Bangladesh · South Asia
Moving to Khulna
Khulna quick facts
Bangladesh at a glance
South Asia
Economy
World Bank · 2025Religion
% of populationBangladesh Population and Housing Census 2022
Cost of living in Khulna
Can you move to Bangladesh?
Pick your passport to see whether you can enter Bangladesh — and what it takes to stay.
Entry rules come from github.com/imorte/passport-index-data, updated 17 February 2026. They change without notice — confirm with the official immigration service before booking.
Getting set up in Bangladesh
E visa, N visa, and why Mongla is a different file from Khulna
The decisive question is which body regulates your employer, because it sets the visa letter, the approval route and the timetable. BIDA handles private-sector employment on an E visa; the NGO Affairs Bureau handles NGO and INGO appointments on an N visa — and in a division dominated by delta, water and coastal programmes that second route is unusually common here; BEPZA handles the export processing zones. All three route through a Ministry of Home Affairs security clearance which, since October 2025, is applied for digitally through BIDA's One Stop Service portal and is deemed granted after 21 working days without objection. Two things are locally useful: there is a Divisional Passport and Visa Office in Khulna, and BEPZA's southwestern zone is at Mongla, not in Khulna city.
Read the full step-by-step guideThe IDP you must get before arrival, and a city small enough not to drive in
The rule that strands people is national: an International Driving Permit must be obtained in your home country before you travel, because the BRTA does not issue them and the Automobile Association's process is built for BRTA licence holders going abroad. What is local is scale. Khulna is small and flat, easy-bikes and CNGs cover it end to end for a few taka, and most residents never need a car in the city at all. Where a vehicle earns its keep is the regional journey — Mongla, Bagerhat, Satkhira and the embankment districts — and those roads flood.
Read the full step-by-step guideOpening an account, foreign currency deposits, and getting money out again
Bangladesh operates real foreign exchange controls, so the account you open determines what you can later take out. Foreign nationals may hold private foreign currency accounts and Non-Resident Foreign Currency Deposit accounts, and NFCD balances are freely repatriable — but the published minimum deposit for a foreign national is an order of magnitude above the non-resident Bangladeshi one. The local reality in Khulna is that far fewer branches process foreign-national accounts as routine work than in Dhaka or Chattogram, so the employer introduction matters more here, not less, and it is worth asking which specific branch has done it before.
Read the full step-by-step guideSalt in the water, cyclones in the season, and where the referral goes
The national picture applies: no public cover for foreigners, competent and inexpensive private hospitals, and complex care routed abroad. What is local is that Khulna's private hospital tier is thinner than Dhaka's or Chattogram's, so the realistic path for anything serious is a referral to Dhaka and then out of the country — which makes both the domestic transfer and the evacuation clause worth reading carefully. Two environmental facts drive everything else: drinking-water salinity, which is a documented health issue across coastal Khulna, and cyclone season, which is a household planning duty rather than a news story.
Read the full step-by-step guideThe two-SIM passport limit, and coverage that stops at the forest
SIM registration in Bangladesh is biometric and tied to an identity document, and the ceiling depends on which document you use: a Bangladeshi national ID supports a substantial number of SIMs, while a passport, driving licence or birth certificate supports only two. That is national. Khulna's local layer is coverage geography rather than rules — city coverage is fine, but it degrades quickly across the coastal upazilas and effectively ends inside the Sundarbans, which matters a great deal if your work takes you into the delta.
Read the full step-by-step guide182 days, a July–June year, and the certificate you need to leave
Bangladesh's residency test is 182 days in the income year — not 183 — with a second limb catching people at 90 days if they were present more than 365 days across the preceding four years. The income year runs 1 July to 30 June. Non-residents face a flat rate on Bangladeshi income rather than the progressive scale. And you cannot leave permanently without a tax clearance certificate. All of that is national and identical in Dhaka. What is local is only administrative: your taxes zone and circle are in Khulna, and the exit certificate must come from your own circle.
Read the full step-by-step guideEach guide has verified costs, timelines, required documents, and the non-obvious gotchas — sourced from official government pages. Last verified August 2026.
Essential Bengali phrases
Reading a list isn’t learning it. Globe Quest turns these into a trainer — hear each phrase spoken, drill them with spaced repetition, and get scored as you say them out loud.
