The Beijing International Travel Healthcare Center, Explained

The Beijing International Travel Healthcare Center (北京国际旅行卫生保健中心) is where foreigners in Beijing complete the mandatory visa medical exam for a work or study residence permit. The entry physical runs at No. 10 Dezheng Road, Haidian District, Monday–Friday mornings. Beijing's statutory fee is a surprise: generally just ¥430 — and free for qualifying Z-visa work-permit holders and X1 students — and Shanghai (≈¥500–600) and Guangzhou (≈¥600) are in the same band, not the ¥1,400–2,100 often quoted for them — that is those cities' US immigrant-visa panel fee for a different exam. Fast for five hours, bring passport photocopies and two 4.5×3.5 cm photos, cut to size before you go, and collect the stamped certificate from the fourth working day.

What the Beijing ITHC does

Like Shanghai and Guangzhou, Beijing runs a customs-affiliated International Travel Healthcare Center dedicated to entry-exit health matters. For foreigners its core service is the Foreigner Physical Examination Record (体检表) — the fixed screening required when you apply for a residence permit for work, study, or a stay of a year or longer, and you've reached age 16. The requirement, the form itself, and the full test list are covered in our China visa medical exam guide; this page covers the Beijing specifics.

One quirk to know: Beijing splits its functions across two sites, and they are not interchangeable.

The consultation hotline for both is +86-10-64274239. If an agent or HR team books for you, double-check which address is on your appointment — turning up at Hepingli for an entry physical costs you the fasting morning.

Fees — and who pays nothing

Beijing publishes the lowest statutory fee of the major cities. As 2026 planning figures from the center's official guidance:

Better still, the center's published policy makes the statutory exam free for two common groups:

• Work-permit arrivals — bring the original and photocopy of your Notification Letter of Foreigner's Work Permit plus a valid Z or R visa, for a stay of one year or more.
• Degree-length students — bring your stamped admission notice and JW201/JW202 form showing a study period over one year, plus a valid X1 visa.

The free exam covers the standard 体检表 items only; anything extra is charged. Beijing is the cheapest of the big centres, but not by the margin most guides imply. Shanghai charges ≈¥500–600 and Guangzhou ≈¥600 for the same residence-permit exam — the widely republished ¥1,446–2,096 and ¥1,700 figures for those two cities are the US immigrant-visa panel schedules for exams that happen to run at the same institutions, not the entry health check. Treat anything above a few hundred yuan as either optional add-ons or the wrong exam, and confirm the fee schedule when you book.

Exam day: what to bring and what happens

• Timing — at the Haidian department, physical exams run Monday–Friday, 08:30–11:00; verification of an overseas report runs 08:30–11:00 and again 13:00–16:00, and is the only errand here with afternoon capacity. Book an appointment first and keep the SMS — the centre treats a missed slot as void and makes you rebook.
• Fasting — five hours before the exam; water is fine.
• Passport — original plus photocopies of the photo page and visa/entry page.
• Photos — two identical 4.5×3.5 cm colored, bareheaded photos on a white background, taken within six months. The centre asks that you cut them to size before you arrive — it does not trim them for you, and the same spec applies whether you are sitting the exam or verifying a report done abroad.
• Extras by category — employment certificate (work permits) or student card/admission notice + JW201/JW202 (study permits).

The panel is the national standard: internal medicine, ENT, and dental checks, ECG, chest X-ray, abdominal ultrasound, and blood tests covering at least HIV and syphilis. You move station to station; the circuit typically takes about an hour, and payment is accepted by cash, Alipay, WeChat, or Chinese bank cards. Collect the stamped certificate at the issuance window within the period on your collection notice — and aim to complete the whole health-management step within 15 days of entry so your permit filing isn't delayed.

Opening times — by site and by errand, because they are not the same

Search results for this centre collapse three different counters into one set of hours, and people turn up fasting at the wrong one. The centre publishes them separately. Working days only, in every row — there is no weekend service.

