Palau Diving: The Permits, the Reef Rules and a Sunscreen Ban With 42 Names On It

What diving in Palau costs before you get wet: $100 in the airfare, $50 at Koror

The first fee is invisible. Under the public notice issued by the Palau Visitors Authority, the Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee of $100 has been included in the price of every international airline ticket into Palau since 1 January 2018, and the ticketing airline is responsible for collecting it. Before that date a visitor paid $50 on the way out, a $30 Green Fee plus a $20 departure tax.

That fee was written into law three years earlier. The Palau National Marine Sanctuary Act of 2015 created an Environmental Impact Fee of one hundred dollars on every passenger aged 13 or older leaving the Republic, payable no more than once in any thirty-day period. Palauan citizens, their spouses, holders of a valid Palau work visa and transit passengers are exempt. The same chapter repealed the old departure tax.

Where the hundred dollars goes is worth a minute, because it shows what the money was built for. As the 2015 Act wrote the split, $10 goes to the Fisheries Protection Trust Fund, $12.50 is divided among the states, $25 to the Civil Service Pension Fund, $30 is earmarked as a Green Fee and $22.50 reverts to the National Treasury. The fee has been renamed and amended since, so read that as the original design rather than today’s ledger.

Fee number two is paid in Koror, in person. A Rock Island Use Permit costs $50 for every visitor aged six and over. Adding Ongeim’l Tketau itself takes it to $100, on a Jellyfish Lake Permit that covers the same designated tourist activity areas. Change your mind at the lake and the rangers’ outpost issues a voucher for a further $75, payable at the Koror State Finance Office within 48 hours. Both permits run ten days and neither is refundable.

Those numbers have moved a long way. The same Koror State law set the Rock Island permit at $25 and the Jellyfish Lake permit at $35 when it took effect in 2009. Peleliu is a different state with its own permit, quoted at $30 per person for ten days on an operator rate sheet published on the tourism authority’s own site; other published figures run to $60, and that disagreement is recorded in the sources.

One more thing happens at the border, and it costs nothing. A presidential directive dated 12 December 2017 instructed immigration officials to use the Palau Pledge entry visa stamp, so an arriving visitor signs a promise addressed to the children of Palau before reaching baggage claim. The signature carries no permit and no depth limit. What it actually commits you to is spelled out in the two bodies of rules below.

Palau’s sunscreen ban names 42 ingredients, and most bottles fail it

The Responsible Tourism Education Act of 2018 is the part of Palauan law that reaches into a diver’s washbag. Signed on 4 November 2018 and in force from 1 January 2020, it named ten ingredients, among them oxybenzone, octinoxate, octocrylene, triclosan, phenoxyethanol and four parabens. The regulations that implement it went considerably further.

Its appendix, inside the Ministry’s Regulations Prohibiting Reef-Toxic Sunscreens, is the document that decides at the airport. It lists 42 named ingredients in twelve chemical classes, and eleven of those classes close with the same line: in addition to the ingredients listed above, all other members of the class are banned. Anything containing one of them is, in the regulation’s own phrase, a reef-toxic sunscreen.

Read that list and the practical consequence is blunt. Avobenzone, homosalate, octisalate, ensulizole and padimate O appear by name, as do the newer filters sold in Europe under the trade names Tinosorb S and Tinosorb M and the two Mexoryls, ecamsule and drometrizole trisiloxane. Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide do not appear in the appendix at all, which is why the government describes its own standard as permitting mineral filters and little else.

Enforcement begins before customs. Palau International Airport is required to place marked disposal bins near the baggage claim area but ahead of the inspection station, with signs in arrivals explaining why. Anything found during entry inspection is confiscated, though Customs may run a scheme to hand it back on departure. Officers are told to confiscate a bottle that is out of its original packaging, or whose label is absent, illegible or printed in a language they cannot read.

The penalty is counted per bottle. Each consumer unit is its own violation and carries a fine of up to $100, with totals capped at $5,000 for selling or distributing and $10,000 for manufacturing or importing. Importing and then selling the same tube is fined twice. Our reef-safe sunscreen guide covers what survives a list written this way.

Eighty percent of Palau’s ocean is closed, and one shark costs $500,000 in court

The law that shapes the diving here was not written for divers. RPPL 9-49, passed as the Palau National Marine Sanctuary Act, split the exclusive economic zone in two: roughly 80 percent became the Sanctuary and the remaining 20 percent a Domestic Fishing Zone. Section 149 is one sentence long and says the Sanctuary is a no-take zone in which fishing and the extraction, disturbance, destruction, removal or alteration of any Sanctuary resource is expressly prohibited.

