The short answer
The visa on arrival costs IDR 500,000 (roughly USD 30), gives you 30 days, and can be extended exactly once for another 30 days and another IDR 500,000: 60 days maximum, as of July 2026. You can buy it two ways: online before you fly as the e-VOA, or at the airport counter after landing. Same visa, same price, very different experience. If your nationality is on the eligible list of roughly 90+ countries, the e-VOA is the version to get.
Buy the e-VOA before you fly
The only official place to buy the e-VOA is evisa.imigrasi.go.id: apply a few days before departure, pay by card, and you land with the visa already approved. That means you skip the payment counter entirely and walk straight to immigration, which at Bali's airport can save a real chunk of time. Search results are full of lookalike agency sites charging double or triple for the same thing; the official domain ends in imigrasi.go.id, nothing else. Keep the approval PDF on your phone and a printed copy if you like redundancy.
Paying at the airport counter instead
The counter works fine, but you queue twice: once to pay for the visa, then again at immigration. Cards are accepted, though travellers report the card readers can drop offline during peak arrival waves, so IDR 500,000 in cash is the smoothest fallback (major currencies are taken at the airport's own exchange rate, rarely in your favour). Morning arrival banks from Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Australia can mean 30 to 60 minutes of queueing; overnight arrivals are often much quicker. There are ATMs in the arrival hall if you land cashless.
How the extension actually works
Since June 2025 every extension involves showing up in person: immigration requires a photo and fingerprints at the local office, even for applications started online. If you bought the e-VOA, you can begin the extension on the same evisa portal and then attend once for biometrics. If you paid at the airport counter, expect to handle the whole thing at the immigration office. Either way, start at least a week (ideally two) before your 30 days run out, bring your passport and onward ticket, and budget IDR 500,000 for the extension itself. Many people in Bali pay a visa agent to shepherd the paperwork; that is convenience, not a requirement.
The eligibility caveat
The VoA is not universal: only citizens of the roughly 90+ listed countries can use it, and the list changes. Most Western, East Asian and Gulf nationalities are on it, but if yours is not, you need a C1 tourist visa arranged before travel instead. The current list lives on the official evisa portal, and checking it takes two minutes. Also remember the VoA is single entry: leave Indonesia (a quick hop to Singapore, say) and it is spent; you buy a new one when you come back.
Mistakes that actually catch people
The classics: buying from a lookalike site, assuming a second extension exists, and miscounting the 30 days. There is no second extension of a VoA; day 61 makes you an overstayer at IDR 1,000,000 per day. The 30 days start on the day you land, and the airport "helpers" who offer to jump the VoA queue for a fee are best politely ignored. One genuinely useful preparation: land with a working eSIM so you have data at the desk to pull up your e-VOA PDF and confirmation email instead of relying on patchy arrivals-hall Wi-Fi.
