Dhakaculture & etiquette

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, with its own appointment approval tied to an approved project. Export processing zone employment runs through BEPZA. These are three separate tracks with three separate letters and three separate timetables, and a file lodged with the wrong one is not transferred — it is restarted. Confusing them costs months, and it is the most expensive mistake made in Bangladeshi immigration.

Since 1 October 2025 all foreign investors and employees must apply for security clearance through BIDA's One Stop Service portal, and the clearance is deemed granted if no objection is raised within 21 working days. That protection is real. The other half is less advertised: BIDA states that failing to submit the security clearance application within the period specified on the work permit invalidates the permit. Diarise the date on the permit itself, not the date you were told about.

A person not domiciled in Bangladesh may not leave the country without obtaining a tax clearance certificate from the income tax authority. For a permanent departure this means filing a return covering 1 July to your departure date, including estimated income up to that date, and obtaining the certificate from your local tax circle. It is not fast and it cannot be done from abroad. Anyone finishing a posting here should start it six to eight weeks out, not in the final week.

You are a resident if you are present for 182 days or more in the income year, or for 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. Every element of that differs from the assumption most arrivals bring: the threshold, the second limb, and the year boundary. If you are moving here from a country with a 183-day calendar-year test, do the arithmetic properly rather than transferring the habit.

MRT Line 6 opened in stages from December 2022 and now runs sixteen stations from Uttara North to Motijheel, carrying around 400,000 passengers a day, with services roughly 07:10 to 21:00 Saturday to Thursday and a shorter Friday afternoon service. Fares run from about Tk 20 to Tk 100. For journeys along that corridor it converts a two-hour crawl into twenty minutes. Uttara, Mirpur and Agargaon are now realistic places to live for someone working in Motijheel in a way they simply were not three years ago. Guidance written before 2023 assumes the opposite.

Dhaka appears repeatedly among the world's ten most polluted cities during the dry season, with index readings above 200 and at times above 250 through January and February. The drivers are brick kilns ringing the city, vehicle emissions, construction dust and a winter inversion that stops any of it dispersing. Buy HEPA purifiers for the bedrooms before December, and treat outdoor exercise in January as a decision rather than a habit.