The permit fee we genuinely do not know: no official figure exists and operator quotes range from 200 to 800 rupees. The green cess we can state: 80 rupees for a small car at the Uttarakhand border, charged on out-of-state vehicles since December 2025.
Two costs sit outside any journey price, and we can be precise about one of them and not the other.
**The permit fee, we do not know.** There is no official figure in any government document or mainstream report we have been able to find. Operators quote two hundred rupees, three to four hundred, six hundred, and two hundred to eight hundred, and those cannot all be right. Rather than pick the middle one and let you budget against a number we invented, we are telling you it is unknown and that the office at Dharchula can confirm it. Payments made on the permit portal are not refundable once a permit is approved.
**The green cess, we can state.** Uttarakhand has charged it on out-of-state vehicles at the state boundary since December 2025, collected automatically by number-plate recognition rather than at a barrier. It is eighty rupees for a small car, one hundred and forty for a bus, two hundred and fifty for a small goods carrier, and between one hundred and twenty and seven hundred for larger trucks. It is not specific to this route, and it applies to anybody driving in from another state.
If you are travelling with us, transport is arranged and this is our cost rather than yours. It is here because a good number of people drive themselves, and because a charge that appears without warning is the kind of thing that sours a trip before it starts.