IMUGA Traveller Declaration: the Maldives arrival form explained

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IMUGA Traveller Declaration: The Form Every Maldives Visitor Has to File

IMUGA is the Maldives Immigration portal, and the Traveller Declaration is the one piece of paperwork standing between your flight and the immigration counter. It is free, it takes about six minutes, and it is the only arrival form the country now uses — the paper cards handed out on board disappeared years ago.

It is also the most misinformed subject in Maldives travel planning. Websites charge for a form that costs nothing, guides repeat an editing rule the portal itself contradicts, and many articles still describe a departure declaration that no longer exists.

This guide walks through the IMUGA form field by field and dates every rule to its source.

What the portal is, and what the declaration does

IMUGA is Maldives Immigration’s online services platform. It handles Maldivian passports, visa services and the Traveller Declaration, and the declaration is the only part tourists need.

The IMUGA form collects your passport details, your flight, where you are staying and a short health section. Immigration uses it to pre-screen arriving passengers before they reach the desk, which is why the officer at the counter already has your details on screen when you hand over the passport.

Submitting the IMUGA form produces a QR code. That IMUGA code, plus the passport it belongs to, is what you present on arrival. There is no paper alternative and no on-arrival version of the form.

One point of vocabulary, because it causes confusion in search results: the declaration is not a visa. Nearly every nationality receives a free 30-day visa on arrival at the border, and the declaration is a separate, mandatory step that happens before you fly.

The rules, dated

Four rules govern the IMUGA declaration, and every one of them is misstated somewhere in the first page of search results.

IMUGA is free. Maldives Immigration has published an explicit warning about this. The declaration is a self-declaration form that travellers submit themselves, no agent is required, and there are no fees on the official portal. The department notes reports of individuals and websites charging for submission. If a site asks for payment, it is reselling a free government form.

The IMUGA window is 96 hours, counted from flight time. The portal states that travellers must submit within 96 hours before their flight time. That is four days, and the clock runs from your scheduled departure rather than your arrival in the Maldives — a distinction that matters on long itineraries with overnight layovers. Submissions attempted earlier are refused by the system.

Arrival only. The IMUGA portal describes the 96-hour requirement as applying to arrival, and offers three actions: new declaration, edit, and verify. The separate departure declaration was retired in August 2024. Guides that instruct you to file a second form before flying home are working from an older version of the system, as is at least one government consular page.

Everyone needs their own. Each traveller files an individual IMUGA declaration, including children and infants. A family of four submits four forms.

Before you start: what to have open

Gather these first. The form times out, and hunting for a booking reference mid-way is how people end up with mismatched data.

Your passport, open at the photo page. The number must match character for character.
Your flight number and date for the flight arriving in the Maldives — the final leg, not the one leaving home.
Your accommodation’s registered name, as it appears on the booking confirmation rather than as it appears on a booking site’s headline.
The booking confirmation number, if you have one.
A contact email and phone number that will reach you while travelling.

Fill the form on a laptop if you have the choice. The accommodation and passport fields are unforgiving of autocorrect, and phone keyboards introduce capitalisation that the passport does not have.

The form, field by field

The IMUGA declaration runs to a handful of screens. Here is what each asks for and where people go wrong.

Personal and passport details

Name exactly as printed in the machine-readable zone of your passport — the two lines of capitals at the bottom of the photo page. If your passport shows a middle name, include it. If it does not, do not add one.

Passport number is the field that produces the most rejections at the counter, because a transposed character means the QR code does not match the document. Check it twice. Note that the passport must have a machine-readable zone and at least one month of validity, and hand-extended passports are not accepted.

Date of birth, nationality and sex follow the passport, not your preference or your other documents.

Travel details

Enter the flight that brings you into the Maldives. On an itinerary routed through Dubai, Doha or Colombo, the relevant flight is the one landing at Velana, not the one leaving your home airport. Choosing the wrong leg is one of the most common errors and it produces a declaration that does not match the manifest.

The arrival date must match that flight. If you cross midnight in a time zone, use the date shown on the ticket for the arriving segment.

Accommodation

Give the registered property name as it will appear in IMUGA’s accommodation field. Resorts and licensed guesthouses appear in the Ministry of Tourism register, and immigration expects a booking at a registered facility rather than a private rental. If you are moving between islands, enter the first property — the one where you sleep on arrival night — and carry confirmations for the rest.

Travellers on a liveaboard enter the vessel name. Travellers on a local island enter the guesthouse, not the island.

Health declaration

A short section covering recent symptoms and, where relevant, vaccination. A yellow fever certificate is required only if you are arriving from or transiting a country the Maldives treats as endemic; children under one are exempt. No other vaccination is required for entry.

Submit, then save the QR code

IMUGA returns a QR code on submission and emails it. Do both of these before you close the tab:

Screenshot the code and save it to your camera roll.
Download the PDF if one is offered, and keep it offline.

