About one in five. Roughly 81 percent of F-1 interviews from Nepal ended in a refusal in FY 2025, which leaves a success rate near 19 percent, down from around 40 percent the year before.
That is the answer. The rest of this is where the number comes from, because a number without that is worth nothing, and because almost every consultancy website in Kathmandu quotes one without saying.
Where the figure comes from, and what it is not
The United States does not publish a student visa refusal rate for Nepal.
What the State Department publishes by nationality is the adjusted refusal rate used for the Visa Waiver Program, and that table covers tourist and business travellers. It is a B visa figure. It is not about students, and quoting it as a student refusal rate, which happens often, is simply wrong.
The 81 percent figure is derived: F-1 visas issued to Nepali nationals set against F-1 applications, from State Department data, as reported in the Nepalnews explainer on the 2026 US visa position. We publish it because it is the best figure available and because the direction of it is not in doubt. We publish how it was worked out because you should be able to decide for yourself how much to trust it.
If anyone quotes you a US success rate to the decimal place, ask them which table it came from.
What a refused attempt costs
Before the interview you have already paid USD 185 for the DS-160 and USD 350 for the SEVIS I-901. That is USD 535, around 75,000 rupees at current rates, and neither is refunded when the answer is no.
Add an English test, notarised translations, photographs and travel to the embassy and a refused American application costs a family well over a lakh with nothing to show for it. This is the reason the US deserves a harder conversation than the other four destinations rather than an optimistic one: it is the most expensive to attempt and, right now, the least likely to work.
The interview decides it, not the file
The I-20 is not an indicator. It says a university has accepted you and that you have evidenced the money. It says nothing about the visa, which is decided separately, in an interview that usually lasts about three minutes.
What that interview is about is section 214(b): the officer begins from the assumption that you intend to immigrate, and you have those three minutes to displace it. Not your marks. Not your university's ranking. Whether you are coming back.
The applications that succeed tend to share a few things. A course that plainly follows from the degree you already hold. Funding that visibly belongs to your family and has for some time, rather than money that appeared last month. A specific, unrehearsed answer to what you will do in Nepal afterwards. A scholarship or an assistantship changes the conversation completely, because it changes who decided you were worth funding.
What this means if you are deciding now
Two things are true at once, and the market usually tells you only one.
The first is that a strong American application is still worth making. One in five is not nothing, and the profile that gets through is recognisable in advance.
The second is that a weak one is now an expensive way to be told no. If your course does not follow from your degree, if the funding is recent or borrowed, or if you cannot answer the return question in one sentence and mean it, the honest advice is to fix those things first or to look at the other four destinations, where the same file has better odds and a cheaper failure.
The full picture for the United States, with tuition, living costs, funds and government fees in rupees, is on our United States page, and the same figures for all five destinations are on the destinations board. Every figure there carries the date it was checked and the source it came from, including this one.