Life in China Reference pagesSources and method
China's visa-agent register: who files, and what it shows
Since 15 September 2026 anyone charging a fee to handle Chinese visa paperwork must file with the police. The register held 5,305 records on 16 November.
Living page — numbers read from the sources on 2026-11-16, re-checked when the rule changes.
Anyone in China who takes a fee to advise on, or handle, someone else’s visa or residence paperwork now has to be on a police register. The duty comes from a State Council regulation in force since 15 September 2026, and the register that holds it is public. On 16 November it listed 5,305 records. Agencies already trading when the rule started have until 14 December 2026 to file, which is 28 days from today and a Monday.
The regulation is State Council Order No. 841, adopted on 29 June 2026, signed on 22 July, in force on 15 September, and 19 articles long (full text, gov.cn, checked 16 November 2026). The implementing rule is the filing measures from the National Immigration Administration and the State Administration for Market Regulation, Announcement No. 6 of 2026, dated 14 September, in force the next day, and 14 articles long (full text, NIA, checked 16 November 2026).
What counts as agency work
A paid service that advises on or handles exit-entry paperwork is agency work, whatever the company calls itself. The filing measures define it as commissioned work for tourists, business visitors, students, workers or settlers, covering policy advice and document handling, for an agreed fee (announcement No. 6, art 2, 14 September 2026). Beijing’s exit-entry police read that as three elements — the client crosses a border, the work is advice or paperwork, the service is paid — and say any business meeting all three falls inside the duty regardless of its registered industry (Beijing municipal notice, 5 November 2026).
Two limits shape who can be filed at all. Foreign companies and institutions may not provide this service inside China (Order 841, art 8), which closes the branch-office model for foreign visa consultancies. And a company with offices in several provinces files in each place separately, because branches register where they sit; the staff who deal with clients are filed by their employer, not by themselves (announcement No. 6, art 3).
The three clocks
Three kinds of entrant file on different clocks, and only one of them expires this year.
| Entrant | Deadline | Source |
|---|---|---|
| New agency | 15 days from establishment | art 4 |
| Trading before 15 September 2026 | 90 days from that date → 14 December 2026 | art 4 |
| Existing company adding the service later | 15 days from starting the business | art 4 |
The 90 days are calendar days, not working days, which is how the deadline lands on a Monday in mid-December. Beijing’s notice adds what follows it: an agency that misses 14 December is ordered to correct within a time limit, and one that refuses is fined 5,000 to 10,000 yuan and reported to the market regulator with a recommendation to suspend business (Beijing municipal notice, 5 November 2026).
Filing is quick once the papers are in. The county-level exit-entry office has five working days to issue a certificate, and an incomplete file must be answered with a single list of everything missing, after which the agency has 15 days to supply it or lose the attempt (announcement No. 6, art 6). Changes of name, address, filed staff, scope or contact details are reported within 15 days, with a replacement certificate in five working days (art 7). Beijing’s notice answers two questions the text leaves open: there is no fee, and one filing does not expire (Beijing municipal notice).
Conditions and papers
Order 841 sets five conditions, and the filing measures turn them into six items of paper. The conditions are lawful establishment; a legal representative with no conviction for an intentional crime; staff with legal knowledge plus funds and premises; no client-facing staff convicted of intentional crimes against state security, public safety or border management; and written systems for personnel, training, records, data security and compliance (Order 841, art 8).
The papers are the agency form, the staff form with identity and employment proof, a no-criminal-record declaration for the legal representative and client-facing staff, proof of ownership or a lease for the main premises, a description of the internal systems, and — only for agencies handling departures — a cooperation agreement or letter of intent with a foreign partner (announcement No. 6, art 5). That last item is the one that changes who can enter the outbound trade; the other five apply in both directions.
What an agency may not do
Six prohibited acts can cost an agency its filing, and a false invitation letter now carries a fine of its own.
| Prohibited | Detail |
|---|---|
| False advertising | Publishing untrue information, or recruiting clients by exaggeration or misleading claims |
| False documents | Supplying or helping supply fake material for visas, permits or passports |
| Data | Leaking, selling or improperly providing personal information learned in the work |
| Scope | Operating outside the filed business scope |
| Crime | Organising or assisting cross-border crime |
| Order | Other conduct endangering state security or disrupting exit-entry management |
Source: Order 841, art 10, in force 15 September 2026. Public officials and military staff who ask an agency to arrange a foreign nationality or residence permit are a separate case: the agency must refuse and report to the supervisory body.
The invitation letter is where the regulation adds a number the older law did not carry. The Exit-Entry Administration Law made the issuer responsible for the letter’s truth in article 19 but set no fine for a false one (law text, NIA). Order 841 article 11 supplies it: 5,000 to 10,000 yuan for an individual, 10,000 to 50,000 yuan for a company, another 5,000 to 10,000 yuan on the person in charge, and confiscation of any gains. That price lands on the Chinese host or employer who writes the letter a business or family visitor carries to a visa office.
