Seven Summits Operators in 2026: Thirteen Scored on Price Transparency, Safety Disclosure and Track Record

Seven of thirteen Seven Summits operators clear a published disclosure rubric in 2026, and the operator with the best safety documentation, guide ratios and track record in the field is not one of them — International Mountain Guides scores 59, one point short, because it publishes no price for any of the seven peaks. Thirteen operators were scored on published price, oxygen and medical provision, guide ratio, peak coverage, track record and corporate substance. Climbing the Seven Summits and Adventure Consultants tie at 78. Vinson, the peak that separates a real Seven Summits operator from a marketing list, is priced by nine of thirteen and clusters between USD 53,700 and USD 63,500. Elbrus has been quietly withdrawn by most of the Western field. And not one operator in this index sells a Seven Summits package at a single price.

Verified 22 September 2026 · operators' own expedition, pricing and about pages read directly · UK Companies House and the Austrian company register · Nepal Department of Tourism permit fees via the Kathmandu Post · every figure re-read at source

Seven Summits operators, scored out of 100

Score breakdown by criterion

Vinson is the comparison peak, and nine of thirteen publish a price

Everest is the query; Vinson is the test. Nine operators publish a Vinson price and eight of them sit within USD 4,200 of each other, which makes this the one peak where the numbers are close to directly comparable.

Everest prices vary by a factor of four because the products underneath them differ enormously — north or south, 21 days or 74, one Sherpa or two, oxygen rationed or unlimited. Vinson barely varies at all: sixteen days, a single approach, and logistics bought from the same tiny Antarctic supply chain. When nine operators quote within USD 10,000 of each other for essentially identical logistics, the spread is close to a clean readout of margin and inclusions. It also exposes who is serious: a company that runs Everest and Kilimanjaro but cannot price Vinson is not really running a Seven Summits programme.

Alpenglow's USD 63,500 is the outlier at the top and Mountain Professionals' USD 53,700 at the bottom — a USD 9,800 spread, or 18 per cent, for fifteen to twenty days on the same mountain. Jagged Globe is the only operator publishing an early-booking distinction, at USD 56,900 for the first departure against USD 57,900 standard, and is also the one whose Vinson price is quoted in dollars while the rest of its Seven Summits table runs in sterling.

The full price matrix: seven peaks, thirteen operators

Read this as a disclosure map rather than a shopping list. Dashes are not gaps in research: each one means the operator's own page for that peak was read and carried no figure, except in the two rows flagged for site access. Currencies are as published.

† Alpine Ascents publishes an Elbrus price with no scheduled departures and a page last modified in 2023 — de facto dormant without saying so. ‡ Kobler & Partner's offer-listing page returned a 404 and several detail pages 404'd on direct fetch, so its row reflects access limits, not disclosure. Seven Summit Treks is omitted from this table entirely: its site blocks automated reading, so nothing here would be honest. Lowest published figure per peak is shown; several operators run priced variants above it.

The Everest question, and what the permit now costs

The cost of climbing Everest is the strongest single query in this entire cluster, and the answer moved in 2025. Nepal raised the spring-season royalty to USD 15,000 per foreign climber effective Monday 1 September 2025, up from USD 11,000 — a 36 per cent rise and the first increase since 1 January 2015. Autumn went from USD 5,500 to USD 7,500 and winter and monsoon from USD 2,750 to USD 3,750. Permit validity was cut from 75 days to 55, and a new rule mandates one guide per two climbers on peaks above 8,000m. Nepal's Department of Tourism director Himal Gautam confirmed the implementation date on the record.

Published Everest prices in this index run from USD 45,000 to EUR 199,000, and the range is real rather than an artefact of comparison. At the bottom, Elite Exped's Full-Service standard tier over 55 days. At the top, Furtenbach's Signature — 21 days, two Sherpas and a private guide, made possible by hypoxic pre-acclimatisation at home, which the company has used since 2002 and first applied to Everest in 2016. Between them, CTSS publishes five tiers on a single page from USD 62,995 for Sherpa-supported to USD 134,995 for a private 1:1 international guide, which is the clearest tier structure anyone in the field publishes. Our itemised breakdown of what Everest costs sets those tiers against the permit, oxygen, Sherpa and insurance lines underneath them.

For context on the season itself: spring 2026 saw 495 permits issued to 52 teams, USD 7.2m in royalties, climbers from 56 countries, around 1,008 summits and a single-day record of 274 on 20 May, per Alan Arnette's season summary.

Elbrus has been withdrawn, and only two operators say so

The seventh summit under the Messner convention is Carstensz Pyramid; the seventh under the Bass convention is Kosciuszko; and the peak actually missing from Western programmes in 2026 is neither — it is Elbrus. Climbing the Seven Summits states plainly that it is not currently operating Mt. Elbrus expeditions due to geopolitical circumstances. Alpenglow says it is not running expeditions to Russia due to the conflict. Those two are the only operators in this index that tell a reader what has happened.

The rest let the absence speak. Alpine Ascents shows a USD 6,100 price against zero scheduled departures on a page last modified in 2023. Adventure Consultants' Elbrus pricing table is simply empty. Jagged Globe shows no price or dates. Madison, Mountain Professionals, IMG, Furtenbach, Mountain Trip and Kobler & Partner present it as a normally-listed product, mostly without confirmable current departures.

