A year, and it is granted at the booth
Georgia's entry rules are among the most generous anywhere. Citizens of roughly ninety countries and territories — the whole of the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, Israel, the Gulf states, Ukraine, most of Latin America — may enter without a visa and stay for a full year on each entry. There is no application, no fee and no sponsor.
The permission is issued at the border rather than in advance. An officer looks at the passport, sometimes asks where you are staying and for how long, occasionally wants to see a return ticket or a booking, and stamps you in. At a quiet airport counter the whole exchange takes under two minutes, and nobody charges you anything for it.
The year runs from the date of entry and starts again when you leave and come back. A great many people live here on that arrangement, and border police have grown attentive to passports showing the same loop repeated over several years. If you are working in Georgia rather than travelling through it, the honest answer is a residence permit, not another hop to the frontier.
The list is set by government decree and it does change. Check the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website in the week you book rather than the week you fly, and take the ministry's own wording over any travel article, this one included. Airline check-in staff work from their own databases and are occasionally wrong in both directions.
Who the year is not for
The visa-free decree is long but it is not universal. A substantial number of African, South Asian and Southeast Asian nationalities are outside it, along with several countries whose citizens travel widely elsewhere. If your passport is not on the list, you need a visa before you arrive, and the airline will stop you at check-in rather than let the border refuse you.
There is a second, quieter route in. Holders of a valid visa or residence permit from certain countries — the EU and Schengen states, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Israel and others — can often enter Georgia without a Georgian visa for a shorter period. The conditions are specific and they are written on the ministry's page, not here.
The e-visa, in practice
Georgia runs an electronic visa on a government portal, and for a short-term tourist visit it is the whole procedure: no embassy appointment, no interview, no passport surrendered for a fortnight. You fill in a form, upload a passport scan and a photograph, pay by card and wait for a PDF that you print and carry.
The stay it grants is much shorter than the visa-free year — a short-term tourist e-visa is normally good for up to thirty days — and it cannot be talked longer at the booth. Allow real time for it. The stated processing window is a handful of working days, which becomes longer around public holidays and whenever the portal is being updated.
Sarpi, where the coast road runs into the sea
Sarpi is the busiest land border Georgia has: a checkpoint squeezed between the mountains and the Black Sea, some fifteen to twenty kilometres south of Batumi, open around the clock. Cars, coaches, lorries and pedestrians all pass through the same complex, and the Georgian terminal building with its curved concrete roof is genuinely worth a look while you queue.
The queues are the honest caveat. On summer weekends, and around Turkish and Georgian public holidays, waits of several hours in a vehicle are normal rather than exceptional. Pedestrians use a separate hall and almost always move faster, which is why many people leave the car, walk across and pick up transport on the far side.
Getting there is easy and cheap. Municipal buses and marshrutkas run from Batumi to Sarpi for a couple of lari, roughly 1–3 GEL (2025), and a taxi is in the region of 30–50 GEL (2025). On the Turkish side, dolmuş services run from the border towards Hopa and onward along the coast.
South to Armenia: Sadakhlo and the quiet alternative
The Tbilisi–Yerevan road crosses at Sadakhlo–Bagratashen, in the low hills of Kvemo Kartli, and it is the crossing almost everyone uses. Two separate posts sit a short walk apart; everybody gets out of the vehicle, carries their own bag through the Georgian hall, walks over and repeats the exercise on the Armenian side. Allow half an hour when it is calm.
Marshrutkas and minibuses run the whole way between the two capitals in something like six to eight hours depending on the queue, for a fare in the region of 40–70 GEL (2025). A rail link has also operated on some seasons and schedules; if you would rather sit still, check the Georgian Railway app for what is actually selling rather than what a forum said two years ago.
East to Azerbaijan: Lagodekhi, Red Bridge, and a status that moves
Two road crossings link Georgia and Azerbaijan. Lagodekhi–Balakan sits at the eastern end of Kakheti, below the Greater Caucasus, and is the natural exit if you have been in the wine country. The Red Bridge crossing, south-east of Tbilisi near Marneuli, is the one on the direct road towards Ganja and Baku, and it carries most of the freight.
None of that helps if the gates are closed, and for several years they have been. The reliable route between Tbilisi and Baku has been the short flight; the rail service and the road buses that once ran the corridor have been suspended along with the crossings. Azerbaijan's own e-visa system operates independently of whether the land border is open, so having the visa is not evidence that you can walk in.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia: the line you do not cross
Georgia regards Abkhazia and South Ossetia as occupied territories, and its law on those territories defines the entry routes. Crossing into Abkhazia from Russia at Psou, or into South Ossetia through the Roki tunnel, is not a grey area or a diplomatic nuance. Georgian authorities treat it as illegal crossing of the state border and they do act on it.
The consequence usually arrives later. Travellers who go in from Sochi and come back out the same way often notice nothing at the time, then find the problem waiting the next occasion they try to enter Georgia proper — a case file, a fine, a refusal. The stamp collection is not worth a criminal record.
There is a lawful route to Abkhazia, and it goes the other way: from Georgian-controlled territory across the Enguri bridge, with prior permission from the Georgian government, which is granted case by case and not for casual tourism. South Ossetia is effectively closed. Near the administrative boundary lines elsewhere, fencing shifts and people who stray across have been detained — do not treat those lines as scenery.
Arriving by air, and what the officer asks
Three airports take international flights: Tbilisi, Kutaisi and Batumi. A large share of arrivals land between midnight and five in the morning because that is how the low-cost schedules fall, and passport control at those hours is quick — two or three booths, no visitor's card to fill in, and a stamp that says how long you have.
The questions, when they come, are mild and worth having answers to. Where are you staying, how long, are you travelling alone, what do you do. Nothing about it is adversarial, but a booking reference and a rough plan spoken confidently ends the conversation faster than a shrug does.
After the stamp: staying, overstaying, leaving
Once you are in, nobody registers you, nobody asks where you moved to, and there is no local paperwork attached to a tourist stay. That freedom is the reason so many people end up staying longer than they planned, and it is also why the exit is the moment when an overstay surfaces.
Overstaying is handled with an administrative fine rather than drama — a sum in the low hundreds of lari (2025), payable when you leave, larger the longer you have run over. It is not a good habit, and if you have crossed out and back several times purely to reset the clock, the sensible next step is a residence permit applied for at a Public Service Hall.
Five mistakes, so you skip them
Three of the five we have made ourselves, and the third is the only one that follows you home.