Bali's Visa-Free Country List, and Why Being On It Is a Trap

Kazakhstan, the Macao Special Administrative Region and Belarus joined Indonesia's visa-free list on 9 July 2026. No market coverage of the change has been found. The addition matters less for who it lets in without a visa than for what it does not let them do once they land.

Being on this list is not the good option

A visa-free entrant gets a stay permit for at most 30 days from the date of the entry stamp, and Pasal 84 of Permenkumham 22/2023 states it outright: tidak dapat diperpanjang, it cannot be extended. There is no application, no fee and no office that changes that. A traveller who plans five weeks and reads "visa-free" as the more generous status has the wrong document. Staying past day thirty runs straight into the overstay charge. The two lawful moves at day thirty are to leave the country, or to have entered on a Visa on Arrival instead, which costs a state fee, covered in what you pay to enter Bali, and is extendable to 60 days under a separate procedure covered in extending a Visa on Arrival. Adding a nationality to this list adds it to that constraint. It is not a favour to the three new entries, and it was not one to the sixteen before them. Entry on this list also carries the same return or onward ticket requirement as a Visa on Arrival: the two application articles print the identical sentence.

The instrument, dated and signed

Peraturan Menteri Imigrasi dan Pemasyarakatan Nomor 10 Tahun 2026, signed 7 July 2026 in Jakarta by Minister Agus Andrianto, executes Pasal 5 ayat (4) of Perpres 95/2024 on visa-free entry. It took effect on promulgation, which the BPK legal database records as 9 July 2026. It carries Berita Negara 2026 No. 463, a number the signed PDF does not give up: its text layer renders a non-numeric glyph at that position rather than a digit, and the number has to be read from the BPK metadata table instead. Worth knowing before concluding a number is missing.

Article 2 names what the minister weighs before adding an entry: reciprocity and usefulness, national security, tourism, the economy and investment, and any further aspect the President determines. Article 3 requires an interministerial meeting, coordinated by the portfolio covering law, human rights, immigration and correctional affairs, before any addition is decided.

Three added, none removed

The annex of Permen Imipas 10/2026 lists six entries: the Republic of Türkiye, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Republic of Peru, the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, and the Republic of Belarus. Against its immediate predecessor, Permen Imipas 10/2025, the change is Kazakhstan, Macao and Belarus added, and nothing dropped. Türkiye, Brazil and Peru carried over unchanged from the earlier text.

Each Permen in this chain repeals the one before it in full and reprints the entire list rather than a delta. Permen Imipas 9/2025, signed 26 June 2025, opened the series with two entries, Türkiye and Brazil. Permen Imipas 10/2025, signed 12 August 2025, repealed 9/2025 and added Peru, taking the annex to three. Permen Imipas 10/2026 repeals 10/2025 in turn and takes it to six. A traveller checking this list should look at whichever Permen is currently in force and read its whole annex, never a stated "addition" alone, because the addition is the whole list restated.

A clause retired after never being used

The 2025 texts carried a second category in their title and in two articles: entitas tertentu atau pemegang izin tinggal tertentu dari suatu negara, entities, or holders of a certain residence permit of a country. Permen Imipas 10/2026 drops that clause entirely, from its title and from both articles that repeated it, with no replacement wording and no cross-reference elsewhere in the text.

The clause never did anything in this chain. Across all three Permen Imipas instruments, the annex itself named only sovereign states and, once, a special administrative region. No residence-permit holder was ever listed under a Permen. The minister's version of the category existed as a dormant possibility for just over a year, from 26 June 2025 to 7 July 2026, without a single use, and its removal closes a route the minister could have exercised rather than taking a status from anyone.

The parent instrument is a different matter, and the distinction is the one that decides who may actually enter. Perpres 95/2024 divides its annex into two lettered parts. Part A is the thirteen entries, twelve countries and Hong Kong. Part B, headed Pemegang Izin Tinggal Tertentu dari Suatu Negara, holders of a certain residence permit of a country, names one beneficiary: Pemegang izin tinggal tertentu dari negara Singapura, holders of a certain Singapore residence permit. That part is in force, has never been amended, and does not depend on the holder's nationality. So the residence-permit route is alive at the presidential level while the minister has just closed his own. Anyone counting only passports will miss it.

Two documents, and a reader needs both

Perpres 95/2024, read at its own annex, sets the base. Part A lists thirteen entries, twelve countries and one special administrative region: Brunei, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Timor Leste, Suriname, Colombia and Hong Kong. Part B adds the Singapore residence-permit holders described above. Part A does not contain Türkiye, Brazil or Peru, because those three were never added to the Perpres itself. They exist only in the Permen Imipas chain, a separate and subordinate instrument that adds to the Presidential regulation rather than amending it.

A page, or a traveller, that finds only the Perpres gets thirteen countries and misses the six currently added by Permen Imipas 10/2026. A page that finds only the Permen gets six and misses the original thirteen. The list a traveller actually needs is both documents read together: nineteen entries as of 9 July 2026, plus the Singapore residence-permit class, which turns on a permit rather than on a passport. No single official page found for this note prints them in one place.

A gap in the reference database itself

peraturan.bpk.go.id, the government's own consolidated legal database, does not index Permen Imipas 10/2025 under any search tried, including its own Berita Negara number, 594. Its predecessor, 9/2025, is indexed. Its successor, 10/2026, is indexed. The one instrument in the middle of the chain is the one missing from the reference source most sites would check first, which is one plausible reason the market has not caught up with any of this: the ordinary route to the text, for the step that matters most, does not return it.