Nepal's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation put the country's wild tiger population at 429 on July 29, World Tiger Day. The last national count, in 2022, found 355. The difference is 74 animals in four years, a rise of 20.8 percent [1].
The longer line is the one worth sitting with. Nepal counted 121 tigers in 2009, 198 in 2013, 235 in 2018, 355 in 2022, and 429 now [1]. Every one of those numbers came out of the same kind of work: camera traps left in the forest, checked, moved, checked again. The 2026 survey ran from December 31, 2025 to April 23, 2026 [2].
The count breaks out across five protected areas. Chitwan holds 145, Bardiya 112, Parsa 71, Banke 51, and Shuklaphanta 50 [1]. Those five figures add to exactly 429. The 2022 columns behave the same way: Chitwan 128, Bardiya 125, Parsa 41, Banke 25, Shuklaphanta 36, which add to exactly 355 [2]. The books close in both directions, which is more than can be said for a lot of conservation arithmetic.
Four of the five parks gained. Parsa added 30 tigers, Banke 26, Chitwan 17, Shuklaphanta 14. Bardiya lost 13, falling from 125 to 112 [2]. Bardiya was Nepal's second-largest tiger population in 2022 and it is still second, but it is the only park in the country that went backwards, and nothing in the national headline number tells you that.
There is a second thing the headline number does not tell you. In the 2025-26 fiscal year, tigers killed 10 people in Nepal: four around Banke, three around Parsa, two around Bardiya, and one near Chitwan [2]. Leopards killed nine more people in Bardiya over the same period. Across the past eight years, 85 people have been killed in tiger attacks nationally [2], an average of just under 11 a year. The 2025-26 total is not an outlier. It is the ordinary rate.
Hari Bhadra Acharya, information officer at the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, framed the problem without softening it. "We cannot change the behaviour of tigers, but we can certainly change our own," he said [2]. That is a statement about people living at the edge of a growing predator population, and about who is expected to adapt.
One more correction belongs in the record, because it is already circulating. The Himalayan Times ran the census under the headline "Nepal's tiger population climbs to 429, nearly quadrupling since 2010," describing 429 as "nearly four times the 121 recorded in 2010" [3]. It is not nearly four times. 429 divided by 121 is 3.55. A genuine quadrupling from 121 would be 484 tigers, and Nepal is 55 short of that. The baseline year is also off by one: in the department's own series, 121 is the 2009 figure [1]. More than tripling a wild tiger population in seventeen years is a remarkable thing to have done. It does not need to be rounded up.
The harder open question is whether Nepal now has more tigers than its forests can hold, and the reporting does not agree with itself. The Himalayan Times put the carrying capacity at "around 400 tigers, meaning the latest population exceeds the habitat's sustainable limit" [3]. The Kathmandu Post quoted wildlife expert Hem Sagar Baral saying Nepal "could sustain between 400 and 500 tigers given the current availability of prey, improved grassland management and the combined habitats of national parks, buffer zones and surrounding forests" [2]. Under the first figure, 429 is an overshoot. Under the second, it sits comfortably inside the range. We are printing both because the record is unresolved, and because the difference between them is the difference between a victory and a warning.
Baburam Lamichhane, a wildlife researcher specializing in tiger ecology, took the optimistic reading. "The increase in tiger numbers is encouraging not only for conservation but also for the country's tourism industry," he said. "It strengthens Nepal's reputation as a global conservation success" [2].
He is right, and the receipts back him. A country that had 121 wild tigers seventeen years ago has 429, and four of its five parks are still climbing. That happened because rangers walked lines, communities gave up ground, and a poor country spent money on animals that generate no revenue until the tourists arrive. It is worth saying plainly and worth saying alongside the rest: Bardiya is down 13, ten families buried someone this year, and 85 people have died in eight. Nepal did something almost no country has managed. The people who live nearest the tigers are carrying the bill for it.
