Palau's $100 Green Fee: Only $30 Is the Green Fee

In the fiscal year to 30 September 2025 Palau's Ministry of Finance booked $10,633,077 from fishing day licences and $2,353,350 from the Green Fee. The Green Fee is the thirty dollars carved out of the $100 charge that every visitor pays on the way in, and which conservation coverage routinely describes as the levy that funds the world's largest marine sanctuary. The statute cuts that $100 six ways, and the two slices that mention the sanctuary by name come to ten dollars.

Silence Index — D-176

Quiet, but findable

Ranks 64 of 99 scored dossiers — quieter than 36% of the others we have scored. A low score is not a warning; it describes who else will be standing next to you.

How the total is weighted. These are the fixed weights of the four inputs, the same on every dossier — not this place’s scores. We do not publish per-input bars, because the per-input values were never recorded article by article and inventing four plausible numbers that sum to the total would be a fabrication dressed as a chart.

Footfall pressure — visitors measured against the ground that absorbs them30%

Access friction — permits, caps, seasons, boats, weather windows30%

Acoustic floor — how close the nearest engine is20%

Unresolved questions — what the record still cannot settle20%

This dossier was scored before 2 September 2026, when the fourth input became night darkness. It keeps the input it was reasoned with until it is re-scored at its next source re-check; the methodology page records the change.

The index is a desk instrument scored by this publication, not a field measurement. How it is calculated, and where it fails.

What this dossier is built from

Nobody from this publication has been to Palau. This is an accounts exercise conducted from a desk, and the sources are the ones an accounts exercise requires: the enacted text of three Republic of Palau Public Laws, read in the FAOLEX and ECOLEX copies; the Ministry of Finance's own quarterly financial reports and its annual Economic and Fiscal Updates; the Bureau of Budget and Planning's visitor arrivals series; the Palau Visitors Authority's monthly arrival reports; audited financial statements from the Office of the Public Auditor and from the Protected Areas Network Fund; Koror State's permit legislation; and a 2019 joint report by the Palau International Coral Reef Center and Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions.

We are not assessing whether closing 80% of an exclusive economic zone was a good idea. We are doing something narrower and duller. Palau wrote a swap into law — foreign fishing money out, tourist money in — and the only way to judge a swap is to set the two columns beside each other and add them up. Both columns turn out to be in Palau's own published accounts. Neither is where the coverage says it is.

The fee, itemised

The operative sentence is short. Under 40 PNC Chapter 27, as enacted by RPPL No. 10-02 in 2017, "Every passenger, 13 years or older, shall pay a Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee of one hundred dollars ($100)". Airlines collect it inside the ticket price. Palauan citizens, spouses of citizens, crew operating as common carriers, diplomats, work-visa holders and transit passengers leaving within 24 hours are exempt. It has been charged since 1 January 2018.

Section 2706 then divides it. As the law stood in 2017: ten dollars to the Fisheries Protection Trust Fund; twelve dollars fifty to the states, seventy per cent in equal shares and thirty per cent by population; twenty-five dollars to the National Treasury "earmarked and appropriated to relevant agencies for purposes related to the security, operation, maintenance, and improvement of the Palau International Airport"; thirty dollars "earmarked as a 'Green Fee'"; and twenty-two dollars fifty reverting to the National Treasury with no earmark at all.

That is five ways, and it is the version still in circulation. It is also out of date. In June 2019 RPPL No. 10-35 re-cut the first slice: five dollars stays with the Fisheries Protection Trust Fund and five dollars goes to the Palau International Coral Reef Center "for its administration of the Palau National Marine Sanctuary", to be held "in a separate account distinct from accounts that fund the Center's other operations". Six ways, then. The joint PICRC and Stanford report published in December 2019 lists the same six figures, which is our second confirmation of a split we first read in the amending act.

Set out plainly, the largest single slice of Palau's environmental fee is not environmental: twenty-five dollars in every hundred is an airport charge. The next largest, thirty dollars, is the Green Fee. Twenty-two fifty is general revenue. Twelve fifty is a state block grant by another name. And ten dollars — five and five — is the only part of the charge whose statutory language mentions the marine sanctuary.

The trade, as written

The fee is not a tourism initiative that grew a conservation justification afterwards. It arrived inside the conservation statute, and the statute says why. ECOLEX's record of the Palau National Marine Sanctuary Act, RPPL No. 9-49 of 2015, describes the charge it created as intended "to replace the current exit tax and to compensate for loss of income from (foreign) fishing activities". The same Act designates everything outside the territorial sea and the Domestic Fishing Zone as a no-take sanctuary, and fixes the Domestic Fishing Zone at "approximately 85,896 square kilometers" under 27 PNC § 148.

What the fee replaced is on the record too. Before 2018 a departing visitor paid a $20 departure tax and a $30 green fee — fifty dollars. RPPL 10-02's own findings state that "the departing cost for tourists will increase from $50.00 to $100.00". The green fee half of that predates the sanctuary by seven years: RPPL No. 7-42 of 2008 created a $30 environmental protection arrival fee from 1 October 2008, splitting it $20 to the Protected Areas Network and $10 to the National Treasury. The PAN Fund's own audited statements, signed by Deloitte & Touche LLC on 5 May 2014, describe the network's share differently again — "the environment impact fee or what is commonly known as 'green fee' for the PAN is $15 per non-Palauan passport holder visiting Palau". We could not reconcile the $20 in the 2008 statute with the $15 in the 2014 audit, and we are not going to average them.