It arrived on a timetable. Existing long-line agreements and purse-seining activity were wound down from the date of passage through 31 December 2019, and by 1 January 2020 no fishing was to be allowed in the Sanctuary at all. The Ministry’s fishing regulations, transmitted to the President on 16 December 2019, restate the same 80 to 20 division and the same no-take status. They also require an observer or an approved electronic monitoring system on every fishing vessel for 100 percent of vessel days from 1 January 2025.

Sharks sit in a separate clause with a separate number. Title 27 makes it unlawful to fish for any shark in Palau’s waters, to remove its fins, or to possess any part of one, and an inadvertent catch must be released at once in the manner that gives it the best chance of survival. The fine runs between $500,000 and $1,000,000, with each shark or part of a shark a separate violation. Steel leader is banned as gear and banned on board.

A purse seiner faces a different scale again. Where any of these prohibited acts is committed by a vessel equipped for purse seining, or by its crew, captain or owner, the penalty runs from a minimum of $1 million to a maximum of $10 million, set by the seriousness of the offence and the size and value of the vessel. Reef fish, turtles, rays and marine mammals carry their own prohibition in the same section.

The public commitment came six years before the Act. On 25 September 2009 President Johnson Toribiong told the United Nations General Assembly that Palau wanted “a sanctuary for sharks to live and reproduce unmolested in our 237,000 square miles of ocean”, and asked other countries to ban shark fishing in their own waters. The statute caught up with the speech in 2015.

There is a number behind the policy, and it is a dive-industry number. Vianna and colleagues, publishing in Biological Conservation in 2012, put shark diving at US$18 million a year in Palau, about 8 percent of gross domestic product, paying $1.2 million in local salaries and $1.5 million in tax. The roughly 100 sharks that interact with tourists at the popular sites would have been worth at most $10,800 to a fishery. Our shark diving list covers coasts that made the same trade.

Thirteen Palau dive sites where fishing stops 100 yards out

Koror State drew a ring around the dive sites themselves. Public law K8-191-2007 makes it unlawful to engage in any fishing activity, or to possess fish or fishing gear, within 100 yards of thirteen named places: Soft Coral Arch, Cemetery Reef, Ngermeaus, Blue Holes, Blue Corner, Sias Tunnel, Shark City, Ngemelis Wall, Short Drop Off, German Channel, Big Drop Off, German Wall and Virgin Blue Holes.

A second law of the same year settles a question divers often ask before booking. K8-186-2007 makes it unlawful to feed sharks in the waters of Koror State, which is why no operator here sells a baited shark dive. What the sites offer instead is current, structure and a population that has not been fished.

Several areas are closed harder than that. The Ngerukewid Islands Wildlife Preserve is a no-entry zone with no taking and no disturbance of any marine or terrestrial life. Fishing is closed year round in the Ngerumekaol Spawning Area. Ngkisaol, the sardine sanctuary, is no-entry; Ngederrak is closed to taking, to disturbance and to motorised watercraft, because it is habitat for the dugong population that Koror State puts at fewer than 200 animals.

Personal watercraft have their own map. A 2003 law establishes four designated water sport zones for jet skis and similar craft and bans two-stroke engines, which keeps them off the reef sites rather than trusting etiquette to do it. Your permit paperwork has to keep up too: the boat operator or guide must carry a passenger list giving each visitor’s name as it appears in the passport in Roman alphabet, country of origin, arrival and departure dates and individual permit numbers.

Your Palau dive guide carries a Koror State card, and it sets the ratio at 8 to 1

Most dive destinations leave guiding to the training agencies. Koror State does not. Its Tour Guide Certification Regulations define a tour guide to include people who serve as scuba diving and snorkelling guides, and Article 2.1 says no person shall act as one anywhere in the waters or on the land of Koror State without a valid certification card issued by the Department of Conservation and Law Enforcement.

Getting the card is a small exam. An applicant must be at least 18, be proficient in Palauan or English, hold a national work permit if not a citizen, and hold current CPR and first aid certification from an internationally recognised body. The exam runs one hour, no notes and no phone in the room, and the pass mark is 80 percent. Validity runs one year, a first card costs $30 and a renewal $10, and an annual refresher keeps it alive.

The content of that card is what a visiting diver actually feels. Diving is fixed at 8 divers to 1 guide and snorkelling at 10 to 1. Gloves are prohibited while diving or snorkelling. Reef hooks are permitted, and must be placed so as to minimise environmental impact. That is the tool the currents at Blue Corner are known for, and the regulation names it directly rather than leaving it to etiquette.