Airport Wi-Fi at Velana is unreliable when several wide-bodies land together, and an email you cannot open is not a declaration. A screenshot in your gallery works with no signal at all.

Yes, you can edit it after submitting

A claim circulates widely in Maldives travel content: once the declaration is submitted it cannot be changed, so a mistake means starting again with a fresh form.

IMUGA offers an Edit function alongside New Declaration and Verify. Corrections are made through that route, using the reference from your original submission. The portal also provides a Verify tool for checking that a QR code is valid, which is worth using if you are unsure whether a submission went through.

That said, filing a second declaration is not a catastrophe either. What causes trouble is arriving with a declaration whose details do not match your passport or your flight, whichever way that mismatch came about.

When your flight changes

Two scenarios, two different answers.

Delayed but departing the same day. The IMUGA declaration remains valid. It is tied to the flight number rather than to an exact departure time, so a three-hour delay changes nothing.

Rescheduled to another date, or moved to a different flight number. Submit a new IMUGA declaration, or edit the existing one. A declaration pointing at a flight you are not on is a mismatch at the counter.

This is the practical argument for filing IMUGA 24 to 48 hours out rather than the moment the window opens. File too early in a disrupted travel week and you may end up redoing it anyway.

The errors that actually cause problems

Ranked roughly by how often they occur.

Mistake	What happens	Fix
Passport number mistyped	QR code does not match the document at the counter	Check against the photo page, twice
Wrong flight selected on a multi-leg trip	Declaration does not match the arrival manifest	Enter the flight landing at Velana
Filed outside the 96-hour window	IMUGA refuses the submission	Wait until four days before flight time
Name entered without a middle name that is in the passport	Mismatch flagged at the desk	Copy the machine-readable zone exactly
Accommodation given as an unregistered rental	Questions about proof of accommodation	Book a registered property, or arrange sponsorship
Relying on the confirmation email at the airport	No signal, no QR code, a queue behind you	Screenshot it before leaving home
One declaration filed for a whole family	Only one traveller is cleared	One form per person, infants included
Paying a third-party site	Money gone, form no better	Use imuga.immigration.gov.mv only

None of these is fatal on its own. Immigration officers see mistyped forms every day and can usually resolve them at the desk. What they cost is time, in a hall where the queue at peak season already runs 30 to 60 minutes.

The paid-form problem, and how to recognise it

This deserves its own section because it is the only part of the process where travellers lose money.

Maldives Immigration has published a notice stating that the Traveller Declaration is free, that it is a self-declaration travellers can submit on their own, and that reports have come in of people being asked to pay for submission. The department’s advice is direct: use the official portal and avoid other websites that charge a fee or provide misleading information.

Recognising the imposters is straightforward once you know the pattern:

The domain. The only correct address for IMUGA is imuga.immigration.gov.mv. Anything ending in .com, .org or .net is not Maldives Immigration, however official the design looks.
A fee. Typically presented as a “processing”, “service” or “assistance” charge, often between USD 20 and USD 60.
Urgency language. Warnings that you will be denied boarding without their service, or that processing takes several days. Neither is true; submission is immediate.
Sponsored search placement. These sites buy the ad slots above the official portal.

If you have already paid one of these, the declaration itself may still have been filed correctly — but you paid for nothing, and you handed passport data to a third party. File a fresh declaration on the official IMUGA portal and treat the passport details as exposed.

What happens at the border with your QR code

The IMUGA code is checked at immigration, not at check-in — though some airlines ask to see it before boarding, particularly on routes with a history of refused passengers.

At the counter, the officer scans or views the code, checks it against the passport, and may ask for the two documents that back up the declaration: your onward ticket and your accommodation confirmation. Then the passport is stamped with 30 days.

Since the start of 2026, passengers from more than twenty nationalities can use the e-gates installed at Velana International Airport, which read the passport and match the face rather than requiring a conversation. The declaration still has to exist; the gate simply checks it faster.

For what the officer is entitled to ask beyond the form, and what happens if the answers do not satisfy, see our guide to the visa on arrival. For what your luggage may contain, dress codes, banned items and customs rules covers the customs desk, which is a separate checkpoint with separate powers.

After the form: the rest of arrival day

Filing the IMUGA declaration is the last administrative task before you fly. The next decisions are logistical, and they matter more to how arrival day feels.

If your resort is reached by seaplane, the flight operates in daylight only, and an afternoon landing usually means a night near the airport before you continue. Speedboat transfers run around the clock but vary widely in price by distance, and remote atolls need a domestic flight first, from a terminal a short walk from international arrivals.

Our full transfers guide compares the three methods and the cost comparison shows how sharply the numbers move by atoll. If you land late, read what to do about a late arrival in Malé before booking anything, and if you are stopping in the capital, Malé is a twenty-minute crossing away.

Timing your submission around the trip

The 96-hour window is short enough that it collides with real travel planning.

