Chattogramculture & etiquette

Rangamati, Khagrachhari and Bandarban form the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and a foreign national travelling there must give the Bangladeshi authorities notice in advance — the UK FCDO and Global Affairs Canada both put it at ten days, through the Chittagong Divisional Commissioner's Office. Canada advises against all travel to the three districts. What generic guidance almost always omits is the other half: the FCDO states explicitly that Chittagong City and the other districts of Chittagong Division are not included in the travel warning. So living and working in the city carries no such requirement — but a weekend trip to Bandarban is a ten-day-notice matter, not a spontaneous one, and your employer's security policy may go further than the law does.

Private-sector employment runs through the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority: your sponsor obtains an E-visa recommendation from BIDA, then a work permit through BIDA's One Stop Service portal. NGO and INGO employment runs through the NGO Affairs Bureau on an N visa. Export processing zone employment runs through BEPZA, and in Chattogram that third track is not a footnote — the Chattogram EPZ, the Karnaphuli EPZ and the BEPZA Economic Zone at Mirsharai are all in this district, so a large share of foreign industrial staff here are BEPZA files rather than BIDA ones. A file lodged with the wrong body is restarted, not transferred.

Chattogram is the only large Bangladeshi city built across hills, and heavy monsoon rain repeatedly triggers landslides and wall collapses on the cut slopes — a run of heavy rain has killed more than twenty people in three days. The Chattogram observatory has recorded 24-hour rainfall above 400 mm. If you are looking at a flat below or on a cut hillside, ask directly about slope stability and drainage, and treat a red-alert forecast as a reason to stay off those roads rather than as background noise.

You are resident if present for 182 days or more in the income year, or 90 days or more if you were in Bangladesh for more than 365 days across the four preceding years. The income year runs 1 July to 30 June. That is national law and identical in Dhaka, but every element of it differs from the assumption most arrivals bring. Chattogram's own wrinkle is administrative rather than legal: the National Board of Revenue runs several taxes zones in this division, so you file at your local Chattogram circle rather than anywhere in Dhaka.

The Department of Immigration & Passports runs Divisional Passport and Visa Offices, and one of the seven is here, at Mansurabad. DIP's own description of these offices is that they issue passports to Bangladeshi nationals in their jurisdiction and visas to foreign nationals. That is a genuine practical advantage over being posted to a city without one, and it is worth confirming with the office which categories it handles before you assume a trip to Agargaon in Dhaka is necessary.

On the morning of 6 November 2025, when Dhaka recorded an air quality index of 177 and ranked eighth worst in the world, Chattogram recorded 99 — the difference between 'unhealthy' and the edge of 'moderate'. Coastal position and sea breeze do most of that work, and the brick-kiln belt that chokes the inland cities in the dry season is thinner here. It is not clean air by WHO standards, and Bangladesh remains among the world's most polluted countries, but anyone choosing between Bangladeshi postings should weigh this properly rather than assuming the whole country breathes like the capital.