There is one app that stands between every modern pilgrim and the Ka’bah, and it is not optional. Nusuk — the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah’s official platform — is where your Umrah permit lives, where your Rawdah appointment is won or lost, and increasingly where the whole trip is assembled. Pilgrims who set it up carefully at home, weeks before flying, barely think about it again. Pilgrims who leave it for the hotel lobby in Makkah inherit a stressful evening. This chapter is the careful version.
What Nusuk actually is
Nusuk began life in 2020 as Eatmarna, the COVID-era permit app, and was relaunched under its current name in late 2022 as the Kingdom’s official companion for Hajj and Umrah. It has since grown into a family of platforms, and knowing which member does what saves real confusion. The Nusuk app (iOS and Android) and nusuk.sa website are for you, the individual pilgrim: permits, Rawdah bookings, and a growing menu of services. The Nusuk Umrah platform at umrah.nusuk.sa, launched in August 2025, is where eligible nationalities can now buy the visa, hotel and transport directly, without an agency. Nusuk Masar is the trade system your travel agent uses; you will never log into it, but every legitimate package flows through it. And Nusuk Hajj is a separate world entirely, for Hajj applications. When someone says “book it on Nusuk,” they almost always mean the first one — the app on your phone. The app passed thirty million downloads in 2025, and its early reputation for flakiness is largely out of date, though we will deal honestly with its remaining quirks below.
Before you register: what to have on the table
Registration goes smoothly when three things sit in front of you: your passport, your visa (or its reference number), and a phone that can receive either SMS or email reliably. The account must be created for each pilgrim individually in principle — but note the companion system described later, which spares you from juggling five phones for a family. One account detail matters more than all others: the name must match your passport exactly. Not your preferred spelling, not the name on your national ID if it differs — the machine-readable line of the passport. Nusuk cross-checks against the Saudi visa database, and a mismatch quietly blocks permit issuance later, at the worst possible moment.
Setting up the account, step by step
Download the app from the official store listing (search “Nusuk” and check the publisher is the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah — clones exist). Choose Register New User, then select Visitor as your account type; the resident options are for people with Saudi iqamas. You will be asked for your passport number or border number, your visa number, date of birth, mobile number and email.
Then comes the OTP — the one-time code that verifies you. It arrives by SMS or email depending on what you chose, and this is the single most complained-about moment in the whole process. Codes to international numbers sometimes crawl or never land. The reliable workaround is boring: use your email for verification instead of your phone number, and check the spam folder. If you insist on SMS, wait the full two minutes before tapping resend, since impatient resending can queue stale codes.
Next the app asks for a passport scan and a photo. The scanner auto-extracts your details, and this is where you slow down: it misreads more passports than you would expect, swapping letters or truncating middle names. Check every extracted field against the physical passport before confirming. Thirty seconds of proofreading here prevents the classic failure — a permit refusal weeks later that takes days of support tickets to unwind.
Booking your Umrah permit
With the account verified and your visa active, the permit itself is almost an anticlimax — and it is completely free. Open the Umrah tile, pick a date and a prayer-period time slot, review, accept the terms and confirm. A QR ticket appears with your date, time and permit number. That QR is what the gates of Masjid al-Haram scan. We walk through every screen with photographs in Book Your Umrah Slot, so here we will concentrate on the rules around the edges.
Permits open roughly 30 days in advance, and each slot shows a crowd indicator — green means space, and a slot like “After Isha” often stays available when the daylight periods are long gone. You may hold one active permit at a time: the system simply refuses a second booking while one is pending. Once your slot passes, or you cancel it, the next booking unlocks — in practice pilgrims performing multiple Umrahs manage one roughly every other day. If you miss your slot without cancelling, expect the app to sulk for around 24 hours before letting you rebook, which is its polite way of teaching you to cancel in advance.
Two seasonal caveats. Permits are suspended entirely during the annual Hajj window — in 2026 that meant roughly 18 April to the end of May — so a late-Shawwal trip needs checking against the calendar in A Complete Umrah Timeline. And enforcement at the gates has varied over the years between strict and relaxed; as of mid-2026 you should simply assume the QR will be scanned, because increasingly it is.
Adding family and companions
The companion feature is the quiet blessing of the system. One account holder can add family members or fellow travellers as companions and book everyone into the same slot — essential, because separate accounts booking separately can end up with a father at Fajr and a mother after Isha. Add companions before selecting your time so the availability check covers the whole party. The limits: companions need their own identity details entered accurately (the same passport-matching discipline applies), and Saudi residents cannot add visit-visa holders as companions — visitors book through visitor accounts. For elderly parents who will never touch a smartphone, this feature is the answer: one capable family member runs the bookings for everyone.
Changing your plans
Life reshuffles itineraries, and Nusuk copes better than its reputation suggests. Open your permit, tap Cancel booking, confirm, and the slot returns to the pool; your right to book anew is restored more or less immediately. Cancelling the night before is courteous to other pilgrims and protects your own rebooking rights. What you cannot do is edit a permit in place — there is no “change time” button, only cancel-and-rebook, so check the availability of your preferred replacement slot before releasing the one you hold in busy seasons.
When the app misbehaves
A short, honest troubleshooting list, assembled from the failures pilgrims actually report. OTP never arrives: switch to email verification, check spam, or try again on a different network — some carriers’ international SMS routing is simply poor. “Verification failed” on registration: almost always the auto-extracted passport data; re-enter it manually, field by field. Permit refused despite a valid visa: name mismatch between account and visa record — compare both letter-by-letter, correct the account, and if the visa itself carries the error, your issuing agency must fix it. App crashes or endless spinner: the unglamorous classics work — update the app, clear its cache, or use the nusuk.sa website, which shares your account and often behaves when the app does not. Everything fails: there is in-app support, but the faster route in Saudi Arabia is often the Ministry’s call centre, or simply asking your hotel’s front desk, who un-jam Nusuk accounts for guests daily and have seen every error screen in existence.