The point stands regardless. The Green Fee is thirty dollars now and it was thirty dollars in 2009. The marine sanctuary did not create it. What the sanctuary legislation did was double the total charge and attach seventy new dollars to it, most of which go somewhere else.

The destination of the biggest new slice has itself been rewritten once. In the 2015 Act, the twenty-five dollars now going to the airport went to the Civil Service Pension Fund. RPPL 10-02 redirected it in 2017. In October 2024 the Ministry of Finance's Economic and Fiscal Update floated sending a further 12.5 per cent of the fee back toward pensions. The slice has been to two destinations and is being proposed for a third.

What popular coverage gets wrong

The received version has three components: that the fee is a green fee, that it funds the marine sanctuary, and that it is one charge with one purpose. All three circulate in places that ought to know better, and two of them circulate in Palau's own publications.

The Palau Visitors Authority's advice to travellers states that "The PPEF directly supports the Protected Areas Network in Palau". That is true of thirty dollars and silent about the other seventy. The United States Department of State's Investment Climate Statement for Palau, dated 4 January 2025, goes further in the other direction: it reports that with the sanctuary "foreign companies were prohibited from fishing in the Palau Exclusive Economic Zone". Foreign companies were prohibited from fishing in eighty per cent of it. The Ministry of Finance booked $10.6 million from fishing day licences in the year that statement was published.

The clearest example we found is recent and comes from a serious conservation funder. On 11 March 2026 the Pew Charitable Trusts published a piece by Neel Inamdar and Peter Edwards on tourist levies for conservation. It dates Palau's fee to 2020 — it began on 1 January 2018 — and prints the allocation as "$10 for the Fisheries Protection Trust Fund; $12.50 distributed among local governments to support environmental management; $22.50 to the national treasury; $25 for Palau International Airport; and $30 to the Protected Areas Network Fund and the Palau National Marine Sanctuary." That is the 2017 split, superseded by RPPL 10-35 nearly seven years earlier, and the last clause quietly merges the Green Fee with the sanctuary, which the statute does not do.

What the primary record says instead: six slices, not five; ten dollars naming the sanctuary, not thirty; a start date of January 2018; and an airport line that is, on the Ministry's own quarterly schedule, a restricted trust fund sitting alongside the Green Fee rather than inside it.

The other column

If the fee exists to compensate for foregone fishing income, the honest question is how much income was foregone. Palau publishes the answer, and it is not the one the swap implies.

The Ministry of Finance's Economic and Fiscal Update for FY2022, published on 7 June 2022, carries a line called Royalties fishing fees, classified as property income rather than tax. Its values run $9.3 million in FY17, $8.5 million in FY18, $9.5 million in FY19, $8.1 million in FY20 and $8.0 million in FY21. The FY2023 update, published 18 September 2023, restates two of those years — $7.8 million for FY20 and $8.8 million for FY21 — and extends the series to $10.6 million in FY22 and a provisional $9.2 million in FY23. We print both revisions and name both documents.

Then the FY2025 fourth-quarter financial report, prepared as at 30 September 2025, gives the actual: fishing day licences, $10,633,077, against a budget of $8,619,141 — 123 per cent of projection. The sanctuary has been fully in force since 1 January 2020. Six fiscal years later, the fishing line is the single largest item under Licenses and Permits and is running a fifth ahead of what the government expected.

Two mechanisms explain how a country can close four-fifths of its ocean and end up collecting more. The first is price. Palau is a party to the Nauru Agreement, and its 2019 sanctuary regulations require that a vessel day be sold at a price "no less than the minimum benchmark set by the PNA". That benchmark was raised from US$6,000 to US$8,000 a day at the Ninth Meeting of PNA Ministers in Majuro on 12 and 13 June 2014 — a 33 per cent increase applied a year before the sanctuary act passed. PNA's own account is that the vessel day scheme had already produced a nearly fourfold rise in revenue to its eight member states since 2010. Palau restricted the water and sold what remained into a market that had been deliberately tightened.

The second is that the closed four-fifths was not where the fishing was. On the PICRC and Stanford analysis of vessel tracking data for 2012 to 2018, the Fishing Permitted Area accounted for 10.6 per cent of longline activity and 5.9 per cent of purse seine activity within Palau's waters — which sounds like the sanctuary took the productive nine-tenths, until you notice that the same regulations extended observer or electronic monitoring to 100 per cent of vessel days by 1 January 2025 and charge $75 per observer per day. For scale, licence and access fee revenue across all Forum Fisheries Agency member governments was estimated at $474 million in 2016, up 8 per cent on the year before. Palau's share of that pool is small, and its own accounts show it holding.

The pre-sanctuary baseline is harder, and here we hit the limit the commission anticipated. The PICRC and Stanford report states that "From 2014 to 2017, Palau generated an average $US13.8 million per year in government revenues from foreign commercial fishing through export taxes, fishing rights fees, fishing licensing fees, and a purse-seine vessel day scheme", roughly 12 per cent of total government revenues and 5 per cent of GDP, with the purse-seine vessel day allocation alone "generating $US5.9 million in 2015". That is a broader definition than the Ministry's royalties line, which is why the two do not match, and it is a research figure rather than an audited national account. We could not locate the underlying line items in Palau's audited financial statements, and we do not present $13.8 million as a national figure.

