The rule changed on 1 January 2026, and almost nobody noticed
Georgia spent years as the country that asked for nothing. A year of visa-free stay for citizens of dozens of countries, no application, no sticker, no proof of anything. That reputation is now half wrong, and the half that changed is this page.
Since 1 January 2026, tourists entering Georgia must hold health and accident insurance with a minimum sum insured of 30,000 GEL, roughly 11,000 US dollars. The authority is Article 12 of the Law of Georgia on Tourism, which states plainly that tourists visiting Georgia shall have mandatory health and accident insurance, with the operational detail supplied by Government Decree No. 602 of 26 December 2025.
The reason older guides say the opposite is not laziness, it is timing. Article 51(3) originally set the mandate to apply from 1 June 2024. Article 51(3.1) then suspended it until 1 January 2026. Anything written between those dates was accurate when published and is wrong now.
Why half the internet still gets this wrong
There is a second, more interesting reason for the confusion, and it is worth understanding because it tells you where to look for the rule.
The visa rules did not change. Ordinance No. 255, the instrument that grants citizens of 94 countries the right to enter and stay for one full year without a visa, was last amended on 24 February 2026 and contains no insurance text whatsoever. Read only that document and you will conclude, correctly as far as it goes, that Georgia's visa-free entitlement imposes no insurance condition.
The mandate sits in tourism law instead. So both of these sentences are true simultaneously: the 365-day visa-free stay carries no insurance requirement, and tourists entering Georgia are required to hold insurance. Sites that check the visa ordinance publish the first and stop. Sites that catch a headline about the tourism law publish the second and imply the visa rules changed. Neither is quite right.
One older detail adds to the muddle: people applying for an actual Georgian visa, the C category, have long had to show travel or health insurance covering incidents above 30,000 GEL as part of the visa file. That predates the tourism mandate and applies to a different, much smaller group.
What the policy actually has to look like
The specification is refreshingly light, and this is the part worth reading before anyone sells you something expensive.
The sum insured must be at least 30,000 GEL. It must cover the entire stay, up to one year. The policy may be issued by a Georgian or a foreign insurance organisation, which the decree says in as many words, so there is no locally-licensed-insurer trap of the kind the UAE runs. It may be presented in material or electronic form, and it must be in Georgian or English.
That is it. There is no repatriation clause, no named-insurer list, no approval process. At about 11,000 dollars, the threshold is low enough that essentially any real travel-medical policy clears it several times over. This is the rare case where the honest advice is that the requirement should not change what you buy.
Exemptions run to residence permit holders, who fall outside the tourism law's definition of a tourist as a non-resident staying under a year, plus diplomatic and special visa holders, diplomatic, official, service and special passport holders, accredited mission and international organisation staff, people covered by international agreements, and international commercial transport drivers.
Your airline will check before Georgia does
Decree No. 602 specifies no fine. Enforcement is by border control at entry, and through the first half of 2026 it has been patchy: travellers report entering via Tbilisi, Batumi and land crossings without being asked, while others were checked.
The consistent enforcer has been the carrier. Airlines have been verifying at check-in and boarding, with denials reported. That inverts the usual risk calculation. The realistic failure mode is not a Georgian official turning you away, it is a check-in agent in Istanbul or Warsaw refusing to board you, at which point the rule's uneven enforcement at the far end is irrelevant to you.
While we are correcting the record: the Remotely from Georgia programme, which so many nomad pages still list as a live route with its own insurance conditions, is dead. Its official domain no longer resolves in DNS at all, checked on 13 August 2026, and it is not linked from the consular portal.
What happens medically, and what I will not pretend to know
Georgia's Universal Health Care programme is for Georgian citizens. Foreigners get no automatic entitlement to it, and the expensive state programmes, chemotherapy, dialysis and cardiac surgery, are citizen-only. Residence status can allow limited enrolment. Emergency care is provided regardless of status, which is a genuine floor and not one to build a plan on.
On prices I am going to stop rather than guess. No Georgian hospital I could reach publishes a verifiable tariff, and every consultation, imaging and surgery figure in circulation for Georgia traces back to expat aggregator sites with no sourcing. The directionally safe statement, and the limit of what I will assert, is that routine consultations here run in the low tens of dollars, far below Western Europe. Ask the clinic for a written quote rather than trusting a number from a page that earns a commission on your policy.
The mountains are where the default policy fails
Here is the coverage gap that actually matters in Georgia, and it has nothing to do with the 30,000 GEL threshold.
Helicopter rescue in the Kazbegi area starts around 3,500 EUR, and a single-person evacuation from the neighbouring Khada Valley has run about 1,200 EUR. Inside the Gudauri resort perimeter there is no rescue fee, but evacuation from routes outside it is bought from commercial heli-ski operators and billed to the casualty. This is not theoretical: a Border Police helicopter crashed during a Gudauri rescue operation in 2022 with eight people aboard.
Now check your policy. SafetyWing covers recreational on-piste skiing but excludes off-piste, heli-skiing and mountaineering without the paid Adventure Sports add-on. Genki likewise covers marked trails only. Gudauri is substantially an off-piste and heli-ski destination, so the standard nomad policy is precisely at its weakest where Georgia's real risk sits.
What to buy
If you are visiting, buy the cheap thing. A Georgian tourist policy written to the mandate is reported at roughly 2 GEL a day, around 60 GEL or 22 dollars a month, a third of a nomad travel policy, and it is purpose-built for the document check. If Georgia is one stop on a longer route, your existing international policy already qualifies and you need do nothing.
If you ski or climb, buy the add-on. That is the only line item on this page where the money changes your outcome.
And if you hold a residence permit, you are exempt from the mandate entirely. See the visa page for the 365-day rule and the 1 March 2026 work-permit regime, and the residency page for the permit routes.