination state, and the sponsor's own bank statements showing the money actually exists. If the relationship cannot be documented, the affidavit is only an assertion, and an assertion is what the ground is written for.

Note the numbering trap here. Annex VI, the standard refusal form, was replaced by Regulation (EU) 2019/1155, in force from 2 February 2020, and the current version has 17 grounds rather than 11. The same number on a 2019 letter and a 2026 letter does not mean the same thing. If you are reading an older refusal to work out why you were rejected, check which form it used before you act on the number.

2. Deposits with no visible origin (grounds 3 and 12)

Two grounds sit side by side: no proof of sufficient means of subsistence (ground 3), and no proof that those means were lawfully acquired (ground 12). A balance that appeared three weeks before the appointment and cannot be traced is caught by both.

What officers look for is a statement that behaves like a salary or a business account over months, not like a number that arrived for the occasion. If a relative genuinely transferred money to help, submit the transfer record and the relative's account, and treat it as sponsorship rather than as your own savings. If you sold something, submit the sale document. An unexplained deposit is worse than a modest balance, because it damages the credibility of everything else in the file.

This applies to the insurance and the accommodation too: a booking that cannot be traced to a real, cancellable reservation, or a policy whose certificate number does not verify, converts a documentary question into a credibility question.

3. A file that names one state and travels in another (ground 2)

Ground 2 is failure to justify the purpose and conditions of stay. The Pakistan-specific version of it is a cover letter or form that says Spain, an itinerary that spends nine of fourteen nights in Italy, and a hotel list that makes the mismatch obvious on the first read.

Under Article 5 the competent state is the main destination, meaning the longest stay, with the state of first entry deciding where stays are equal. A consulate that receives a file for a trip whose centre of gravity is elsewhere is entitled to doubt the purpose of the stay, and it is also simply not the right consulate. Either way you lose weeks.

The fix is mechanical: write the itinerary first, count the nights per country, and apply to the state with the most nights. If the counts are equal, apply to the state where you land first. Then make the cover letter say the same thing the itinerary says.

On refusal statistics

You will find numbers quoted for Pakistani refusal rates. We have not verified any of them from a primary source, and the European Commission publishes per-consulate statistics that would have to be extracted properly before a figure could be printed. So this page prints no percentage. If you want to judge your own odds, judge them from your file: documented relationship, traceable funds, consistent itinerary.

Appointment and timing reality

The legal clock. Article 9(2) says an appointment "shall, as a rule, take place within a period of two weeks from the date when the appointment was requested". That is a rule, not a promise, and it is the sentence to keep in mind when a slot is offered eight weeks out. Article 23(1) then gives the consulate 15 calendar days from the lodging of an admissible application to decide, extendable in individual cases (Article 23(2)).

When you may apply. No earlier than six months before your visit, and as a rule no later than 15 calendar days before it (Article 9(1)). Both limits are enforced at the door. Applying 15 days out technically complies with the Code and practically leaves no room for a request for further documents.

Current waits in Pakistan.

Where to book. Book on the operator's own site for your destination state, whether that is the Gerry's page or the VFS Global Pakistan portal, and nowhere else. Appointments are issued by the centre. A slot sold to you by a third party is a slot someone else is holding, and paying for one is how people lose both the money and the appointment. We have not read a fraud warning on Gerry's own site and are not going to attribute one to them.

How long the passport stays with the centre. Plan around the passport being unavailable for several weeks after submission, and do not commit to travel that requires it.

If you are refused. Article 32(3) gives you a right of appeal against the member state that took the decision, in the form and within the deadline set by that state's national law. The refusal letter states the grounds, and it is the document to read before deciding whether to appeal or reapply with a stronger file.

What Visakit does, and what it does not do

The Pakistan to Schengen tourist pack is one of five routes we prepare, alongside Schengen visa from Egypt, Schengen visa from Nigeria and Schengen visa from Morocco. It contains an eligibility pre-check, a numbered document checklist, your form data as a filled PDF, and an automated review before delivery. It is free.

Be clear about the limits, because the routing on this page makes them matter more than usual. The pack is built with Spain as the default main destination state, and we cannot confirm a Spanish application route from Pakistan. So use the pack for the parts that are identical across all twelve confirmed destinations: the fee structure, the Article 15 insurance test, the Article 12 passport test, the Article 9(1) window, and the form data. Then check the destination-specific list against the centre that actually handles your state before you submit anything.

We are not a government body, not a consulate and not a law firm. We do not file applications. We do not book consulate or VFS Global or Gerry's appointments. We do not collect the visa fee or the service fee. We cannot influence a decision and we cannot guarantee an approval, because the consulate decides alone.

If your main destination is France rather than Spain, the destination choice changes the whole file. The Spain vs France comparison for a Schengen visa sets out how much the answer moves when the state changes, and the same logic applies here.

Where to start

Run the free visa check for your passport and destination first. It tells you whether you need a visa at all, and it cites the destination's official policy for the answer. Then use the free Pakistan to Schengen tourist pack to assemble the file. Confirm the operator and the centre for your destination state on that operator's own site before you pay anyone anything.

Verified on 8 November 2026 against the consolidated Visa Code (Regulation (EC) No 810/2009, CELEX 02009R0810-20240628), the gerrysvisa.com destination and location pages, and BLS International's Spain country selector. Rules change without notice, appointment availability moves daily, and the routing on this corridor is less settled than on any other we cover. We log corrections and dated changes at the changelog. If this page is more than a few months old, re-check the operator, the fee and the appointment window before relying on any of it.

Visakit prepares documents. The consulate decides.