Egypt insurance for nomads

Egypt runs a two-tier system. The public sector is large but stretched and under-resourced, and most nomads will not use it beyond an emergency. The private sector is where you actually get care: well over half of the country's roughly 1,800 hospitals are private, and the good ones in Cairo and Alexandria are modern, with Western-trained doctors and short waits. It is pay-as-you-go, and private insurance is strongly advised because uninsured emergencies and surgery can run into serious money.

English is widely spoken in private hospitals, where many doctors trained abroad. The names nomads reach for in Cairo are As-Salam International Hospital in Maadi (JCI-accredited since 2015, affiliated with London's Royal Free, with a dedicated International Relations Department for foreigners), Saudi German Hospital Cairo, and Andalusia Hospital in Maadi. The ambulance number is 123 and Egypt also has a unified emergency line on 112. Pharmacies are everywhere, well stocked and cheap, and pharmacists will advise and dispense many things over the counter. The honest catch, in the State Department's own words, is that ambulances are "rare, unreliable in most areas, and don't have advanced medical equipment," so for anything serious you are relying on getting to a private hospital, or being evacuated. If you dive the Red Sea out of Dahab, Hurghada, Sharm El Sheikh or Marsa Alam, note that decompression illness is treated in dedicated hyperbaric chambers run under the Chamber of Diving and Watersports (the Ministry of Tourism's diving body), with 24-hour call-out, but that treatment and the evacuation around it are exactly what budget insurance leaves out.

For short stays, US, British, Canadian and Australian passport holders can all get a 30-day tourist visa, either as an e-visa applied for online (US$25 single entry, US$60 multiple) or on arrival at the airport for about US$30, with a passport valid at least six months. Travel insurance is not a legal entry requirement. One quirk worth knowing: arriving directly into the Sinai resorts (Sharm El Sheikh, Dahab, Nuweiba, Taba) and staying within them for up to 15 days can get you a free entry stamp instead of a paid visa.

Egypt has no formal digital nomad or remote-work visa. People who base themselves here long-term do it the unofficial way: enter on the tourist visa and extend it at the local passport office (the Mogamma in Cairo or regional equivalents), repeating as needed, or pursue a longer residence permit. A widely reported 5-year tourist visa costing around US$700 has been announced to boost tourism, but as of mid-2026 it has not launched and there is no confirmed date, so treat it as a plan, not an option. Because there is no nomad visa, there is no visa-driven insurance mandate, which makes the decision yours: given the ambulance reality and, for divers, the chamber-and-evacuation gap, this is a place to carry strong cover by choice. We lay out the routes on the Egypt digital nomad visa page.

• No nomad visa, so visa runs are the norm. Long stays mean extending tourist visas or doing border hops, with no formal long-term status for remote workers, so plan around renewals rather than a clean multi-year permit.
• Diving accidents and the cover gap. The Red Sea is a top dive destination, but standard travel insurance usually excludes scuba accidents, hyperbaric chamber treatment and the evacuation they require, so insure diving explicitly to your planned depth.
• Stomach bugs and water. Travellers' diarrhoea is common, tap water is not safe to drink outside good hotels, and raw salads, undercooked meat and shellfish are the usual culprits, so stick to bottled or filtered water, including for brushing teeth.
• Sinai and the Western Desert. Both the US and UK governments warn against travel to North Sinai and the desert west of the Nile for terrorism and security reasons, while Cairo, Luxor, Aswan, Hurghada and the Red Sea resorts sit outside those zones.
• The roads. Egyptian driving is chaotic and dangerous, with CAPMAS reporting about 5,260 road deaths in 2024, so be wary as a pedestrian, avoid driving yourself where you can, and use reputable transport.