Inca Trail Permits / Inca Trail Availability

Click on one of the following links below to find out how many Inca Trail trek permits are still available. The link will take you to the Ministry of Culture's website (www.machupicchu.gob.pe)  which is the government institution in charge of selling the permits to the licensed tour operators. The number of permits remaining is correct in real time and shown in pdf format. The information is in Spanish but you don't need to be a genius to understand it. To give you a clue the left hand column (fecha) is the date and the column to the right is the number of remaining permits (disponibles). There are 500 permits available each day, approximately 200 are allocated to tourists and 300 to porters, cooks and guides. If the number of remaining permits is 0 (zero) then all the permits have sold out so you will have to choose another date. If the permits have sold out for a particular date then no trekking company will be able to offer you a space. Trekking companies can't buy up blocks of permits and sell them on at a later date. Trek permits can only be bought using a tourist's name and passport number and these details cannot be changed after the permit has been bought. Even if there are cancellations then the cancelled permits do not come back onto the market so there is no waiting list.

If there are trek permits available for the date that you want then it doesn't necessarily mean that the trekking company that you want to use will even have a trek departure on that date. You will have to email the company to check if they have availability.

www.machupicchu.gob.pe - Available Inca Trail permits (November 2011)

www.machupicchu.gob.pe - Available Inca Trail permits (December 2011)

www.machupicchu.gob.pe - Available Inca trail permits (January 2012)

The Inca Trail is closed each year throughout the month of February although Machu Picchu is still open as normal.

Note: If the links above are not working please try again in a few hours. The government website is a bit temperamental and is frequently not working!

The Inca Trail is closed in February every year to allow repairs and maintenance.

Inca Trail treks permits for departures March 2012 to December 2012

Inca Trail permits are required for the Classic 4 day trek, the shorter 2-day trek and the 7-day trek via Salkantay. Inca trail permits are currently only on sale for the months of November & December 2011 and January 2012. The Inca Trail is closed during the month of February. The Inca Trail permits for trek departures in March to December 2012 will not go on sale until around mid-January 2012 (exact date has yet to be announced) but we highly recommend that you still make a booking with the trekking company of your choice as soon as you can. The way the trek permits are released to the licensed tour operators is slightly complicated. Approximately two weeks before the trek permits go on sale all the tour operators have to submit to the government a full list of all their clients names and passport numbers. The permits are then issued on a lottery basis so that all companies have an equal chance of getting the permits. Obviously if the number of permits for a specific day is oversubscribed then there will be losers and some tour operators will have to cancel their trek departure, refund the trek deposit or offer an alternative departure date. Only clients with their names on this initial list will be issued with permits (dependent upon availability) so this is a good reason to make your booking before mid-December. Only after the initial round of permits have gone on sale does the system change to the sale of trek permits on a first-come-first-served basis.

Once the permits have gone on sale in January it is very likely that some dates will sell out immediately (dates such as the first week of March, several dates in April, many dates in May and a few dates around Inti Raymi in June (ie 15-28 June). Maybe a couple of dates in July will sell out and probably no dates in August. So if you want to book a trek departing in August you will probably still be safe to wait until February or even March to book.

As soon as the permits go on sale we will update our website to show how many permits are still available.