The lines that do not reconcile

Four of the six slices appear by name in the FY2025 fourth-quarter schedule. PPEF National Treasury: $1,765,013. Green Fees, held as a restricted local trust fund: $2,353,350. PPEF Airport, also restricted: $980,563. PPEF disbursed to the sixteen states: $980,136. They sum to $6,079,062.

The Fisheries Protection Trust Fund and the Palau International Coral Reef Center — the ten dollars that name the sanctuary — do not appear in that schedule at all. On 65,558 arrivals they should be worth about $655,000 between them. We could not trace them.

Two more arithmetic problems, both ours. First: 65,558 visitors at $100 is a ceiling of $6,555,800, and the four visible slices represent ninety of every hundred dollars, or $5,900,220 on that arithmetic. The books show $6,079,062 — $178,842 more than arrivals-based arithmetic allows. Airlines collect at ticket purchase, so receipts and arrivals fall in different periods; that is the obvious explanation and we cannot demonstrate it. Second, and larger: the departure tax line in the FY2022 update reads $9.9 million for FY18 on 115,564 arrivals, which is $85.67 a head, and $3.7 million for FY19 on 89,379 arrivals, which is $41.40. Something changed in how the fee was booked between those two years. No document we opened says what.

One figure from the FY2025 Citizens Budget deserves flagging because it does not agree with anything else. In the tax breakdown behind that document's $56.3 million of taxes, the Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee is shown at $2 million. The Ministry's own quarterly actuals put the treasury slice alone at $1.77 million and the four traceable slices at six times that. Different documents from the same ministry are counting different things under the same name.

What the traveller actually pays

The hundred dollars is not the whole bill, which is the last thing wrong with "one charge, one purpose". Koror State charges separately for the Rock Islands Southern Lagoon, inscribed by UNESCO in 2012 across 100,200 hectares with a 164,000-hectare buffer, and holding 445 limestone islands and 52 marine lakes. Koror's Rock Island Management & Conservation Act, K8-209-2009, set a $25 Rock Island Use Permit and a $35 Jellyfish Lake permit for visitors aged six and over. The 2016 visitor use permit notice puts them at $50 and $100, with a $75 upgrade voucher, valid ten days. The Palau Visitors Authority's own page gives the same prices but a five-day validity. We could not resolve that.

Add the entry side. No visa is required; a thirty-day permit is issued on arrival and extended twice at $50 each to a ninety-day maximum. Every arriving visitor signs the Palau Pledge, stamped into the passport under Presidential Directive No. 17-29 of 12 December 2017. So a diver doing the obvious fortnight pays $100 to the Republic, $100 to Koror State, and $50 more if they stay past thirty days. The fee that gets written about is a little under half of it.

Why the Silence Index is 67

Physical remoteness scores very high and pulls hard: the sanctuary is several hundred thousand square kilometres of open Pacific that no one may fish and almost no one crosses, and PICRC's figure of 38 square kilometres of it for every Palauan citizen is the right way to feel the scale. Access friction scores low, because Palau is one of the easier countries on earth to enter — no visa, thirty days on arrival, a fee inside the ticket. Visitor volume is genuinely modest: 65,558 in FY2025 against a FY2015 peak of 168,424, on a rising trend. The fourth input here is unresolved questions, and it is the one this dossier actually reasons about, because the central number — what Palau gave up — is a research estimate rather than an audited line, and the fee's own accounting does not close. A country you can fly into without paperwork does not score in the eighties. A ledger with two holes in it does not score in the fifties.

What the ledger cannot close

Palau made a real trade and wrote both halves of it into statute, which is more than most governments manage. The trade did not go the way the story goes. Foreign fishing did not stop; it was compressed into a fifth of the zone, repriced under the Parties to the Nauru Agreement's vessel day benchmark — raised from $6,000 to $8,000 a day at Majuro in June 2014 — reopened to long-lining and commercial export by RPPL 10-35 in 2019, and it is now yielding more than it did before the sanctuary existed. Tourism did not replace it. In FY2025 the entire hundred-dollar fee, across every traceable slice, raised about six million dollars against ten and a half million from fishing day licences alone.

So the compensating column never had to compensate for much, and the conservation column is smaller than advertised. The visitor is paying a hundred dollars, of which thirty is the Green Fee and five reaches the body that administers the sanctuary. That is a defensible way to run a small state's public finances. It is not what the passenger is told they are buying, and it is not what a foundation in Philadelphia printed as recently as March 2026.

Corner Codex — D-176

Place: Republic of Palau; administrative and commercial centre at Koror
The charge: Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee, $100, every passenger aged 13 or over
In force since: 1 January 2018, per the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection
What it replaced: A $20 departure tax plus a $30 green fee — $50 in total
The split today: $30 Green Fee · $25 airport · $22.50 treasury · $12.50 states · $5 + $5
Statutes: RPPL No. 9-49 (2015), RPPL No. 10-02 (2017), RPPL No. 10-35 (2019)
Sanctuary: 80% of the EEZ no-take; PICRC gives the area as 475,077 km²
Domestic Fishing Zone: About 85,896 km² under 27 PNC § 148, recoordinated in 2019
FY2025 fishing day licences: $10,633,077 actual against a $8,619,141 budget
FY2025 Green Fee receipts: $2,353,350 actual against a $2,681,370 budget
FY2025 visitor arrivals: 65,558 (Bureau of Budget and Planning); peak 168,424 in FY2015
Silence Index: 67 / 100

The Traveler's Panel · checked 24 August 2026

Changing information. Prices, permits, seasons and road access change, sometimes at short notice. Everything here is a starting point for your own confirmation — not a quote, and not a guarantee. Verify with the operator and the relevant official body before you book.