Book-ended holidays. If you fly out on a Saturday, the window opens on the previous Tuesday. Put a reminder in your calendar for the Wednesday, which leaves a day of margin without pushing into the departure scramble.

Peak season. Arrivals in January and February meet the longest immigration queues of the year, and December around New Year is the fullest the halls get. A correctly filed IMUGA declaration is worth more in those weeks than at any other time. In June or September the same terminal clears in a fraction of the time.

Ramadan. The border runs normally and the form is unchanged, but government offices keep shorter hours, which matters if anything needs resolving in person. See Ramadan in the Maldives for how the month affects the rest of a trip, and Eid al-Fitr if your dates fall at the end of it.

Multi-island trips. If you are moving between a guesthouse island and a resort, the declaration names your first night only. Our atoll decision guide and the complete atolls guide cover how far apart those stops really are, and Kaafu Atoll is where such combinations are easiest, whether you pair a guesthouse with North Malé or with South Malé.

What the form does not do

Four things travellers assume the declaration covers, and does not.

It is not a visa. The visa on arrival is granted separately at the counter, free, for 30 days.

It is not a customs declaration. Immigration and customs are different desks with different powers. What you may bring into the country — and what is confiscated on sight — sits in our guide to dress codes, banned items and customs rules.

It is not proof of accommodation. Naming a property on the IMUGA form does not replace the booking confirmation. Officers ask for the confirmation itself, and on multi-island trips they may ask for all of them.

It is not a transfer. Nothing in the declaration tells your resort when you land. Confirm the boat or the domestic flight separately, and check how many airports sit between you and your island before assuming a short hop.

Filing for a family, and other awkward cases

Most declarations are one adult, one passport, one flight. These are the variations that generate questions.

Children and infants. Every traveller files a separate IMUGA declaration against their own passport, including a newborn. A child recorded on a parent’s passport cannot enter the Maldives at all, so the passport problem surfaces before the form does. File the children’s declarations from the same device and email address as your own; nothing in the system objects.

Group bookings. There is no group submission. A honeymoon party of twelve files twelve declarations. Allow an hour for a group and collect the passport numbers in advance, because chasing them one at a time inside the 96-hour window is where groups come unstuck.

Split accommodation. Where a party is booked into two properties, each traveller names the property they personally sleep in on arrival night, not the one the lead booker chose.

Transit passengers. Travellers connecting onward without clearing Maldivian immigration are handled separately and do not enter the country. If you leave the sterile area — to collect bags, to overnight in Malé, or to take a domestic flight — you are entering, and you need the declaration.

Two passports. File against the passport you will actually present at the border, and travel on that document throughout. Mixed documents between the IMUGA form, the airline booking and the counter is the one combination guaranteed to cost you time.

Liveaboard arrivals. The vessel is your accommodation, and it must be a registered facility. Safari boats carried more than 23,000 visitors in the first seven months of 2026, so crews handle this routinely — ask yours for the registered vessel name rather than the marketing name.

Questions travellers ask about the form

Is IMUGA free? Yes. Maldives Immigration states that the IMUGA Traveller Declaration is a free self-declaration submitted by the traveller. Any website charging a processing or service fee is a third party reselling a free government form.

When can I submit the IMUGA declaration? Within 96 hours — four days — before your scheduled flight time. Earlier submissions are refused by IMUGA. Filing 24 to 48 hours ahead is the sensible compromise.

Do I need a departure declaration when leaving the Maldives? No. The separate departure form was retired in August 2024, and the portal now describes the 96-hour requirement as applying to arrival. Some guides and at least one government consular page have not been updated.

Can I edit my IMUGA declaration after submitting it? Yes. IMUGA provides an Edit function alongside New Declaration and Verify. The widely repeated claim that submissions cannot be changed is inaccurate.

Does each traveller need a separate IMUGA declaration? Yes, including children and infants. A family of four files four declarations, each tied to an individual passport.

What if my flight is delayed? If it departs the same day, the declaration stands, because it is linked to the flight number rather than the departure time. If the date or flight number changes, edit the declaration or file a new one.

Do I need to print the QR code? No. A screenshot saved to your phone’s gallery is sufficient and more reliable than an email, given how the airport Wi-Fi behaves at peak arrival times.

Is the declaration the same thing as a visa? No. The declaration is a mandatory pre-arrival form. The visa is granted separately at the border, free, for 30 days, to almost every nationality.

What to take away

The IMUGA declaration is free, mandatory, filed by you, and available only at imuga.immigration.gov.mv.
The IMUGA window is 96 hours before your flight time, not before landing. File 24 to 48 hours out.
Only the arrival declaration exists. The departure form was retired in August 2024.
Submissions can be edited through IMUGA, despite widespread claims otherwise.
One form per traveller, infants included, and screenshot the QR code before you leave home.

Next step: put a calendar reminder four days before departure, and put your passport, flight number and accommodation confirmation in one folder on your phone before you open the form. The whole thing takes six minutes when the details are in front of you and twenty when they are not.