The distinction matters because it is the difference between a peak an operator has decided not to run and a peak an operator has forgotten to unpublish. CTSS's substitute is worth flagging separately: it now offers Mont Blanc as what it calls an acting Seventh Summit. Mont Blanc is not one of the Seven Summits under any convention. It is a reasonable alternative activity and it is not a substitute peak, and the phrasing invites a reader to think otherwise.

Who publishes an oxygen policy, a ratio and a sum insured

Twenty of the hundred points go to safety and medical disclosure, and the spread runs from the most detailed publication in the field to nothing at all.

Elite Exped is worth singling out for the one thing it does that nobody else does: it names a sum. Its Vinson page requires medical and evacuation insurance with at least USD 150,000 of cover to 5,000m. Every other operator that requires insurance requires it in the abstract, which leaves the buyer to guess whether their policy is adequate for a helicopter off a glacier. A figure is more useful than a rule, and what an altitude policy actually has to cover is worth reading before buying one.

Track-record claims, and which ones carry a denominator

A success rate without a basis is a marketing line; a success rate with a start date and a count is a fact you can weigh. IMG publishes the most quantified record in the field — over 600 Everest summits since 1990, Aconcagua nearly 80 per cent, Kilimanjaro 100 per cent successful since 1989 over more than 200 expeditions, Vinson expeditions since 1988 with no missed summit in over 30 years. All self-reported and none independently audited, but each figure carries a start date and a denominator, which is what the criterion asks for.

Climbing the Seven Summits publishes 91 per cent expedition summit success and 80 per cent client summit success over 120-plus expeditions, and states that the basis is its own tally. Stating the basis is the whole difference. At the other end, Madison Mountaineering claims the highest success and safety in the industry eight years running with no basis for either half of the sentence, and Elite Exped claims a 100 per cent record on 8,000m summits alongside a 100 per cent safety record, again self-reported with nothing behind it. Elite Exped's directors have genuine, checkable individual records — Nirmal Purja holds the fastest 14 by 8,000m, Mingma David Sherpa the youngest, and both were on the first winter K2 ascent in January 2021 — and those are personal achievements rather than a company success rate. The two should not be read as the same thing.

Two operators offer something better than a self-reported statistic: a third party's judgement. Alpine Ascents has held the Mount Rainier National Park guiding concession since 2006, awarded on safety record and environmental leadership, and RMI has been an authorised concessioner at Mount Rainier continuously since 1969 and at Denali National Park since 1975. A concession renewed by a park service across five decades is a harder fact than any percentage.

Only one operator publishes what happens to your money

Furtenbach Adventures publishes an Austrian company number, a trade licence, a VAT number, a GISA registration and a named bank guarantee — 70.045.315 with Raiffeisenbank Kematen — protecting client funds. No other operator in this index publishes a client-money protection instrument of any kind. On an expedition costing USD 60,000 to 80,000 booked twelve to eighteen months ahead, that is arguably the single most material disclosure on this page, and it is also the criterion the fewest buyers ask about.

Jagged Globe is the other operator with a complete registry record: company 07089554, incorporated 27 November 2009, registered in Sheffield, active, SIC 79120. Everyone else publishes some fraction. Alpine Ascents and Alpenglow both point to named public-land permits instead — Alpenglow operates under special-use permits with five named National Forests. Mountain Professionals, Elite Exped, Mountain Trip and Madison publish no entity detail a buyer could check at all; Madison's LLC status was found on a trademark filing rather than on its own site.

What changed in 2026

Four rule changes are in force and a fifth is not, which is exactly the distinction most coverage of Nepali mountaineering regulation gets wrong. The 7,000m prerequisite has passed one chamber and is not law.

Method, and what this index does not claim

The rubric was fixed on 22 September 2026 before any data was collected and has not been adjusted since. That is the only reason IMG's 59 stands and Jagged Globe's 62 sits outside the six: moving a pass mark after seeing the results would make the whole exercise decorative. Thirteen operators were scored. Seven cleared 60. Six are ranked, per this site's convention that only the top six are named and ranked, and the seventh is identified by name and score above so that nothing is hidden by the format.

Seven Summit Treks is recorded in the evidence base and deliberately unscored. Its site returns a robots.txt block on every URL tried — homepage, Everest tiers, history, about pages and PDFs — so the absence of published figures reflects what could be read, not what the company publishes. Kobler & Partner is scored but flagged on the criteria where its own pages returned 404s. Everywhere else, not published means the specific page was read and the figure was genuinely absent.

One note on this site's own back catalogue: the existing Everest expedition operators page carries no rubric at all. It is a comparison guide rather than a scored index, so the criteria here are new rather than inherited, and that page will be rebuilt against them. The full evidence base behind every figure on this page, with sources, observation dates and confidence grades, sits alongside it.

Finally, what this page is not. It is not a safety ranking. An operator that publishes nothing may run an immaculate mountain, and an operator that publishes everything may not. What a fixed rubric measures is whether a buyer can find out before they pay — and in a category where a single peak costs more than a car and is booked eighteen months out, that is a reasonable thing to grade.