your roadmap
One page, start to finish. The visa is the easy part here — the qualification assessment and the legalisation chain are what set your timeline.
September is the main intake, with a February cohort for medicine at Rīga Stradiņš. Work backwards from the permit application, and remember you can pay to accelerate it if you are late.
Shortlist and apply
For medicine, check the Nepal Medical Council's recognised list before anything else. For everything else, compare programme and cost across a small and examinable set of institutions.
Start legalisation and English translation
Legalise your academic documents, then get notarised translations into English — not Latvian, which is a real saving over Poland, Czechia or Spain.
Qualification assessment
The Academic Information Centre evaluates your Nepali qualification through your university. It has a lead time and it is easy to underestimate.
Accept, MoEST NOC, request the bank letter
An original bank reference letter on official letterhead showing the first year's subsistence. Ask your bank specifically — it is not a printed statement.
The university files with OCMA
Choose your fee tier: thirty days, ten working days, or five. If your assessment ran long, the faster tiers are a genuine remedy.
Collect the D visa
Through the designated visa centre once the permit is approved. Latvia has no embassy in Nepal, so confirm the hub early.
Collect your residence card, register, open a bank account
Then term begins. Your permit already carries twenty hours a week of work rights.
One item here is specific to Latvia and worth getting right early.
The funds evidence must be an original bank reference letter on official letterhead — not a printed statement or a screenshot. Some Nepali banks need the request made specifically, so ask early.
Everything else is ordinary preparation:
Accommodation
University dormitories are substantially cheaper than the private market in Riga. Apply as soon as you are admitted.
Health insurance
Required for the permit. Confirm the cover your institution and OCMA expect.
Money for the first weeks
Banking takes time to set up. Carry enough to live on before a Latvian account exists.
Warm clothing
Not a joke for a student arriving from Kathmandu. Baltic winters are long, dark and genuinely cold, and buying locally on arrival is expensive.
Light, because the decision was made before you travelled.
The sequence: collect your residence card, register your address, open a bank account, then a phone — with no hard post-arrival immigration deadline hanging over it
There is no equivalent here of Malta's ninety-day deadline or Cyprus's one-week registration scramble — your residence permit was approved before your visa was issued, so arrival is about collecting the card and settling in.
Use the slack to start Latvian. In a country this size it moves your job prospects more than it would in a larger one, and the darkness of a first Baltic winter is easier with something structured in it.
Real, and honestly bounded.
The entitlement: twenty hours a week during term, with no separate work permit required
Twenty hours a week with no separate work permit sits comfortably ahead of Cyprus and Malta, and behind Poland, Czechia and Spain. It is a solid, ordinary allowance.
The limit is the market. Latvia is small, and outside Riga's technology sector, Latvian or Russian opens far more part-time work than English does. Treat earnings as a supplement to a funded plan, and for medicine assume the workload leaves little room regardless.