What to know before you go
The water here is a genuine question, and the city's own answer tells you how serious it is
CriticalKhulna's piped supply does not come from under Khulna. Local groundwater and the surrounding rivers are too saline to rely on, so the Khulna Water Supply Project — financed by the ADB and JICA and completed in 2019 — built an intake on the Modhumoti river tens of kilometres away and a treatment plant with about 110,000 cubic metres a day of capacity, then piped it in. That is an enormous amount of engineering to avoid a local aquifer, and it is the clearest possible statement of the problem. Ask a prospective landlord where the building's water comes from, whether it is on the KWASA mains or a bore, and what its dry-season taste and TDS are like. In April and May even the Modhumoti turns brackish.
Khulna's air can be worse than Dhaka's, which nobody expects
ImportantOn the morning of 6 November 2025, Khulna recorded an air quality index of 229 — 'very unhealthy' — against Dhaka's 177, Rajshahi's 167 and Chattogram's 99. Bangladesh was the world's second most polluted country in 2025 with a national annual PM2.5 average of 66.1 µg/m³, and the assumption that a smaller, greener, coastal city breathes better does not hold here in the dry season. Plan for it the way a Dhaka resident does — purifiers in the bedrooms before December, and outdoor exercise as a decision rather than a habit.
Cyclone preparedness is not theoretical in Khulna division
CriticalCyclone Remal made landfall near Mongla late on 26 May 2024. Around 400,000 people in Khulna district were affected, roughly 50,000 homes were damaged, and about 61 kilometres of embankments across Khulna, Satkhira and Bagerhat were breached or damaged. The Sundarbans absorbed a great deal of the surge and were themselves flooded for about thirty hours. Learn the Bangladesh Meteorological Department's signal system, know where your nearest cyclone shelter is, and keep several days of water, power and cash. This is a routine seasonal duty here, not disaster tourism.
Know which regulator owns your employment — and note there is no Khulna EPZ
CriticalPrivate-sector employment runs through BIDA on an E visa; NGO and INGO employment runs through the NGO Affairs Bureau on an N visa; export processing zone employment runs through BEPZA. A common error in this region is assuming a 'Khulna EPZ' exists — it does not. BEPZA's zone for the southwest is Mongla EPZ, beside the port about fifty kilometres away in Bagerhat district, and a job there is a BEPZA file with a Mongla address, not a Khulna one. Get this right before anything is lodged: a file in the wrong system is restarted, not transferred.
Both of Khulna's traditional industries have contracted, and the city feels it
ImportantThe government closed 25 state-owned jute mills on 2 July 2020, sending around 25,000 workers into voluntary retirement; the Khalishpur mill area in Khulna emptied out and has not recovered. Shrimp has gone the same way more slowly — Khulna, Bagerhat and Satkhira account for roughly 90 per cent of national shrimp exports, but of 109 registered processing factories only about 30 in Khulna remain operational, and tiger-prawn pond area in Khulna fell from 36,151 hectares in 2018–19 to 32,383 in 2023–24. Anyone taking a commercial role here should understand that the growth story is Mongla port and its zone, not the industries the city is named for.
Tax residence is 182 days, not 183 — and the income year runs July to June
CriticalYou 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, identical in Dhaka and Chattogram, and every element of it differs from the assumption most arrivals bring. Khulna's only local wrinkle is administrative: your taxes zone and circle are here, and the exit clearance certificate has to come from your own circle.
Top industries & employers
Mongla port & the southwest logistics corridor
Mongla Port Authority, shipping agents, and the freight operators on the new Khulna–Mongla rail line
Bangladesh's second seaport and the one growing fastest in relative terms: Mongla handled about 10.4 million tonnes of cargo for record revenue of Tk 343.33 crore in FY2024–25 and set a target of over 12 million tonnes for FY2025–26. Container volumes in the first seven months of FY2025–26 already exceeded the whole of the previous year. This is the region's genuine growth story.
Shrimp, aquaculture & seafood processing
Processing plants around Khulna and Rupsha, plus the gher economy across Khulna, Bagerhat and Satkhira
Roughly 90 per cent of Bangladesh's shrimp exports come from these three districts. The sector is under severe pressure — around 30 of 109 registered processing factories still operating, pond area shrinking, and salinity, disease and input shortages all biting — so the jobs here are as much in remediation, certification and traceability as in volume.
