Tihar’s five-day public holiday began in Nepal today. It’s the festival of lights: dogs are garlanded, houses are lit with oil lamps for Laxmi Puja, and on Wednesday sisters give their brothers a seven-coloured tika for Bhai Tika. Government offices reopen on Friday, three weeks after a seven-day Dashain closure ended.
UK and US companies hire developers in Nepal and India for the hours, the calendar and the price. A team in Kathmandu can cover the whole UK working day and the US East Coast morning; ours works Sundays, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day; and a senior software engineer from us costs about half what a median UK developer costs to employ. What Nepal doesn’t offer is fewer holidays. It has more than the UK or the US, on different days, and the difference is the useful part.
The five weeks from Dashain to Chhath are the fairest test of that arrangement, so this is a good week to set it out. I run Crimson Umbrella, registered in Kathmandu in 2024 and incorporated in New York in 2026, and this calendar sets my year as much as anyone’s. What follows is the clock, the calendar and the cost, each with a source, and the parts that don’t flatter the idea are left in.
Who buys engineering from South Asia, and why
Most of the money goes to India. The Reserve Bank of India’s survey of software and IT-enabled services exports puts them at $221.4 billion for 2025-26, up 8.2% on the year. The United States bought $119.7 billion of that and the United Kingdom $34.0 billion, 54.1% and 15.4% of the total, so more than two-thirds of India’s software exports go to the two countries this article is written for. Nepal’s industry is much smaller. NAS-IT, its industry association, puts Nepal’s IT service exports at about $1 billion for 2025, against an official count of Rs 22.33 billion for telecom, computer and information services in 2024/25; much of the income is recorded as remittance.
The reason buyers give has changed more than the money has. In Deloitte’s 2024 survey of more than 500 business and technology leaders on buying work from outside providers, 34% named cost reduction as a main reason, down from 70% in 2020, and access to talent came first at 42%. Forty percent expected to spend more with outside providers and 20% expected to spend less. On those numbers, price isn’t most buyers’ first reason.
Policy is moving at the same time. The UK’s trade agreement with India took effect on 15 July 2026, and under a social security convention that came with it, staff an Indian employer posts to the UK pay into India’s scheme rather than UK National Insurance for up to 60 months. In the US, S. 2976, a Senate bill that would tax payments to foreign workers and firms for services reaching US consumers at 25% and deny the deduction, has not moved since it went to the Finance Committee on 6 October 2025. It isn’t law. The bigger US factor is the $100,000 H-1B fee, renewed to September 2027 but not being charged while a court order stands.
Nepal working hours: how much overlap with the UK and US?
All of the UK working day, and between 3¼ and 4¼ hours of a US Eastern one, inside our window of 08:00 to 23:00 Kathmandu time. Nepal runs at UTC+5:45 all year. The IANA time zone database records that it has used that offset since 1986 and has never used daylight saving, so the gap to London moves only when the UK’s clocks do: 5 hours 45 minutes in winter, 4 hours 45 minutes in summer. India, at UTC+5:30, sits 15 minutes behind Nepal and moves with it.
A standard Kathmandu day of 10:00 to 18:00 overlaps a UK nine-to-five by 3 hours 15 minutes in winter and 4 hours 15 minutes in summer. Our window runs Sunday to Friday and covers the whole UK day in both seasons:
| UK clocks | Dates | Your 09:00 to 17:00, in Kathmandu | Our window, in UK time |
|---|---|---|---|
| GMT, UTC+0 | 25 October 2026 to 28 March 2027 | 14:45 to 22:45 | 02:15 to 17:15 |
| BST, UTC+1 | 28 March 2027 to 31 October 2027 | 13:45 to 21:45 | 03:15 to 18:15 |
A 17:30 finish in winter is 23:15 in Kathmandu, a quarter of an hour past the window, so if your team works until half past five, tell us when we scope the work and we’ll set the shift to match.
The whole UK day doesn’t mean anyone works a fifteen-hour one. Nepal’s Labour Act caps a working day at eight hours and a week at 48, and allows overtime of four hours a day at most, paid at one and a half times. Our window is long because it’s staffed in shifts. The engineer on a UK account works your hours, which in Kathmandu are the afternoon and evening.