Three things fall out of that table and each of them costs somebody a morning.

• The afternoon is for paperwork, not for exams. If you already had the medical done at home, you do not need to be there at dawn — the verification counter reopens at 13:00. If you need the exam itself, the morning is the only option anywhere in the system.
• Hepingli opens an hour earlier than Haidian and hands out queue numbers that run out. Number distribution stops at 10:30 even though processing continues to 11:00, so arriving at 10:45 for the main site means arriving after the door has effectively shut.
• Collection has its own window, and it is the mirror image of the exam. You cannot collect in the morning. Anyone planning a single trip to do both is planning two trips.

The phone numbers are genuinely different services rather than overflow lines. 010-64274239 and 010-82003383 are the entry/exit physical desk, 010-82005029 is the designated visa-physical desk that runs the US immigrant medical, and 010-58648801 is the immigration stream. Calling the wrong one gets you accurate information about the wrong exam, which is the failure mode this whole page exists to prevent.

Paying, and getting the certificate back

There is no foreign-card option. The centre takes WeChat Pay, Alipay, UnionPay and cash. A Visa or Mastercard issued outside China will not work, and a new arrival typically has neither a mainland bank card nor a linked mobile wallet yet — which makes cash the only method that is certain to work on day one. Bring it. The invoice is issued electronically through the customs WeChat service account rather than on paper, so if you need it for reimbursement, set that up before you leave the building.

The stamped certificate is available from the fourth working day after your appointment, and only between 13:00 and 16:00. Two collection routes exist and one of them is easy to miss:

• In person, with the collection voucher you were handed on the day. If you lose the voucher it is recoverable — bring the examinee's original ID and a photocopy — but it turns a counter visit into a conversation.
• By courier, arranged at the centre on the day of the exam, delivering from the fourth working day. This is the option worth taking if you are leaving Beijing, and it cannot be set up afterwards by phone.

If your dates are genuinely tight, say so at the registration desk when you check in rather than at collection: the centre operates an expedite path, and it is discretionary, in person, and decided at the front of the process, not the back.

Already examined at home? Use the verification route

If you completed the 体检表 items at a public hospital abroad within the past six months, Beijing will verify the overseas exam for ¥60 instead of repeating it. The form must carry your sealed photo, doctor's signature, and hospital stamp, and come with the original reports — X-ray (or film), ECG, lab results covering at least HIV and syphilis, and ultrasound. Private-clinic reports need local notarization first. If anything is missing or unclear, the consulting physician simply examines the missing items on the spot, which for verification cases is free.

What the counter is checking is narrower than most people expect, and four things get a folder sent away. The form must have been completed by a public hospital. A report from a private clinic or a GP surgery is not refused outright, but it has to be notarised locally first, and that is not something you can arrange from Beijing. It must be in Chinese or English — no other language is accepted, and a translation you commissioned yourself does not cure it. The photo on the form must carry the hospital's seal across it, and that seal must match the one stamping the form itself. And the form expires six months from its date of issue, not from the date of your exam or your arrival.

If your consulate applied a certification label or issued a certification letter for the report, bring it and hand it over unprompted. Without one, and with any item missing, unclear or absent from the original lab sheets, the on-site physician simply performs the missing items — free, on the spot, which is the good outcome. The bad outcome is a form judged invalid as a whole, which means sitting the entire exam again at full price.

One thing worth doing before you fly: the centre publishes the Physical Examination Record for Foreigners form as a download on its own site. Taking it to your doctor at home, rather than accepting whatever report format that clinic normally issues, is the single cheapest way to make verification work — it removes the "missing item" problem before it exists.

After the exam: collecting the certificate, and the two clocks you are on

Almost everyone plans the exam and nobody plans the collection, which is where the fasting morning actually gets wasted. The stamped Physical Examination Record for Foreigner is not handed over on the day: bloods and the chest film have to be read, so the centre gives you a collection notice with a date — in Beijing that is the fourth working day after your appointment, collectable 13:00–16:00 only. Two practical consequences follow, and both are easier to fix on exam day than afterwards.