Mongla EPZ manufacturing
Zone enterprises under BEPZA at Mongla — garments, accessories, camping and outdoor goods, textiles
BEPZA's southwestern zone, established in 1998 beside the port, with some of the lowest land and factory rates in the BEPZA system. It has attracted Korean and Chinese investment as Mongla's shipping access improved. Foreign technical staff here are BEPZA files rather than BIDA ones.
Shipbuilding & marine engineering
Khulna Shipyard Limited and the smaller yards along the Rupsha and Bhairab
Khulna Shipyard is a Ministry of Defence commercial enterprise with more than six decades of history, hundreds of vessels built and around Tk 800 crore of revenue in FY2024–25. It anchors a genuine marine engineering cluster — an unusual thing for a Bangladeshi city outside Chattogram to have.
Climate adaptation, water & development
The Bangladesh Water Development Board, ADB and World Bank projects, WaterAid, BRAC and the delta-focused INGOs and research institutes
Salinity intrusion, embankment failure, cyclone recovery and coastal water supply make southwest Bangladesh one of the most concentrated climate-adaptation programme geographies anywhere. For a development professional this is the substantive reason to be in Khulna rather than Dhaka.
Higher education & research
Khulna University, Khulna University of Engineering & Technology, Khulna Medical College, and the agricultural and fisheries research stations
KUET alone has around 9,000 students across 17 active departments. The universities give the city a research and consultancy base that the industrial decline has not touched, and they are the main English-speaking professional network here.
Where to go in Khulna
The Sundarbans
Nature · South of the city, reached by boat from Khulna or Mongla
The largest contiguous mangrove forest in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage site inscribed in 1997, covering around 140,000 hectares of tidal waterways, mudflats and salt-tolerant forest.
Local tip: Entry needs a Forest Department permit and an armed forest guard on board — not optional, and normally bundled into the price of a two- or three-night boat trip out of Khulna or Mongla. Go between November and February for wildlife and tolerable weather. Do not attempt a day trip: the forest starts hours from anywhere.
Sixty Dome Mosque, Bagerhat
Landmark · Bagerhat, about an hour east
The centrepiece of the Historic Mosque City of Bagerhat, a UNESCO World Heritage site — a fifteenth-century brick mosque of extraordinary scale founded by Khan Jahan Ali.
Local tip: It is called Shait Gumbad — 'sixty domes' — and does not have sixty, which locals enjoy explaining. Combine it with Khan Jahan Ali's tomb nearby and go early; the brickwork is best before the midday flatness.
Rupsha river & the bridge
Landmark · Eastern edge of the city
The working river that defines Khulna's eastern boundary, with the road bridge above and, since 2023, the 5.13 km Rupsha rail bridge carrying the new Mongla line.
Local tip: Take a small ferry across at dusk rather than driving over. The ghats on the Khulna side are where the city's river life still happens, and the fish landing in the early morning is worth being up for.
Khalishpur mill quarter
Hidden gemNeighborhood · North of the centre
The jute mill district — a planned industrial quarter of mills, workers' colonies and mill-owned housing, largely idle since the state mills closed in July 2020.
Local tip: Not a tourist site and that is the point. Walking it is the fastest way to understand what happened to this city's economy, and the tea stalls that survive have people who will tell you about it at length.
Shaheed Hadis Park & the city centre
Culture · Central Khulna, near Shibbari
The city's central park and monument, and the surrounding streets where Khulna actually gathers in the evening.
Local tip: The evening crowd here is the best introduction to the city's scale — Khulna is small enough that you will start recognising people. Combine it with the Shibbari and Moylapota junctions for food.
Khulna's river fish and chui jhal
Food · Across the city, best around Doulatpur and the Rupsha ghats
Freshwater and estuarine fish cooked with chui jhal — a woody pepper vine used as a whole stick in curries, and the southwest's signature flavour.
Local tip: Chui jhal beef is the dish to ask for and it is genuinely regional — you will not find it done properly in Dhaka. The vine is chewed for the flavour and not swallowed, which nobody tells first-timers.
Emergency numbers in Khulna
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