Search for the cost of a Schengen visa and you get one number, confidently stated. Then you arrive at the centre and pay something else.
The gap is not fraud. It is that the question has more than one answer, and the pages giving you a single figure have quietly picked one.
Two charges, not one
The consular fee goes to the member state deciding your application. It is set in euros by the Visa Code and collected in local currency at the exchange rate of the day.
The service charge goes to VFS Global for operating the centre. It is set per country and stated separately.
They are always both payable, and they are quoted in different places on the fact sheet. Add-ons — courier, lounge, form filling — sit on top again and are optional. What they do and do not get you is a separate question.
Why the consular fee is not one number
Across the fee tables we parsed, the same route routinely publishes several different amounts for what people think of as “the visa fee”. The variables:
Age. The standard structure is a full fee for adults and applicants from twelve upwards, roughly half for children between six and eleven, and nothing at all for children under six.
Nationality. Visa facilitation agreements cut the fee for citizens of particular countries. On the Malta route from the UAE, for example, the published table lists a reduced rate for citizens of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Belarus, and another for Cape Verde, alongside the standard one.
Family of an EU or EEA national. Free, under the free-movement directive, where the relationship qualifies.
Category. Short-stay and national long-stay categories are priced separately, and the long-stay ones are usually higher.
So a route with a dozen visa categories can easily publish twenty distinct amounts. There is no single “the fee” to extract, which is why the direction pages on this site reproduce the tables as published, with their own headers, rather than reducing them.
That decision came from getting it wrong. An earlier version of this site tried to compress each table into one figure and produced “AED 0.00” for one route and a wrong average for another — numbers that are simply false on a page people use to plan money. Nothing is synthesised now.
The currency question
Fees are set in euros and collected locally, at the centre’s exchange rate on the day. Across the tables we parsed, amounts appear in dirhams, pounds, riyals, dollars, euros and rupees depending on where you are applying.
Two consequences worth knowing:
The published local amount is a snapshot. The fact sheets say plainly that it moves with the exchange rate and can change without notice — so treat a figure you read a month ago as approximate.
And a quoted euro figure is the anchor, not what you will hand over. Convert it yourself if you want a sanity check on the local number.
The service charge is often not stated
This is the part that surprises people, and it is worth being straight about.
Of the 42 routes whose fact sheets we parsed, only a handful name a service charge amount. Malta from the UAE states AED 120 per application. Portugal from Saudi Arabia states SAR 169.09 including VAT. Most of the rest say a service charge applies without saying what it is.
One route publishes “a VFS Service Charge of AED 0.00 … will be levied”, which contradicts itself — a charge of nothing that will nonetheless be levied. That is a field nobody filled in, not a free service, and we suppress it rather than repeat it. Where the amount is not stated, our pages say nothing rather than guess.
Ask the centre before you go if the exact total matters to you.
What makes it worse
- Budgeting from a single figure found in a search result. It is almost certainly one row of a table that had several, and possibly the wrong row for your age or nationality.
- Assuming the fee is refundable. It is not. A refusal does not return it, which is one more reason not to apply somewhere you are not eligible to apply.
- Forgetting the second charge. The service charge is not optional and it is quoted separately from the consular fee.
- Paying anyone in advance for “the fee”. The consular fee and the service charge are paid at the centre. A third party asking for them up front is asking for something else.
What we charge, and when
Separately, and after the appointment is booked and confirmed. If nothing opens on your route, there is no invoice.
Booking through official channels is free — the consular fee and the service charge are what the state and the centre charge, and we do not touch either. What we charge for is the watching and the paperwork around it.
Pricing · The routes we cover, with their published fee tables