The Rawdah is a different game
One warning before you assume the Umrah permit skills transfer: booking the Rawdah — the garden of Paradise inside the Prophet’s Mosque — runs on scarcer supply, tighter windows and different rules, and it deserves its own preparation. Slots appear only days ahead and evaporate in seconds. Read Booking Your Visit to the Rawdah and How to Find a Rawdah Slot before you arrive in Madinah, not after.
On the day: make the QR unlosable
The permit is a QR code on a phone — which means it is hostage to battery, signal and glare. The drill that never fails: screenshot the QR the moment it is issued and, for families, screenshot every companion’s ticket too. Signal around the Haram gates dips exactly when ten thousand phones converge on the same cell towers, and a screenshot needs no signal. Carry a power bank, keep the screen brightness up for the scanners, and know your permit number in case a gate official wants it verbally. None of this is likely to be needed; all of it is free.
Booking the whole trip through Nusuk Umrah
Since August 2025, the Nusuk Umrah platform at umrah.nusuk.sa has done something quietly radical: it lets pilgrims from eligible countries buy the visa, the hotel and the ground transport directly from the Ministry’s own marketplace, with no agency in the chain. You browse hotel inventory in Makkah and Madinah the way you would on any booking site, add airport transfers or the intercity leg, and the visa application rides on top of the verified bookings — which is exactly the shape the new rules demand, since no Umrah visa is issued without confirmed accommodation and transport behind it. Prices are the operators’ own, not subsidised, so it pays to compare against what a good agency quotes for the same hotels (see Choosing the Right Umrah Package); the platform’s real advantages are trust and traceability rather than guaranteed savings. Eligibility is by nationality and has been expanding season by season — if your passport is not yet served, the licensed-agency route through the same underlying system remains your path, and nothing about the app-side permits changes either way.
Finding your way around the app
The home screen rearranges itself with the seasons, but the anatomy stays stable. The Umrah tile is where permits live — booking, viewing and cancelling. The Rawdah tile sits alongside it for Madinah. A services area gathers the growing extras: prayer-time information, site guides for the holy places, transport links, and seasonal features that come and go. Your profile holds the identity details and your companions list, and it is worth opening once before travel just to confirm everything survived registration intact. Two habits make the app pleasant instead of stressful: do your booking on hotel Wi-Fi rather than on the street, where signal drops mid-transaction, and keep notifications switched on, because slot confirmations and any schedule changes arrive there first. The interface speaks seven languages including English, Urdu, French, Turkish and Indonesian; if it opens in Arabic, the language toggle hides in the profile settings, top corner.
Data, signal and the offline question
Nusuk needs a connection to book, but not to present — a saved QR works from a screenshot with the phone in flight mode. Plan around that split. Do everything that requires the network from your hotel: booking, cancelling, adding companions. Keep everything you will need at the gates stored locally: screenshots of every ticket, plus your permit numbers written somewhere analogue if you like belt-and-braces. Pilgrims relying on international roaming should note that OTP text messages are the flakiest part of the whole stack; an eSIM with a data plan plus email-based verification sidesteps the problem entirely. And if your phone dies at the worst moment, all is not lost — gate staff deal with dead batteries hourly, and a companion’s app showing the group booking usually resolves it.
Setting up Nusuk for parents who won’t use it
A very common family shape: you are reading this, and the actual pilgrims are your parents, who will carry a phone but never open an app. Set them up properly and the system works for them. Create their accounts from your own device using their passports and your email addresses (each account needs a distinct one — the trick of adding “+dad” to a Gmail address works and keeps every OTP in your inbox). Add them as companions on your account for shared slots, or book from their accounts directly. Print their permit QRs on paper as well as screenshotting — laminate them if you are feeling thorough — and tuck a copy in each parent’s day bag. A printed QR scans exactly as well as a glowing one, and it does not run out of battery in the courtyard at Fajr.
The pre-travel Nusuk checklist
Ten days before flying, sit down once with the app and clear the whole list. Account opens and logs in without OTP drama. Name matches passport, letter for letter. Visa shows as linked and active. Companions added and verified. First Umrah permit booked for a slot on day one or two — not arrival evening, when immigration and exhaustion own you (we explain the arrival-day maths in the Haramain railway guide and the timeline chapter). Rawdah strategy decided, alarms set for the release window. Every QR screenshotted to the photo roll. Done properly, that is twenty minutes, and it converts the app from a source of anxiety into what the Ministry built it to be: a queue you never have to stand in.
A note on security
Your Nusuk account holds your passport details, which makes it worth a moment of hygiene. Use a password you have not reused from elsewhere, never share the account credentials with agents who offer to “handle it for you” (legitimate operators use Masar, not your login), and be sceptical of any message claiming your permit is cancelled and asking you to “re-verify” through a link — phishing that borrows Nusuk’s branding circulates every season. The app and the official website are the only two doors you ever need.
Set up properly, Nusuk shrinks to what it should be: thirty seconds of QR scanning between you and the Haram. The pilgrims who struggle with it are almost never defeated by the technology — they are defeated by a name typed differently from a passport, or a permit left to the last minute. Both are choices, and now you know to make different ones.
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