The rest reads like a briefing written down. Guides must demonstrate dive etiquette: do not touch, handle or provoke any marine organism, do not alter or deface anything on the reef, do not collect or remove corals, sea grass or algae. Boats moor rather than anchor where mooring applies. A functional emergency medical oxygen kit and a first aid kit must be aboard the dive boat at all times, a life jacket or BCD must be aboard for every passenger, and communication with the tour station has to be continuous.

The Jellyfish Lake clause is oddly specific and worth carrying. Guides must prevent cross contamination: nothing but clean snorkel gear goes into the lake, and nothing comes out of it into the ocean, including things that look dead such as shells and rocks, which can house invasive organisms. Penalties are modest and escalate: $100 for a first offence, $250 for a second, $500 for a third, and at the third the business licence itself becomes subject to suspension or revocation.

Jellyfish Lake is a snorkel to 12 metres, and in May 2016 the jellyfish ran out

Koror State describes Ongeim’l Tketau as the one marine lake open to visitors, and the reason you cannot dive it is chemistry rather than crowd control. The lake is 400 m long and 30 m deep. A pink bacterial layer sits between 13 and 15 m, and below it there is no light and no oxygen, only water loaded with dissolved hydrogen sulfide. Scuba is prohibited and visitors must stay above 12 m.

What lives in that thin upper layer exists nowhere else. The golden jellyfish is a subspecies, Mastigias papua etpisoni, named after former President Ngiratkel Etpison, and it carries zooxanthellae in its tissues and swims after the sun to feed them. Contrary to the tourist line it does sting, mildly, having inherited the cells from its lagoon ancestor. Its predator is an endemic anemone called Entacmaea medusivora, which is Latin for medusa-eater.

Then the lake emptied. Following the extreme El Niño drought of 2015 and 2016, the golden jellyfish population dwindled and then vanished, with the last medusa seen in May 2016 against a normal standing population of about five million. The medusae were virtually absent until late 2018, when the lake finally began to cool, and by 2019 the population was back in the millions. An identical collapse had been documented in 1999, after the previous strong El Niño.

You can check the lake before you book, which is worth doing where the attraction has already vanished twice. The Coral Reef Research Foundation publishes a conditions board for Ongeim’l Tketau: at the monitoring date of 14 July 2026 it showed the status green, jellyfish numbers above 100,000 and rising against the previous three months, an average water temperature of 31.0°C over the top 12 m and falling, and the ENSO phase as El Niño.

How that number is reached matters before you trust it. Above 20,000 animals the estimate comes from net hauls: nets are dropped to 15 m at 15 stations spaced across the lake and drawn slowly up, three full runs in a day, and the mean catch is scaled by the area of the lake. Below 20,000 the count is visual. Two non-native species are established in the lake, one of them an Exaiptasia anemone that may have arrived on a rock carried in by a visitor.

The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon: 445 islands, 52 marine lakes, 746 fish species

Almost all of the diving above happens inside one World Heritage property. The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon was inscribed in 2012 under five criteria, three cultural and two natural, which is rare. It covers 100,200 hectares of sea and holds 445 coralline limestone islands, uplifted by volcanism and then cut into their mushroom shapes by weather, wind and vegetation.

The biology behind criterion (x) is a list of counts. UNESCO records 746 species of fish, over 385 species of corals, at least 13 species of sharks and manta rays, seven species of giant clam and the endemic nautilus inside the property, together with all of Palau’s endemic birds, mammals and herpetofauna and nearly half its endemic plants. The forests above the water and the reef below it were inscribed as one thing.

Marine lakes are the reason criterion (ix) exists here. Inside the property sit 52 marine lakes, more than at any other site in the world, at different stages of geological and ecological development and ranging from well connected to the sea to almost entirely isolated. Five new subspecies of the Mastigias papua jellyfish have been described from them. UNESCO calls them natural laboratories for the study of evolution and speciation.

People were here first, and left. Caves in the islands hold rock art and burials dating back 3,100 years and spanning some 2,500 years of seasonal occupation, with permanent stone villages on a few islands from between 950 and 500 years ago. Those villages were abandoned in the 17th and 18th centuries as the population moved to the larger islands, and that abandonment is itself part of the inscription: criterion (v) treats it as an illustration of climate change and population pressure on a marginal marine environment.

Management is local, not national. The whole property falls within Koror State, the Koror State Rangers enforce the rules, the Rock Islands Use Act of 1997 regulates tourist activity and Koror State Regulations from 1994 cover resource use, recreation and protected areas. UNESCO names uncontrolled tourism as the standing risk and asks explicitly that visitor numbers be kept within the capacity of the property.