For US Eastern the window covers your morning: from 9:15pm the evening before until 12:15pm in winter, and from 10:15pm until 1:15pm in summer, so someone senior is online from 8:00am to at least 12:15pm Eastern all year. Against a nine-to-five that’s 3 hours 15 minutes of overlap in winter and 4 hours 15 minutes in summer, where two standard working days would share none. Central gets 2¼ and 3¼ hours, Pacific a quarter of an hour and 1¼. Where an engagement needs more, we run a late shift: six hours with a 9am Eastern start means working until 01:45 in Kathmandu in winter and 00:45 in summer, which we arrange per engagement rather than as the default. What that overlap is worth and what a 45-minute offset does to scheduling code are in two earlier pieces.
Does Nepal have fewer holidays? No, different ones
The usual pitch says teams in South Asia work through the holidays. The calendar says otherwise. The Home Ministry’s list for the Nepali year 2083, which runs from 14 April 2026 to 13 April 2027, has 22 nationwide public holidays. Because Dashain counts as seven days and Tihar as five, they cover 32 days, four of which fall on a Saturday, Nepal’s weekly day off (the list in English, from Pradhan & Associates). England and Wales have eight bank holidays a year, and US federal law sets 11 public holidays.
Private employers aren’t bound by the government’s list. Nepal’s Labour Act gives private-sector staff 13 paid public holidays a year and women 14, with Labour Day on 1 May fixed among them and the rest chosen by the employer; home leave adds a day for every 20 days worked. Over a year that lands close to the UK’s statutory 28 days. The US has no legal minimum: federal law requires no paid holidays, and private-sector workers who get them average eight in Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
So “fewer holidays” is the wrong claim. The right one is that the days fall elsewhere, as the months after Tihar show:
| Date | Off in London or New York | Nepal’s government | Our team |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every Sunday | The weekend | Off since April | Working |
| Thu 26 Nov | US: Thanksgiving | Open | Working |
| Fri 25 Dec | Christmas Day | Off | Working |
| Mon 28 Dec | UK: Boxing Day, moved | Open | Working |
| Fri 1 Jan 2027 | New Year’s Day | Open | Working |
| Mon 18 Jan | US: Martin Luther King Day | Open | Working |
| Mon 15 Feb | US: Presidents’ Day | Open | Working |
| Fri 26 Mar | UK: Good Friday | Open | Working |
| Mon 29 Mar | UK: Easter Monday | Open | Working |
Christmas Day is on Nepal’s list too, but the country’s year turns on Dashain and Tihar, and its New Year is 1 Baisakh, in mid-April; 1 January doesn’t appear on the list at all. We don’t close for Christmas or New Year. We close for Dashain and Tihar instead, for less time than the government does, and clients get our dates months ahead.
The Western year-end is less of a shutdown than it looks. Of US private-sector workers with paid holidays, 97% get Christmas Day but only 26% get Christmas Eve and 14% New Year’s Eve, in the latest BLS figures, which date from 2018. In the UK the law lets an employer tell staff to take their leave at Christmas, which is how a Christmas shutdown works, and larger companies are the likeliest to freeze deploys at year-end in a Pragmatic Engineer survey of 185 readers at tech companies. Systems don’t take the week off. GitLab’s reliability report for the on-call week of 29 December 2020 to 5 January 2021 logged 20 PagerDuty incidents, five of them on New Year’s Day. A team in Kathmandu changes who is at a desk when one of those happens, and in a freeze week the work that doesn’t touch production carries on: tests, upgrades, documentation.
Nepal public holidays in 2027, Dashain and Tihar included
Nepal closes for Dashain and Tihar. This year Dashain closed government offices for seven days, 17 to 23 October, after Ghatasthapana on 11 October; Tihar closes them from today until 12 November, and Chhath follows on 15 November. That’s up to 14 days of public holiday in five weeks, in the middle of the Western fourth quarter. Dashain is the real gap; Tihar is a shorter one. We plan around both, and because clients get our closure dates months ahead, a release, a migration or a handover can go either side of them instead of landing in the middle.
