Nepal FM Radio Frequency List: All Provinces, Districts & Cities

You are driving through Butwal, scanning the car radio, and a familiar Nepali song suddenly comes through clearly. A few kilometres later, the signal fades. Which frequency should you try next? Or perhaps you are in Surkhet, Pokhara, Dharan, or Kathmandu and simply want to know which local FM stations are available in your area.

Finding that answer online is surprisingly difficult. Most searches lead to an outdated table, an incomplete list, or a scanned government document that is hard to read on a phone. Some pages list station names without frequencies. Others show frequencies but give no clear city, district, province, or listening option.

This Nepal FM radio frequency list is designed to be genuinely useful. You can browse stations province by province and district by district, check their FM frequencies, and quickly identify the stations broadcasting near you.

The list is built from the same station information used by Merokalam’s live Nepali radio player, which includes more than 200 radio streams. It is maintained as a working directory rather than copied from an old list and forgotten.

Our radio directory was most recently checked against a public stream-health report on July 26, 2026. Frequencies, station locations, and online streams can still change, especially for local broadcasters. If you notice an incorrect frequency, wrong city, or a station that no longer plays, please let us know. We will review it and update the directory.

• Koshi
• Madhesh
• Bagmati
• Gandaki
• Lumbini
• Karnali
• Sudurpashchim

A Short History of Nepali Radio, and Why It Still Matters

Long before smartphones and cheap data plans, there was a radio set in the corner of almost every Nepali living room, its dial glowing faintly in the evening, and a familiar voice reading the news in careful, formal Nepali twice a day. That voice belonged to Radio Nepal, which first went on air on 2 April 1951, broadcasting from a modest 250-watt shortwave transmitter to a country that had only just opened itself to the outside world. For the next 46 years, Radio Nepal held a complete monopoly over the airwaves. If you wanted news, weather, or music on the radio anywhere in the country, the state broadcaster was the only station you had.

The first real technical shift came in 1995, when Radio Nepal itself launched FM Kathmandu from its studios at Singh Durbar, the country's first FM channel, aimed at the capital and the valley around it. But the moment that actually changed Nepali media arrived two years later. In May 1997, a small station named after Mount Everest, Radio Sagarmatha, went on air from Lalitpur. It wasn't run by the government. It was founded by journalists working under the Nepal Forum of Environmental Journalists, with support from the Nepal Press Institute and other media groups, after nearly five years of lobbying for a broadcasting license. When the license finally came, it carried seventeen separate restrictions, including a ban on airing news and current affairs and a requirement that content be approved by the government beforehand. Radio Sagarmatha went on air anyway, becoming the first independent community radio station anywhere in South Asia, broadcasting in Nepali as well as Newar, Maithili, and Tamang.

Its founders, among them Bharat Dutta Koirala, who later won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for his journalism, described its purpose simply: to be a voice for the voiceless. That mission was tested directly less than a decade later. When King Gyanendra assumed direct rule in February 2005 and banned independent stations from airing current affairs, Radio Sagarmatha and other community broadcasters fought back through what became known as the Save Independent Radio Movement. In 2006, the government shut the station down for 43 hours and 47 minutes after it aired an interview with Maoist leader Prachanda, and five of its journalists were arrested. The station only returned to air after Nepal's Supreme Court ruled in its favor, a moment many in Nepali media still point to as proof that an independent signal could outlast an order to silence it.

What followed was less dramatic but arguably more important: a quiet explosion of local FM stations across the country. Within roughly two decades of Radio Sagarmatha's first broadcast, Nepal's Ministry of Information and Communication had granted licenses to more than 700 FM stations, reaching from the plains of Madhesh to hill towns most Nepalis outside the district have never visited. Many of the stations in the list below carry that same spirit forward on a far smaller scale: a two-room studio in Kharbang, Baglung; a transmitter on a ridge above Kalikot; a handful of volunteers running a station out of a Rolpa village to cover the news bigger networks would never reach. In places with patchy phone signal, thin internet coverage, and roads that wash out every monsoon, a local FM frequency is still, in 2026, often the fastest and most trusted way to reach an entire community at once, whether the news is a landslide warning, a school closure, or simply which shop in town still has diesel.