The headline charge	$100 Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee, in the ticket price
Who pays	Every passenger aged 13 or over; citizens, crew and work visas exempt
The Green Fee share	$30 of the $100. The other $70 goes five other places
The airport share	$25 — the largest single slice, and a restricted trust fund
Sanctuary-named share	$10: five to the Fisheries Protection Trust Fund, five to PICRC
On top of that	Koror State permits: $50 Rock Islands, $100 Jellyfish Lake
Entry	No visa. 30 days on arrival, two $50 extensions, 90-day maximum
Arrivals	65,558 in FY2025, against a FY2015 peak of 168,424

Getting there — Fly into Roman Tmetuchl International Airport, Airai, then road bridge to Koror

Everything arrives by air at Roman Tmetuchl International Airport in Airai State, on the southern end of Babeldaob, with a road bridge across to Koror where almost all the accommodation and every dive operator sits. The new terminal opened on 8 May 2022, built by a joint venture in which the Republic holds 49 per cent and Sojitz with Japan Airport Terminal hold 51 per cent between them.
The $100 fee is not something you queue for. It has been inside the price of every international ticket into Palau since 1 January 2018, which is precisely why so few people who have paid it could tell you what it buys.
No visa is required in advance. A thirty-day permit is issued on arrival and can be extended twice, at $50 each time, to a ninety-day maximum, after which you must leave. Longer stays run through a separate schedule that reaches $20,000 for an initial elite resident visa.
Every arriving visitor signs the Palau Pledge, which is stamped into the passport. It has been administered under Presidential Directive No. 17-29 of 12 December 2017 — an executive instrument, quite separate from the fee statute, though the two are habitually described together.
The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon needs its own permit from Koror State, bought at the Capitol Building finance office in Ngerbeched or at the Malakal field office by the rangers station, or through a licensed operator. Budget for it as a second, unrelated charge, because that is what it is.

Indicative costs — verify before booking

Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee	$100, inside the airline ticket, ages 13 and over
Of which the Green Fee	$30. The rest is airport, treasury, states and two $5 slices
Rock Island Use Permit	$50 per visitor aged 6+, Koror State. Validity given as 10 days on the state's own notice and 5 days by the Visitors Authority
Jellyfish Lake permit	$100 per visitor aged 6+, or $75 as an upgrade on a Rock Island permit
Visa extension	$50 per extension, two permitted, to a 90-day maximum
What we will not quote	Dive, liveaboard or hotel prices. Every figure we found came from an operator selling the trip, none from a published tariff

What to pack

Printed copies of your Koror State permits. The state's own permit notice makes an incomplete, transferred, counterfeited, duplicated, forged or altered permit invalid, and requires it to be in your possession throughout any activity in the Rock Islands Southern Lagoon Area.
Enough cash for the state-level charges. The national $100 is prepaid inside your airline ticket; the $50 and $100 permits that actually get you into the lagoon are bought on the ground, are non-refundable and are non-transferable.
A note of what you paid and to whom. It is the only practical way to work out afterwards how much of your hundred dollars was the green part, because nobody hands you an itemised receipt for a fee that was inside a fare.
Passport space. The Palau Pledge is stamped into it on arrival under a 2017 presidential directive, and the entry permit is a physical stamp rather than an electronic record.
Patience with the numbers if you plan to write about this. Palau's own agencies publish at least three different descriptions of what the fee is and where it goes, and the most widely quoted version has been out of date since June 2019.

Where to stay

Effectively all visitor accommodation is on Koror, the island state that also administers the Rock Islands Southern Lagoon and collects the permits for it, which makes Koror the one place in Palau where the national fee, the state permit and the World Heritage property all sit within a few kilometres of each other. Malakal Island, joined to Koror by causeway, holds the commercial port at 7°19'58"N 134°27'33"E and most of the dive operations. Babeldaob, the large volcanic island to the north, holds the airport at Airai, the administrative capital at Ngerulmud — a purpose-built seat at 7°30'02"N 134°37'25"E with almost nobody living in it — and very little else in the way of beds. Peleliu and Angaur, south of the lagoon, each have a civil airfield and a handful of guesthouses, and are listed in the gazetteer as civil airfields; we could not establish from any source we opened whether either carries scheduled service. Anyone budgeting should note that the largest single line in Palau's own visitor charging is the one they will never see: twenty-five dollars of every hundred is earmarked to the terminal they walk through once in each direction.

