Click on one of the following links below to find out how many Inca Trail trek permits are still available. The link will take you to the Ministry of Culture’s website (www.machupicchu.gob.pe)  which is the government institution in charge of selling the permits to the licensed tour operators. The number of permits remaining is correct in real time and shown in pdf format. The information is in Spanish but you don’t need to be a genius to understand it. To give you a clue the left hand column (fecha) is the date and the column to the right is the number of remaining permits (disponibles). There are 500 permits available each day, approximately 200 are allocated to tourists and 300 to porters, cooks and guides. If the number of remaining permits is 0 (zero) then all the permits have sold out so you will have to choose another date. If the permits have sold out for a particular date then no trekking company will be able to offer you a space. Trekking companies can’t buy up blocks of permits and sell them on at a later date. Trek permits can only be bought using a tourist’s name and passport number and these details cannot be changed after the permit has been bought. Even if there are cancellations then the cancelled permits do not come back onto the market so there is no waiting list.

If there are trek permits available for the date that you want then it doesn’t necessarily mean that the trekking company that you want to use will even have a trek departure on that date. You will have to email the company to check if they have availability.