The rest of the government’s list for early 2027 is already published, and it is mostly single days:
| Date | Government holiday |
|---|---|
| Mon 11 Jan | Prithvi Jayanti, National Unity Day |
| Fri 15 Jan | Maghe Sankranti |
| Sat 30 Jan | Martyrs’ Day |
| Sun 7 Feb | Sonam Lhosar |
| Fri 19 Feb | National Democracy Day |
| Sat 6 Mar | Maha Shivaratri |
| Tue 9 Mar | Gyalpo Lhosar |
| Sun 21 Mar | Fagu Purnima, in the hill districts; Monday in the Terai |
Private firms choose most of their own holidays, so ask any supplier which of these it closes for. For the autumn, Nepal’s official dates arrive with the list for the year 2084, normally published in February or March. Until then, these are dates calculated by Drik Panchang (Dashain, Tihar) for New Delhi, and Kathmandu’s can differ by a day:
| Festival day | Expected date in 2027 |
|---|---|
| Ghatasthapana, the first day of Dashain | Thursday 30 September |
| Fulpati | Wednesday 6 October |
| Vijaya Dashami | Sunday 10 October |
| Laxmi Puja, in Tihar | Friday 29 October |
| Bhai Tika | Sunday 31 October |
If a 2027 launch matters, keep it clear of the week from Fulpati to Vijaya Dashami and the turn of October into November.
Is Sunday a working day in Nepal?
For us, yes. Our week runs Sunday to Friday. For the country it has become a harder question. Saturday has long been Nepal’s weekly holiday, and from 6 April 2026, with petroleum supplies disrupted, the government gave schools and its own offices Sunday off too, Onlinekhabar reported, and the central bank moved banks to the same weekend. It tried a two-day weekend in 2022 and reversed it a month later after backlogs in hospitals and courts, the Kathmandu Post reported. This time, in June, it denied that it was scrapping the Sunday holiday. Other private employers set their own week, and the Labour Act requires a weekly day off without naming the day. We kept ours.
Sunday is a normal working day for us, which matters for work that has to happen on your weekend: a migration, a release, a fix that can’t wait for Monday. In winter, a Kathmandu Sunday runs from 02:15 to 17:15 on a UK Sunday and from 9:15pm on Saturday to 12:15pm on Sunday in New York. The gap is Saturday. We stop at 23:00 on Friday in Kathmandu, which in winter is 17:15 on Friday in London and 12:15pm in New York, and start again at 08:00 on Sunday. Outside those hours, on-call is something we add to your contract if you want it.
In practice, a bug your New York team logs at 3pm on a Tuesday in winter can be picked up at 9:15pm Eastern, when Kathmandu starts its Wednesday, and be in review by your morning. A bug logged in London at 10am can reach an engineer the same working day.
Nepal or India for a software team?
For a UK or US buyer the two countries are closer than the comparison sites suggest.
| Nepal | India | |
|---|---|---|
| Time zone | UTC+5:45, no daylight saving | UTC+5:30, no daylight saving |
| A UK 9-to-5 in winter, local time | 14:45 to 22:45 | 14:30 to 22:30 |
| Autumn festival closures, 2026 | Dashain, 17 to 23 October; Tihar, 8 to 12 November | Dussehra, 20 October; Diwali, Sunday 8 November |
| Christmas Day | Government holiday | Government holiday |
| New Year’s Day | Working day | Optional holiday only |
| English, EF EPI 2025 | 58th of 123, “moderate” | 74th of 123, “low” |
| Software and IT services exports | About $1 billion, industry estimate for 2025 | $221.4 billion in 2025-26 |
India’s central government holiday list for 2026, published through StaffNews, closes offices for Dussehra on 20 October, puts Diwali on Sunday 8 November, the day Tihar’s closure began, and has Christmas as a compulsory holiday; New Year’s Day appears only on its optional “restricted” list. The festivals are the same, but the closures aren’t, and Nepal’s are much longer. The English rankings come from EF’s 2025 fact sheets for Nepal and India. EF tests adults who choose to take its test, so read the gap as a signal, not a census.
India’s advantages are real. It has the scale: a buyer who needs forty engineers in one stack next quarter will find them there sooner. It has the UK convention for people who need to be on site: an Indian employer’s engineer posted to the UK for up to five years pays into India’s scheme, not UK National Insurance. And its largest firms already run offices in London and New York.
Nepal’s case is narrower. The clock is the same, the main festivals coincide, and the English ranking is higher. Beyond that, the choice is about the firm more than the country. The country sets the clock and the calendar; the firm decides who answers at 9:15pm on a Tuesday, and whether it’s the same person next year. With us it’s a named senior lead who owns the engagement and doesn’t change after you sign.