Safety & responsible travel

Do not repeat the line that the $100 fee funds the marine sanctuary. Thirty dollars is the Green Fee and goes to the Protected Areas Network; ten dollars names the sanctuary; twenty-five dollars is an airport charge.
Pay the Koror State permits rather than routing around them. They are the charge that actually reaches the water you are swimming in, and they are levied by the state that manages the World Heritage property.
Treat the sanctuary as closed rather than as scenery. Outside the territorial sea and the Domestic Fishing Zone, extraction, disturbance, destruction, removal and alteration of any sanctuary resource are prohibited outright, for everyone.
Be careful with the claim that foreign fishing ended in 2015. It did not. Long-lining and commercial export from the Domestic Fishing Zone were reopened by statute in June 2019, and fishing day licences raised $10.6 million in FY2025.
If you are writing about this, cite the statute rather than the last article you read. The five-way split was superseded in June 2019 and is still being printed as current.

Nearby, and quieter

The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon, inscribed by UNESCO in 2012 under five criteria across 100,200 hectares with a 164,000-hectare buffer, is the reason most visitors come and the reason Koror State runs a permit system of its own: 445 uninhabited limestone islands of coralline composition, 52 marine lakes — the highest concentration in the world — more than 385 coral species, 746 fish species, at least 13 shark species and seven species of giant clam, together with the archaeological remains of stone villages occupied for some three thousand years and abandoned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. North of it lies Babeldaob, the large volcanic island that carries the airport at Airai and the administrative capital at Ngerulmud. South lie Peleliu and Angaur, each with a civil airfield in the gazetteer and neither with much else. And everything beyond the reef — the 475,077 square kilometres PICRC counts as the sanctuary, or the 590,000-plus that Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions counts for the same water — is ocean no visitor sees and no boat may fish, and it is the part of Palau this dossier is really about.

Getting there, in order

1Roman Tmetuchl International Airport
↓
2Angaur Civil Airstrip
↓
3Malakal Port
↓
4Koror

Each leg is a separate booking and a separate chance to be weathered out. Build spare days into the chain, not onto the end of it.

Where it is

Koror, Airai and the Palau National Marine Sanctuary · 7.3397°N 134.4731°E · Open in Google Maps · OpenStreetMap

Key locations

Roman Tmetuchl International Airport — Airai; the terminal the $25 slice of the environmental fee is earmarked for
7.3672°N 134.5406°E
Koror — seat of the first-order administrative division; issues the Rock Island permits
7.3397°N 134.4731°E
Malakal Port — the commercial port and dive-operator base, by causeway from Koror
7.3328°N 134.4592°E
Rock Islands Southern Lagoon — UNESCO coordinate for the 2012 inscription; 100,200 ha with a 164,000 ha buffer
7.2469°N 134.3525°E
Ngerulmud — the purpose-built national capital on Babeldaob
7.5006°N 134.6236°E
Peleliu Civil Airfield — southern island airfield; no scheduled service
6.9953°N 134.2297°E
Angaur Civil Airstrip — the southernmost state, outside the barrier reef
6.9058°N 134.1444°E

Coordinates are for orientation and are accurate to roughly the width of the feature named, not to a doorway. Several of these points are inside protected areas or need a permit, a guide or a boat — read the access notes above before you plan a route to any of them.