Palau wreck diving comes out of two days in March 1944

The wrecks here have a single date on them. On 30 and 31 March 1944 a United States Navy carrier operation codenamed Desecrate One struck Japanese shipping in and around Palau, and most of the vessels now on the bottom went down in those two days. Over forty Japanese vessels have since been identified in Palauan waters.

What they were is less glamorous than the phrase “war wreck” suggests, and more interesting. Underwater survey work by Tomo Ishimura of the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties found that most of the ships sunk at Palau were not naval vessels at all but converted civilian hulls: cargo carriers, tankers, whaling boats and fishing boats, slow and poorly armed. The main force of the Combined Fleet, the Musashi among it, had left Palau on the evening of 29 March.

Depth decided which ones you can still dive. Vessels lying in about 20 m or less were largely salvaged in the post-war decades; those at 30 m or more remain, and the same survey notes they are threatened by unauthorised salvage rather than by depth. That is the practical reason Palau’s best-known wrecks sit deeper than a first open-water certification allows.

They are also a legal object. Underwater archaeological and historical remains in Palau are protected under Title 19 of the Palau National Code as the Palau Lagoon Monument, a designation separate from the World Heritage inscription and from the Koror State permits. Removing anything is not a grey area here. Other coasts where the hull is the whole reason to book are gathered in our wreck diving list.

Palau diving through the year: 28.5 to 30 degrees, and a typhoon every three years

Water temperature is not the variable here. The Coral Reef Research Foundation, which has run instrumented stations in Palau since 1999, puts the outer reefs and surrounding ocean at about 28.5 to 30.0°C, with lagoon shallows roughly half a degree warmer. Its annual low falls around February, and the peak arrives by November. A 3 mm suit covers the whole year, and our travel wetsuit guide covers the trade-off if you dive four times a day.

Depth changes that picture fast. The mixed layer runs to about 40 m, with the upper 10 to 30 m usually the same temperature and no thermocline in it. Below that the numbers fall away: instruments at 57 m on the outer slope often dip into the upper teens, and the mesophotic zone between 60 and 90 m frequently sits at or below 18 to 20°C. In the 2010 bleaching event the whole column went nearly unithermal at 29.5 to 30.5°C from the surface to 90 m.

The season you are actually choosing is wind and rain. Northeast trade winds run October to May and the westerly monsoon June to September, with transition periods in May to June and October to November. The monsoon half is the wetter and windier one, which matters more for boat comfort and surface conditions than for visibility on a wall.

Typhoons reach Palau, but rarely. Since 1945, twenty storms of 64 knots or more have come within 200 nautical miles of the country, roughly one every three years. Two recent ones came close: Bopha in 2012 passed 25 nautical miles south of Angaur, and Haiyan in 2013 crossed directly over Kayangel at super typhoon strength. Drought is the other extreme, and 2015 delivered it, with total rainfall of 64 inches, about half the preceding years.

One piece of local infrastructure belongs in your dive planning. Palau has a single hospital, the Belau National Hospital in Koror, and the tourism authority states that an operational hyperbaric chamber is located there. Dispensaries sit in Babeldaob, Peleliu, Angaur and Kayangel. That one chamber is a long way from most of the outer reef, which is an argument for conservative profiles rather than for cancelling a trip.

Three Palau dive businesses in the registers, and what that number is not

The register count for Palau is three, and it misleads on its own. The Palau operator list holds 3 businesses, read on 20 September 2026, and all three are published by SSI in its register of affiliated centres. Two of the three are Aggressor liveaboards; one is filed by the register under Malakal. SSI lists two of them for freediving programmes.

Three is not the number of dive businesses in Palau. It is the number that the readable registers publish. PADI is the largest body in this sport, and its shop locator applies the country filter in your browser rather than on the server, so the list cannot be enumerated. A centre in Koror stays invisible to a count like ours unless its store number is known. The point at which each source stops being readable is set out in which registers can be read.

Two other registers are empty here, for a different reason. Neither the IKO nor the VDWS list carries any of the three, because both cover kite and windsurf schools rather than dive centres. Not one holds a Green Fins membership, so no in-person environmental assessment sits behind any entry on this coast, which is a gap worth noticing in a country that legislates reef protection this hard.

For Palau the register question matters less than it does elsewhere, because the binding document is not a training affiliation. It is the Koror State tour guide certification card, checked on the water by rangers, and the state and national business licences behind the company that issues your permit. Ask to see the card. It is the one credential in this country that a stranger can verify on the spot.