Two penalty tracks
A fake document costs the agency money and the traveller years, under two separate sets of rules.
| Breach | Penalty | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Agency not filed | Order to correct; if refused, 5,000–10,000 yuan plus a recommendation to suspend business; serious cases 10,000–50,000 yuan plus licence revocation | art 12 |
| Individual practising unfiled | Stopped, gains confiscated, up to 5,000 yuan | art 12 |
| Agency breaching the six prohibitions | Gains confiscated and multiplied one to five times where they reach 20,000 yuan; otherwise 20,000–50,000 yuan; 10,000–50,000 yuan per responsible person | art 13 |
| Traveller using a fraudulent document | 2,000–5,000 yuan; serious cases five to ten days’ detention plus 5,000–20,000 yuan | law, art 73 |
| Foreigner giving false material or statements | Barred from entry for one to five years, counted from the day any punishment is completed | art 5 |
| Chinese citizen with fraudulent documents | Barred from leaving for six months to three years; also applies to export-control violations | art 4 |
Fines above 5,000 yuan and confiscations are decided by the public security organ above the county-level exit-entry office rather than by the office itself (art 14). A bar on entry or exit has to be communicated in writing, with the fact, reason, legal basis and the route to challenge it, unless national security or a criminal investigation is involved (art 6).
The register, counted
The public register can be paged through, which makes its size countable rather than anecdotal. It sits on the immigration administration’s site under 办事服务, with a filter for province, city and county (register, read 16 November 2026).
I pulled the whole list that morning: 5,305 records, no duplicates by internal id, the newest filed on 15 November. Each filing number carries the filing date in characters seven to twelve and the province code in the first two, so the register sorts by month and by province without asking anyone.
| Period | Records | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 15–30 September 2026 | 611 | 11.5% |
| October 2026 | 2,721 | 51.3% |
| 1–15 November 2026 | 1,973 | 37.2% |
Weekdays carry the work. The five working days from 9 to 13 November added 935 records, an average of 187 a day, and the two weekend days after them added five. Guangdong, Beijing and Shanghai hold 989, 968 and 693 records, or 49.95% of the register between them; Zhejiang has 278 and Jiangsu 268.
Twenty working days remain before 14 December. At the pace of that second week in November the list would gain roughly 3,700 records and end near 9,000. That is arithmetic on an observed rate, not a forecast, and the rate has risen every month: 38 a day in the second half of September, 88 a day across October, 131 a day in the first half of November.
What an entry does not prove
A register entry shows that a company filed, not what it is allowed to handle. The record carries a name, a unified social credit code, a main business address, a legal representative, the names of client-facing staff, and a field for violations and bad records. It has no business-scope field.
That gap matters for a foreigner choosing an agent, because an agency serving only Chinese citizens going abroad and one handling inbound work and residence permits are filed under the same rule and look identical. The date inside the filing number is the day the company filed, not the day it started trading, so a firm with fifteen years of history and one that opened in October can carry codes a few weeks apart. A branch is its own record, which makes the 5,305 a count of filings rather than of companies.
How I checked
Order 841 and the filing measures were read in full in Chinese, from government hosts, on 16 November 2026. I counted the articles myself, 19 and 14, rather than taking the numbers from a news summary.
The register figures come from the site’s public list endpoint, queried at a page size of 500 across 11 pages with duplicates dropped by id; the total the endpoint reported, 5,305, matched the unique records collected. Filing dates were read from characters 7 to 12 of each filing number and province shares from characters 1 and 2 against the standard six-digit administrative division codes. The month and weekday tallies were computed from those fields.
The three-element reading of the definition, the statement that filing is free, and the statement that a filing does not expire come from Beijing’s notice of 5 November 2026, which is an official reading of the same text rather than a second source for it.
What I could not check
- No English text. I found no official English translation of either instrument, so everything above is from the Chinese; an English summary elsewhere may use different wording, and the Chinese governs.
- The annexes. Six forms are attached to the filing measures as .docx files. I did not open them, so the fields a company must fill are unverified.
- Enforcement. No published list of fines or revocations under articles 12 and 13 turned up, so how strictly they are applied is unknown. The violations field was empty on the one record I opened, which says nothing about the other 5,304.
- Which agencies serve foreigners. Not in the data. A reader can confirm a filing and nothing more, so the register cannot by itself tell an inbound applicant whether a given agent handles their kind of case.
- The process on the day. Filing needs a business licence and a visit to a county-level office or a city booking system, and I did not run it. The 12367 hotline and Beijing’s booking page are reported by the city notice and not tested by me.
- The size of the trade. Without a count of agencies trading before 15 September, the 5,305 cannot be turned into a share, so how much of the market has filed and how much sits outside the register is unknown.