Sources & further reading — checked 24 August 2026

FAOLEX — Republic of Palau Public Law No. 10-02, full text (2017). The enacted text: 'Every passenger, 13 years or older, shall pay a Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee of one hundred dollars ($100)'; the § 2706 split of $10, $12.50, $25, $30 and $22.50; the exemptions; the repeal of the 40 PNC § 1403 departure tax; and the finding that the departing cost 'will increase from $50.00 to $100.00'
FAOLEX — Palau National Marine Sanctuary Act, RPPL No. 9-49, full text (2015). The original Environmental Impact Fee at 40 PNC § 2703 and its 2015 allocation, in which the $25 slice went to the Civil Service Pension Fund rather than the airport; the Domestic Fishing Zone of 'approximately 85,896 square kilometers' at 27 PNC § 148; and the finding that Palau receives little revenue in proportion to the value of the asset
ECOLEX — record for the Palau National Marine Sanctuary Act (RPPL No. 9-49 of 2015). The abstract stating that 80 per cent of the exclusive economic zone becomes a no-take area, that domestic fishing is confined to the remaining 20 per cent, and that the fee is intended 'to replace the current exit tax and to compensate for loss of income from (foreign) fishing activities' — the sentence this dossier is built around
FAOLEX — Palau National Marine Sanctuary Amendment Act, RPPL No. 10-35, full text (2019). The amendment passed 7 June and signed 12 June 2019: long-lining permitted in the Domestic Fishing Zone, commercial export of zone-caught fish permitted, the zone's coordinates redrawn, and § 2706 re-cut so that $5 stays with the Fisheries Protection Trust Fund and $5 goes to the Palau International Coral Reef Center in a separate account
FAOLEX — RPPL No. 7-42, Amendment to Protected Areas Network and Micronesia Challenge (2008). The $30 environmental protection arrival fee effective 1 October 2008, split $20 to the operation of the Protected Areas Network and $10 to an account in the National Treasury — proof that the Green Fee predates the marine sanctuary by seven years at the same $30
Palau National Government — RPPL 10-2: Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee (Formerly EIF). The government's own document record, dated 13 April 2017, describing the law as 'Amendments to Environmental Impact Fee' and linking a 3 MB scan of the signed act — the copy of record, which carries no machine-readable text layer
Republic of Palau, Ministry of Finance — Fiscal Year 2025 4th Quarter Financial Reports (as of 30 September 2025). The FY2025 actuals: fishing day licences $10,633,077 against a $8,619,141 budget; PPEF National Treasury $1,765,013; Green Fees $2,353,350; PPEF Airport $980,563; PPEF to the states $980,136; ship registry $2,211,960; and total general fund revenue of $88,653,966
Republic of Palau, Ministry of Finance — Economic and Fiscal Update Fiscal Year 2023 (18 September 2023). Table 1, revenues of the national government on a GFS basis in $ million: departure taxes of 3.7, 3.3, 0.5, 1.2 and 3.0 for FY19 to FY23 provisional; royalties fishing fees of 9.5, 7.8, 8.8, 10.6 and 9.2 across the same years; and the note that fishing fees are an important source of non-tourism funding
Republic of Palau, Ministry of Finance — Economic and Fiscal Update FY 2022 (7 June 2022). Table 5, giving departure taxes as other-tax revenue of 6.6, 9.9, 3.7, 1.7 and 0.5 for FY17 to FY21, and royalties fishing fees as property income of 9.3, 8.5, 9.5, 8.1 and 8.0 — the earlier vintage of two series that disagree with each other for FY20 and FY21
Republic of Palau, Ministry of Finance — Economic and Fiscal Update Fiscal Year 2024 (30 October 2024). The ministry's own gloss equating the departure-tax line with the PPEF; the proposal of 'a 12.5 percent allocation from the PPEF to support CSPP' in pension reform; the legal basis in the Fiscal Responsibility and Debt Management Act, RPPL No. 11-13; and FY24 growth of 8.3 per cent against a projected 11.1 per cent for FY25
Republic of Palau — Palau's Citizens Budget FY 2025. Total revenue and financing of $142.2 million; taxes of $56.3 million, within which the Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee is shown at $2 million; licences at $11 million; and fees and charges at $2.8 million — figures that do not agree with the ministry's own quarterly actuals for the same year
Republic of Palau, Bureau of Budget and Planning — Visitor Arrivals by Country Group, FY2008 to FY2025. The official fiscal-year series sourced to the Bureau of Immigration, the Palau Visitors Authority and the Bureau of Budget and Planning: 168,424 in FY2015, 115,564 in FY2018, 89,379 in FY2019, 3,400 in FY2021, 35,052 in FY2023, 52,661 in FY2024 and 65,558 in FY2025
Palau Visitors Authority — December 2025 Visitor Arrival Report. Calendar-year 2025 arrivals of 71,681, up 27.6 per cent on 56,184 in 2024, with China at 23,349, Taiwan 13,604, USA and Canada 11,387, Japan 8,008 and Australia 3,035 — a calendar-year count that runs ahead of the fiscal-year series for the overlapping period
Palau International Coral Reef Center and Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions — 'Palau's National Marine Sanctuary: Managing Ocean Change and Supporting Food Security' (December 2019). The average of US$13.8 million a year in government revenue from foreign commercial fishing across 2014–2017, about 12 per cent of government revenue and 5 per cent of GDP; the vessel day scheme at US$5.9 million in 2015; and the six-way fee split including $5 to the Fisheries Protection Trust Fund and $5 to PICRC
Palau International Coral Reef Center and Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions — executive summary (December 2019). The sanctuary at 475,077 km², or 38 km² per Palauan citizen; the Domestic Fishing Zone as 20 per cent of the EEZ, comprising a 17.8 per cent Fishing Permitted Area and a 2.2 per cent contiguous zone; and AIS data showing the permitted area held only 10.6 per cent of longline and 5.9 per cent of purse seine activity in Palau's waters, 2012–2018
Palau International Coral Reef Center — PNMS Information Sheet. PICRC's own statement of the sanctuary's scale — 475,077 km², 38 km² for every Palauan citizen, 80 per cent of the exclusive economic zone — and of the 2015 announcement, from the institution the statute now pays $5 a passenger to administer it
Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford University — Palau National Marine Sanctuary project page. The project description giving the sanctuary as covering 'over 590,000 km²' and fully implemented by 2020 — a figure roughly 115,000 km² larger than the one PICRC publishes for the same water, which is why this dossier prints both
Republic of Palau, Ministry of Natural Resources, Environment and Tourism — Palau National Marine Sanctuary Regulations (issued 16 December 2019, effective 1 January 2020). The regulations made by Minister F. Umiich Sengebau under RPPL 9-49 as amended by RPPL 10-35: the no-take definition, the observer fee of '$75.00 per observer, per day', 100 per cent observer or electronic monitoring coverage from 1 January 2025, and vessel day pricing 'no less than the minimum benchmark set by the PNA'
Parties to the Nauru Agreement — 'PNA increases fishing day price to US$8,000 for 2015'. The Ninth Meeting of PNA Ministers at Majuro on 12–13 June 2014 raising the benchmark fishing day fee from US$6,000 to US$8,000 from 1 January 2015, and the statement that the vessel day scheme produced a nearly fourfold increase in revenue to the eight member states since 2010