What it costs to hire a developer in Nepal, against a UK or US hire
Our senior engineers start at $4,000 a month for 160 hours, about $25 an hour, for software development, $4,500 for data engineering and $5,000 for AI work. At Nepal Rastra Bank’s exchange rates for 8 November, $4,000 is about £2,990.
In the UK, the Office for National Statistics’ 2026 provisional earnings survey puts median full-time annual pay for programmers and software development professionals at £59,863, up 5.4% on the year. An employer adds National Insurance at 15% on pay above £5,000 (HMRC), about £8,229, and at least 3% of qualifying earnings into a workplace pension, about £1,321. The total is roughly £69,400 a year, or about £5,780 a month, before recruitment, equipment, office space or anyone to cover holidays. A contractor at the median advertised rate of £525 a day, from IT Jobs Watch for the six months to 8 November, costs about £10,500 for 20 days.
Against those, a senior engineer from us costs about half a median UK employee and under a third of the contractor. Both comparisons are before VAT, which a UK business buying services from abroad accounts for itself under the reverse charge; it nets to nothing for a business that recovers VAT in full. Bringing an engineer to the UK instead means a Skilled Worker salary of at least £41,700 or the going rate for the job, whichever is higher (GOV.UK), plus an Immigration Skills Charge of £1,320 a year for a medium or large sponsor. In the US, the median software developer was paid $135,980 in May 2025 (Bureau of Labor Statistics) before the benefits an employer adds, and our $48,000 a year for a senior engineer is about a third of that pay alone.
We’re not the cheapest. There are people on Upwork at eight dollars an hour, and Accelerance, which matches buyers with development firms, put senior engineers in Asia at $31 to $41 an hour in its November 2025 rates guide, with India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as its examples. Our senior rates, $25 to $31.25 an hour, sit at the bottom of that range or under it.
The rate isn’t the whole cost, either. Research on moving work abroad has found for two decades that companies misjudge the coordination it takes. A 2013 study in the Strategic Management Journal found the misjudgement grows with the complexity of the work, and that experience and organisational design built for it weaken that link. The next two sections are about that design.
What a UK buyer needs on paper
Neither Nepal nor India is on the UK’s list of countries with adequacy regulations for personal data. Under the ICO’s guidance, updated in January 2026, remote access to UK personal data by a separate company registered outside the UK counts as a restricted transfer, as Freshfields summarises it, even when the data never leaves your own cloud account. Without adequacy, that usually means the ICO’s international data transfer agreement, the IDTA, or its addendum to the EU clauses, plus a transfer risk assessment. Since 5 February 2026 the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 has framed that assessment as a “data protection test”: whether protection abroad would be “not materially lower” than at home.
Contracting with our New York corporation doesn’t remove the paperwork. The ICO looks at where the receiving company is registered, so that is a transfer to the US, where the UK’s data bridge covers only companies certified under the Data Privacy Framework, and the work in Kathmandu is an onward transfer from there. Nepal’s Privacy Act 2075 restricts using personal information without consent, but it has no cross-border transfer rules and no dedicated regulator, so the assessment rests on the contract and on technical controls.
Our side of it is the way we work. Our engineers work inside your GitHub organisation and your cloud accounts, with access you grant and can revoke in a minute. We don’t take copies, and no one outside our two companies works on your data. Ask any supplier in Nepal or India for the transfer paperwork before anyone touches production data, us included.
How we keep time zones and holidays off your delivery dates
Time zones and holidays are real costs, and we’d rather plan for them in writing than promise they don’t exist. We set dates with both clocks and the festival calendar in view, and the rest is how the work runs:
- A fifteen-hour working window, 08:00 to 23:00 Kathmandu time, Sunday to Friday, staffed in shifts: the whole UK day, a US Eastern morning, and up to six hours of Eastern overlap when an engagement needs a late shift.
- Christmas Day and New Year’s Day as working days, and our holiday dates, Dashain and Tihar among them, sent to you months ahead.
- A named senior lead who owns the engagement and doesn’t change after you sign.
- Written handovers that say what’s done and what’s blocked, a weekly written update and a demo at every milestone. If something’s blocked, you hear the day it’s blocked, not at the next call.
- Your code stays in your repositories and your infrastructure from the first day.
