I Wayan Sumarajaya, head of the Bali provincial tourism office, said foreign arrivals to the island reached roughly 3.7 million by 23 July1. The PWA (Pungutan Wisatawan Asing, the Rp150,000 foreign-visitor levy payable on arrival) had collected Rp208 billion by 26 July, up from Rp203 billion three days earlier. Australia remains the largest source market, ahead of India and China. Both counts run from January.
Every one of those arrivals paying the levy would have produced about Rp555 billion, and Sumarajaya has published the resulting ratio himself for earlier periods using the same total-arrivals denominator: 32 per cent for the whole of 2024, and 36 per cent for January to October 20252. He has attached no percentage to this July snapshot, and neither will we. Ombudsman RI's Bali office has separately flagged PWA compliance as low and called for better governance of the collection3.
That denominator flatters the shortfall, because arrivals and liable visitors are not the same population. Diplomatic and official visa holders, transport crew, holders of KITAS and KITAP long-stay residence permits, family-reunification and student visa holders, and golden-visa holders are all exempt4. Bali's long-stay foreign community, the cohort this briefing follows, sits almost entirely inside those exemptions, so the uncollected share does not belong to the resident nomad. Compliance among visitors who actually owe the levy therefore runs higher than the arrivals arithmetic implies, and nobody publishes the liable base that would settle by how much.
Enforcement explains the rest. Indonesia's immigration directorate has run a permanent 100-person task force across ten Bali areas since January and named sweeps such as Dharma Dewata, which detained 62 foreign nationals across three regencies in April. None of that apparatus collects the levy. A charge payable at the airport, at a booth or through an app, with no consequence attached to walking past all three, does not collect itself. The province has spent two years demonstrating that it will pursue the visa violation it can deport for rather than the Rp150,000 it cannot.