Republic of Palau, Bureau of Customs and Border Protection — Immigration. The border agency's own statement that 'every visitor coming to Palau will be assessed a $100 environmental fee', required since 1 January 2018 and included in ticket prices, with diplomats, crew and Palauan citizens exempt; plus the visa fee schedule from $50 extensions to a $20,000 elite resident visa
Palau Visitors Authority — Travelers Tips. The national tourism body's description of the fee: 'The PPEF directly supports the Protected Areas Network in Palau', with the $100 charge applied to tickets issued on or after 1 January 2018, and Rock Island and Jellyfish Lake permits at $50 and $100 with a five-day validity
Palau Visitors Authority — Public Notice: Palau Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee. The transition notice: the $100 included in every international ticket from 1 January 2018, and for tickets issued earlier the old regime collected at the airport — a $30 Green Fee plus a $20 Departure Tax, $50 in total, which is the charge the new fee doubled
Palau Visitors Authority — Visa and Passport Requirements. That no visa is required, a 30-day permit is issued on arrival and may be extended twice at US$50 to a 90-day maximum, and that 'Upon Arrival, All Visitors Must Sign the Palau Pledge, which is stamped into their passports'
Palau National Government — Presidential Directive No. 17-29, directing immigration officials to utilise the Palau Pledge entry visa stamp (12 December 2017). The government's document record establishing the date and instrument behind the passport stamp — the Palau Pledge is an executive directive of December 2017, not a provision of the environmental fee statute, and the two are separate instruments
Koror State Government — Rock Island Management & Conservation Act, K8-209-2009. The state law under which the Rock Islands Southern Lagoon is charged separately: $35 per visitor for the Ongeim'l Tketau Jellyfish Lake permit and $25 for the Rock Island Use Permit, for persons aged six and over, valid ten days, non-transferable and non-refundable
Koror State Government — Visitor Use Permit Information (2016). The later schedule: a $50 Rock Island Use Permit, a $100 Jellyfish Lake permit and a $75 upgrade voucher, all for visitors aged six and over and stated as valid for ten days — the validity the Palau Visitors Authority gives as five
UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Rock Islands Southern Lagoon. Inscription in 2012 under criteria (iii), (v), (vii), (ix) and (x); 100,200 ha of property with a 164,000 ha buffer zone at N7°14'48.93" E134°21'9"; 445 uninhabited limestone islands, 52 marine lakes, over 385 coral species and 746 fish species
Protected Areas Network Fund — audited financial statements, year ended 30 September 2013. Green fee revenue of $1,706,923 in FY2013 and $1,847,920 in FY2012, audited by Deloitte & Touche LLC on 5 May 2014, with the note describing the green fee for the PAN as '$15 per non-Palauan passport holder visiting Palau' — against the $20 written into RPPL 7-42
Graduate School USA, Pacific and Virgin Islands Training Initiatives — Palau Economic Review FY 2018 (July 2019). The statement that 'fishing royalties have grown significantly in recent years and brought in $8.5 million in revenues in FY2018'; the note that $25 of the fee was originally devoted to the pension fund; and arrivals of 168,767, 146,643, 122,050 and 115,964 for FY2015 to FY2018, which differ slightly from the Bureau of Budget and Planning series
Office of the Public Auditor, Republic of Palau — Single Audits index. The full published run of national government single audits from FY2014 to FY2023, establishing what is and is not available: no audited statement later than FY2023 at the time of writing, and no separate audit of the Fisheries Protection Trust Fund
Office of the Public Auditor, Republic of Palau — ROP FY2023 financial statements and required supplementary information. The audited governmental funds statement giving total revenues of $71,898,812 and taxes of $48,013,579 for FY2023, with revenue reported under aggregate headings — fees and charges, licences and permits, other — rather than the itemised lines the quarterly reports carry
United States Department of State — 2024 Investment Climate Statement: Palau (4 January 2025). Tourism at an estimated 40 per cent of GDP, GDP of $242 million in 2022 at about $13,764 per capita, and the overstatement that with the sanctuary 'foreign companies were prohibited from fishing in the Palau Exclusive Economic Zone' — true of 80 per cent of it, not all
The Pew Charitable Trusts — Neel Inamdar and Peter Edwards, 'How Island Nations Can Harness Tourist Dollars for Conservation' (11 March 2026). The clearest circulating version of the error: the fee dated to 2020, the superseded 2017 five-way split printed as current with $10 to the Fisheries Protection Trust Fund, the Green Fee merged with the sanctuary, and an expectation of about $7 million generated in fiscal 2025
Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency — Economic and Development Indicators and Statistics: Tuna Fisheries of the Western and Central Pacific Ocean, 2017 edition (February 2018). Regional context for the money Palau gave up a share of: licence and access fee revenue across FFA member governments estimated at $474 million in 2016, an 8 per cent rise on 2015. The per-country appendix tables, including Palau's C15 and C16, did not render for us
Sojitz Corporation — 'Grand Opening Ceremony Held for a New Terminal at Palau International Airport' (11 May 2022). The completion of the terminal that the $25 slice of the environmental fee is earmarked to operate, maintain and improve: opening ceremony held 8 May 2022, approximately 12,000 m² across the new terminal, the existing terminal and the annex
Palau National Government — 'Palau Signs Joint Venture Agreement for Airport Renovation and Expansion through Public-Private Partnership' (7 August 2017). The Palau International Airport Corporation as owned 49 per cent by the Republic and 51 per cent by Sojitz and Japan Airport Terminal together, with financing to be sought from the Japan International Cooperation Agency — signed four months after the fee was redirected to the airport
GeoNames gazetteer — airports in Palau. Roman Tmetuchl International Airport in Airai at 7°22'02"N 134°32'26"E, elevation 54 m, also recorded as Babeldaob-Koror Airport; Peleliu Civil Airfield at 6°59'43"N 134°13'47"E; and Angaur Civil Airstrip at 6°54'21"N 134°08'40"E
GeoNames gazetteer — Koror, Palau. Koror at 7°20'23"N 134°28'23"E, recorded as the seat of a first-order administrative division with a population of about 14,000, and Koror Town separately at 7°20'33"N 134°28'44"E with 12,676
GeoNames gazetteer — Malakal, Palau. Malakal Port at 7°19'58"N 134°27'33"E, Malakal Harbor recorded as an anchorage at 7°19'21"N 134°26'51"E, and Malakal Island at 7°19'53"N 134°27'07"E rising to 124 m, all within Koror State
GeoNames gazetteer — Ngerulmud, Palau. Ngerulmud at 7°30'02"N 134°37'25"E, classified as capital of a political entity, in Melekeok State on Babeldaob — the purpose-built national seat used as a panel coordinate in this dossier