- If something we shipped breaks, it’s ours to fix. On-call cover outside our hours can go in your contract.
The flexibility is in the shifts. Engineers can start earlier or later inside the window, so tell us which hours matter to you. An engineer on your team is from 20 hours a month and usually starts within one to two weeks. You contract with either the New York corporation and pay USD by wire or ACH, or with the Nepal company and pay by bank transfer in Kathmandu; invoices come in USD, EUR, GBP or AUD. If you need senior judgement more than extra hands, a part-time technical lead starts at $2,500 a month.
The details are on how we work, the four people who own the disciplines are on the about page, and the quickest way to find out whether our hours fit yours is a twenty-minute call.
Questions UK and US buyers ask
How many hours does a team in Nepal overlap with the UK working day?
A standard Kathmandu day of 10:00 to 18:00 overlaps a UK nine-to-five by 3 hours 15 minutes in winter and 4 hours 15 minutes in summer. Nepal is UTC+5:45 with no daylight saving, so a UK 9:00 to 17:00 day runs from 14:45 to 22:45 in Kathmandu during GMT and from 13:45 to 21:45 during BST. Crimson Umbrella’s shifts, 08:00 to 23:00 Kathmandu time, cover all of it.
How much overlap does Nepal have with US Eastern time?
None if both sides work nine to five. Crimson Umbrella’s shifts, 08:00 to 23:00 Kathmandu time, cover 3 hours 15 minutes of a 9am to 5pm Eastern day in winter and 4 hours 15 minutes in summer; they end at 12:15pm or 1:15pm Eastern. Six hours needs a late shift in Kathmandu, to 01:45 in winter or 00:45 in summer, which Crimson Umbrella arranges per engagement.
What is the time difference between Nepal and the UK?
Nepal is 5 hours 45 minutes ahead of the UK in winter, when the UK is on GMT, and 4 hours 45 minutes ahead in summer, on BST. Nepal has no daylight saving, so the gap changes on the two days the UK’s clocks do: 28 March and 31 October in 2027.
Does Nepal have fewer public holidays than the UK?
No. Nepal’s government list for April 2026 to April 2027 has 22 nationwide public holidays covering 32 days, against eight bank holidays in England and Wales. Private employers must give 13 public holidays, 14 for women; Labour Day on 1 May is one of them, and the employer chooses the rest. The difference is timing: Dashain and Tihar fall in the autumn, while 1 January is a working day.
Does Nepal work on Christmas and New Year’s Day?
New Year’s Day, 1 January, is a normal working day in Nepal, whose own new year falls in mid-April. Christmas Day is on the government’s holiday list, but private employers choose most of their own public holidays. Crimson Umbrella works both days.
When are Dashain and Tihar in 2027?
Provisionally, Dashain begins with Ghatasthapana on Thursday 30 September 2027 and peaks on Vijaya Dashami, Sunday 10 October. Tihar’s Laxmi Puja falls on Friday 29 October and Bhai Tika on Sunday 31 October. These are dates calculated for New Delhi; Nepal’s official list for 2084 is normally published in February or March 2027.
Is Sunday a working day in Nepal?
For private employers on a six-day week, yes. Since April 2026, government offices, schools and banks have closed on Saturdays and Sundays to save fuel. Other private employers set their own week; Crimson Umbrella’s runs Sunday to Friday, with Saturday off.
How much does it cost to hire a senior developer in Nepal?
Crimson Umbrella’s senior engineers start at $4,000 a month for 160 hours, about $25 an hour, with data engineers from $4,500 and AI engineers from $5,000. At 8 November 2026 exchange rates, and before any UK VAT, $4,000 is about half the £5,780 a month a median UK developer costs to employ with National Insurance and pension. It is about a third of a median US software developer’s pay of $135,980 a year, before benefits.
Should we hire developers in Nepal or India?
Both keep the same clock to within 15 minutes and the same main festivals, but Nepal’s autumn closures are much longer. India has far more scale and, since July 2026, lets its employers post engineers to the UK for up to five years without UK National Insurance; Nepal ranks higher for English proficiency on EF’s 2025 index. The firm matters more than the country: ask who your named lead is, and when they will be online.
Saurav Raj Joshi is the founder and CEO of Crimson Umbrella Technologies and a principal data and BI engineer. You can find Saurav on LinkedIn.