Nepal does not suffer from a shortage of formalisation policy. What it needs now is a way of making the many institutions it has already built work together as one, and a clearer sense of what would make ordinary workers and small enterprises want to step into those systems on their own. The scale of the challenge is worth stating precisely, because the numbers carry a lesson. The World Bank's recent analysis estimates that 81.8 percent of Nepal's employed working-age population was in the informal sector in 2023/24, well above global and regional averages. Nepal's last completed Labour Force Survey, from 2017/18, measured a narrower concept, informal-sector employment, at 62.2 percent. The difference matters: the broader measure also captures some workers in otherwise formal enterprises whose employment lacks key protections, such as employer contributions to social security. Nepal's fourth Labour Force Survey is currently being conducted, and its eventual results will provide a much-needed update. Nepal's first National Economic Census, in 2018, found that nearly half of establishments operated without formal registration. A second Economic Census was conducted nationwide in 2026 and is expected to provide a far more current enterprise-level picture once its results are released. Nepal has already built much of the machinery this next step requires. The Company Registrar's online platform is increasingly integrated with the tax authority, allowing a company's tax identification number to be generated through the registration process, proof that one government transaction can trigger another. Customs tells a similar story: the World Trade Organisation's 2025 review found that 99.8 percent of Nepal's cross-border trade now operates under an interconnected digital system across major customs offices, alongside a national single window bringing government agencies together in one process. The National Planning Commission's current five-year plan names formalisation a structural priority, targeting basic social security coverage of 60 percent of the population by 2028/29, up from 32 percent. Separately, 5.55 million tax identification numbers had been issued by fiscal year 2023/24. This year's budget also strengthened the incentive to participate in the formal system through preferential tax treatment tied to Social Security Fund contributions, a tangible reward for stepping into the formal economy. Yet the Fund's own numbers show where the work remains. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) reported in late 2025 that nearly 2.7 million workers were registered with the Social Security Fund, but only about 1,500 informal and self-employed workers had enrolled. That gap, more than any single statistic in this piece, is where the next phase of formalisation must concentrate. Several municipalities have already begun using their own resources to extend coverage to informal workers, particularly women, proof that when formalisation is offered as something genuinely useful, people respond. Women are especially exposed to informality, particularly in agriculture and home-based work. For a street/road-side shopkeeper, daily wage worker, construction worker, a vegetable seller, or a returning migrant, none of this is experienced as an architecture. It is experienced as forms, fees, and a simple question: what do I actually get in return? That question should shape the next phase, through flexible contribution options suited to seasonal and irregular income, and differentiated pathways for salaried workers, the self-employed, and migrants returning with skill and savings but no domestic contribution history. The most promising fix is a shared architecture of identifiers, not one central database, linking enterprise, tax, worker, and social protection records so that recognition by one agency travels automatically to the next. Nepal's privacy law and emerging data-protection framework provide a starting point for building safeguards around such interoperability. Nepal should designate a coordinating authority with a mandate to set interoperability standards and publish an annual formalisation scorecard, so responsibility sits with someone rather than everyone's hope and no one's task. Local government also has a natural role, since business registration, market licensing, and social protection outreach all happen closest to citizens, at the municipal level, where national policy is either translated into real services or lost in translation. Uruguay's Monotributo scheme offers a useful institutional lesson: by bundling tax compliance and social protection for small and self-employed workers, it treated formalisation as a single proposition rather than a series of obligations. Nepal need not copy Uruguay's institutions; it can copy the principle that citizens experience the state as one. The ILO's renewed global push to implement Recommendation No. 204, its 2015 standard on transitioning from the informal to the formal economy, gives Nepal's own agenda a broader international framework, but the real test will be domestic implementation. Nepal's tripartite process has already produced a National Formalisation Action Plan, endorsed in 2022, and more recently an approved outline for a broader National Strategy on Formalisation. Nepal has also requested a three-year extension of its LDC graduation date, to 2029. The request remains under UN consideration, so the currently established graduation date remains November 24, 2026. Whichever date ultimately applies, the underlying need is the same: a more productive, better-protected domestic workforce. Nepal has built the pieces. The next test is whether those pieces can become a system, and whether that system gives people a reason to enter it. When a worker or small enterprise becomes visible to the state, the state must become more useful to them in return. That is the visibility bargain. Nepal now has the institutions to make it real.