That explosion is easiest to see broken down by province. Bagmati, anchored by Kathmandu Valley's national broadcasters, still carries by far the most stations in our directory, but every other province has built its own local FM presence too, right down to Karnali's handful of hill-district signals.

Stations in Merokalam's live directory by province (201 total, excluding international and diaspora stations). Full station-by-station tables follow below.

That's the story behind the frequencies on this page: not just numbers on a dial, but seven decades of Nepalis fighting for, building, and depending on the right to broadcast for themselves.

Koshi Province

Koshi Province, in Nepal's far east, stretches from the tea gardens of Ilam and the low plains around Jhapa, through Dharan and Biratnagar, into the high Himalaya around Kanchenjunga. Biratnagar, Nepal's second-largest city and a long-standing industrial and trading hub, anchors the province's commercial FM scene, while hill districts like Taplejung, Panchthar, Terhathum, and Sankhuwasabha each keep at least one local community station on air, often the only outlet covering hyper-local news for that specific valley.

Madhesh Province

Madhesh Province covers Nepal's central-eastern plains along the Indian border, a region with a strong linguistic and cultural identity built around Maithili and Bhojpuri. Janakpurdham, the ancient city tied to the Ramayana and revered as Sita's birthplace in Hindu tradition, is naturally a cultural broadcasting center, while Birgunj, one of Nepal's busiest border-trade towns, anchors news and commerce-focused programming for the province.

Bagmati Province

Bagmati Province is home to Kathmandu Valley and, with it, most of Nepal's national broadcasting industry, including Radio Nepal, Radio Kantipur, and dozens of other stations that reach a national audience. But the province stretches well beyond the valley too, into Chitwan's inner terai, the Himalayan foothills of Sindhupalchok and Dolakha, and hill districts like Ramechhap, Nuwakot, and Dhading, each served by smaller community stations that rarely make headlines outside their own district.

Gandaki Province

Gandaki Province, centered on Pokhara and the Annapurna range, runs as much on tourism as on media, and its FM stations reflect that mix of trekking-season updates, local news, and music. Beyond Pokhara, historic Gorkha town, the birthplace of Nepal's unification under Prithvi Narayan Shah, and hill districts like Baglung, Tanahun, and Lamjung each maintain their own community stations.

Lumbini Province

Lumbini Province, named for the birthplace of the Buddha near Rupandehi, is home to the largest number of community radio stations in this list, spread across Dang, Rolpa, Pyuthan, Palpa, Gulmi, Kapilvastu, Bardiya, and Nawalparasi. Many of these districts sat at the center of Nepal's decade-long Maoist insurgency, and the community radio movement that grew here afterward became an important outlet for local voices, particularly in formerly conflict-affected hill districts like Rolpa and Pyuthan.

Karnali Province

Karnali Province is Nepal's largest by area and its most remote, with fewer roads, weaker mobile coverage, and lower population density than anywhere else in the country. Surkhet, the provincial capital, hosts the region's main stations, while a scattering of community radios in Jumla, Kalikot, Salyan, and Rukum often serve as the most reliable way to reach entire districts during the monsoon, when roads can disappear for days.

Sudurpashchim Province

Sudurpashchim, Nepal's far-western province, has historically been the country's most underserved region for infrastructure and media investment alike. Dhangadhi and Dadeldhura carry most of the province's stronger signals, while community stations in Bajura, Bajhang, Achham, and Kanchanpur fill gaps that national broadcasters, based hundreds of kilometers away in Kathmandu, were never built to cover.

Nepal also has an active diaspora and international radio presence, from BBC Nepali's news service to community stations run by Nepali communities in Australia, the UK, Qatar, and the United States. Those don't carry an FM frequency inside Nepal, so we've kept them out of the province tables above, but you can still find and play them inside the live radio player.

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