Official and scientific bodies are the authority for safety, regulatory and scientific claims. Commercial operators are used only for practical detail such as tour length, meeting points and indicative pricing — never for a safety or scientific statement.

How this was made

Desk research. Compiled from official bodies, scientific and conservation sources, established journalism and licensed operators. Not based on a personal visit.

Editor’s method note — what we checked, corrected and could not verify

Desk research only. Nobody from this publication has been to Palau, and this dossier makes no claim to have seen the sanctuary, the airport terminal or the Rock Islands.
Every URL cited was opened and read before citation. Sources we could not open are listed below and are cited nowhere in the piece.
The allocation of the fee is stated from the enacted text of three laws read in sequence — RPPL 9-49 (2015), RPPL 10-02 (2017) and RPPL 10-35 (2019) — because reading only the middle one, which is what most secondary coverage does, produces a five-way split that has not been the law since June 2019. The six-way split is independently corroborated by the PICRC and Stanford report of December 2019.
Where two of Palau's own documents disagree, we print both and name both. The Ministry of Finance's FY2022 update gives FY20 departure taxes of $1.7 million and fishing fees of $8.1 million; its FY2023 update restates the same years at $3.3 million and $7.8 million. We have not reconciled the revisions and do not favour either vintage.
The same rule applies to areas and permits. PICRC gives the sanctuary as 475,077 km² and Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions gives 'over 590,000 km²' for the same water. Koror State's 2016 permit notice and the Palau Visitors Authority give the same permit prices with different validity periods. RPPL 7-42 gives the PAN's green fee share as $20 and the PAN Fund's 2013 audit gives it as $15.
All per-passenger arithmetic in this piece is ours, performed across cited documents and labelled where it appears. Multiplying arrivals by $100 gives a ceiling, not a collection: the fee is charged at ticket purchase rather than at the gate, so receipts and arrivals fall in different periods, and the exemptions for citizens, crew, diplomats, work-visa holders and short transits remove an unknown share of passengers.
We do not present the figure of US$13.8 million a year in foreign fishing revenue as a national account. It is the PICRC and Stanford report's own average for 2014–2017 across a broader definition than the Ministry of Finance's royalties line, and we could not locate the underlying items in Palau's audited financial statements. The commission asked us to narrow the piece to the split alone if the counterfactual existed only as an estimate; in the event the Ministry publishes a fishing line of its own, so we print that instead and attribute the $13.8 million to the report that made it.
Sources we could not read, and therefore did not cite: the FAO FAOLEX record pages at fao.org, which returned 403; PacLII's numerical lists of Palau public laws, 403; the IMF eLibrary version of the 2025 Article IV staff report, 403; the scanned PDF of RPPL 10-35 on palaugov.pw and the scan of Presidential Directive 17-29, both of which carry no machine-readable text; palaupledge.com, which returned only page metadata; and the per-country appendix tables in both FFA indicator reports, which did not render, so we cite only the regional totals from those documents.
Things we could not verify: the current balance or annual receipts of the Fisheries Protection Trust Fund, which appears in no schedule we opened; whether the Palau International Coral Reef Center's $5 a passenger has actually been paid since 2019, and into what account; why the Ministry's departure-tax line falls from about $85.67 a head in FY18 to about $41.40 in FY19; why the FY2025 Citizens Budget shows the fee at $2 million when the same ministry's quarterly actuals trace $6,079,062 across four slices of it; what Palau earned from foreign fishing access in any single year before 2015, from Palau's own accounts rather than from a research estimate; whether any law after RPPL 10-35 has re-cut § 2706 again, the government document archive being paginated and incomplete; how the $30 Green Fee is divided between the two National Treasury accounts that 24 PNC directs it into, subsection (c) of that section not appearing in the copy of RPPL 10-02 we read; and whether the 12.5 per cent pension allocation floated in October 2024 has since been enacted.

AI is used to draft this text, and a human checks it. Every figure, date and quotation above was verified by Tony Hall against the source cited for it in the reference list; where sources disagree, the disagreement is shown rather than resolved, and where a claim could not be confirmed it is either marked unverified or left out. The illustrations are AI-created and labelled as such — no photograph on this site is presented as a record of a real place. Full disclosure · Editorial policy.

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The Hundred-Dollar Fee, Itemised: Palau's Green Fee Is Thirty Dollars