• Do not book onward travel against the exam date. Book it against the collection date on the notice. There is no national reprint counter for this document — it is issued by the centre that examined you, at the window that examined you.
• Settle proxy collection while you are standing there. If an HR representative or a school administrator will pick it up for you, ask at the issuance window what they need to bring — your receipt, a copy of your passport, their own ID — and get the answer before you leave. Practice varies between windows and it is a five-second question on the day and a lost afternoon later.

The deadline that matters is not the centre's. Two separate clocks start the moment you land, and they are frequently confused:

Work backwards from the 30 and the schedule writes itself: exam in your first week, certificate on the fourth working day after that, filing with a fortnight of margin. Arrivals who treat the medical as a week-three errand are the ones who end up paying for an expedited anything.

Treat the certificate as a six-month document — the same window Beijing applies in the other direction when it accepts an exam performed abroad. If a job start slips and your filing lands outside it, budget for repeating the exam rather than assuming the old form will be waved through. Finally, the original usually goes into the permit file and does not come back: photograph or scan every page before you hand it in, including the stamps. It is the only copy you will have if a later employer, school or visa office asks what was on it. What happens if one of the results comes back abnormal is a national rule rather than a Beijing one — the visa medical exam guide covers what is actually screened for and what still bars a permit.

The other Beijing site — and why the ¥430 exam is not the one US visa applicants need

The Hepingli address in the table above is not an overflow annexe for the Dezheng Road site, and the distinction is worth more than an address. The Beijing ITHC is one of only four facilities in the whole of mainland China whose medical exams the US Consulate General in Guangzhou — which processes immigrant visas for the entire country — will accept. The other three are the Guangzhou ITHC, the Shanghai International Travel Medical Center, and the IME Centre at Fuzhou University Affiliated Provincial Hospital. An exam by any other physician, at any other hospital, however senior, is simply not accepted. It is an accreditation list, not a quality ranking.

So two completely different exams run under the same institution's name in Beijing, and people book the wrong one:

The immigrant-visa fees above are the schedule published by the US Department of State for its panel physicians, current as of its February 2026 post supplement; the ¥430 is Beijing's own statutory fee for the entry physical. That is a more than four-fold gap between two exams sharing one institution's name, and the two are not interchangeable in either direction — the residence-permit panel never asks about your childhood immunisation record, and the consular panel does not produce a 体检表.

Two things follow that are specific to being in Beijing:

• Beijing is the second-cheapest of the four, but your interview is in Guangzhou regardless. Adult basic fees run ¥1,700 in Guangzhou, ¥1,831.80 in Beijing, ¥2,000 in Fuzhou, and ¥1,631–2,096 by age band in Shanghai. The real decision is therefore not price — it is whether to sit the exam at home before you fly, or fold it into the interview trip, where the clinic is minutes from the consulate.
• Do not do it early. An immigrant visa's expiry is normally set by the expiry of the medical report, so an exam done months ahead of the interview does not buy you time — it spends the window you have to actually move. Book it against the interview date.

Whichever city you choose, you will be handed a sealed envelope: do not open it, and hand-carry any X-ray films to the port of entry rather than packing them. The national picture — all four clinics with addresses and fees side by side, the full exam contents, the vaccination list, and the e-medical exception to the envelope rule — is in our US immigrant visa medical exam in China guide.

Make the fasting morning count

The ITHC exam is a compliance screen, not a health assessment — it says nothing about your cardiac risk or cancer markers. Since you're already fasting in the city with China's densest concentration of elite hospitals, many new arrivals pair it with a genuine comprehensive checkup in Beijing the same week — see the national cost guide for tiers, and if your employer is also arranging a hire-related screen, note that the pre-employment 入职体检 is a third, separate exam. Whatever you book, ask for results in English so the trip produces something your home doctor can use — and if you already hold a Chinese-language report from an earlier exam, certified translation runs about $20–60 a page.

Frequently asked questions