Flights from Lagos to Nairobi (LOS-NBO): Airlines, USD Fares

Flights Lagos -> Nairobi (LOS-NBO) — USD Fares, Airlines, Frequency

7 scheduled departures a week link Lagos (LOS) in Nigeria with Nairobi (NBO) — roughly one a day — flown by 2 catalogued carriers at a scheduled block time near 5.5 hours. Our catalogue scores corridor demand 7/10 and files it as an intra-Africa + Gulf hub transit corridor.

Lagos to Nairobi connects Nigeria with Kenya, the largest economies of West and East Africa, with around 7 flights a week, one a day. The route carries business travellers, traders and passengers connecting onward across the continent. Block time is about five and a half hours.

Great-circle distance Lagos–Nairobi is about 3,832 km, computed from the stored coordinates of LOS (6.58, 3.32) and NBO (-1.32, 36.93). What the figure fixes is the sector profile — 3,832 km against a scheduled 5.5-hour block time — and the fuel-and-crew economics behind the fare floor. It does not fix a compensation amount. No fixed-tariff compensation scheme reaches LOS–NBO. EU261 and UK261 do band by distance, but they only cover flights departing an EU/EEA or UK airport — plus arrivals there on a bloc-licensed carrier — and neither endpoint here is one, whoever operates the flight. The Montreal Convention 1999 is what applies, and it pays provable loss, not a tariff.

Airlines on this route

2 carriers operate LOS–NBO: Kenya Airways (KQ) and Ethiopian Airlines (ET). Our carrier table records checked-baggage baselines of 23 kg; the group spans SkyTeam and Star Alliance. That mix decides three things — the fare floor, whether your bag is through-checked on a connection, and which delay regulation covers you.

Two carriers fly LOS-NBO: Kenya Airways and Ethiopian Airlines, both full-service with a checked baggage allowance and meals included. Both feed wide onward networks from their East African hubs.

The LOS–NBO carriers do not share one alliance — SkyTeam and Star Alliance are represented — and that has a concrete consequence. Mileage earning and lounge access do not carry across the split, and more importantly a connection built across two of these airlines is only through-checked when the two tickets are issued as one. Two separate confirmations mean you collect the bag, clear immigration where required, and check in again — and a missed second flight is your cost, not the airline’s.

USD fares — LOS-NBO

$712 is the lowest one-way economy price the Travelpayouts feed returned for LOS–NBO on WB, for a 2026-08-07T14:45:00+01:00 departure. That is a single cached observation on this one corridor — not a low across the site’s fare cache, and not a live price — so read it as an observed floor for LOS–NBO on that date.

LOS-NBO fares rise around the December holidays and major regional events. For the busiest periods, booking two to three months ahead is sensible. Outside the peaks, four to seven weeks usually secures a reasonable economy fare in USD.

Across the 1 departure month our cache holds a one-way low for, the cheapest reading on LOS–NBO is $492 for a Aug 2026 departure and the dearest is $492 for Aug 2026 — a spread of $0 between the best and worst month in the same cache. Month-to-month movement of that size is normal on this corridor and is usually worth more than any single booking trick.

LOS–NBO fare history — 2026-W20 to 2026-W24

3 weekly readings between 2026-W20 and 2026-W24 put the cached LOS–NBO low between $413 and $815 — a $402 spread, 97% of the cheapest reading. The low landed in 2026-W23; the most recent reading, 2026-W24, was $420. Each row is one weekly snapshot of the cheapest published quote, not an average of everything sold that week.

The cached low fell 48% between the first and last reading, from $815 to $420. Read it with the sample size in front of you: 3 observations over a ten-week window is a signal about this corridor’s volatility, not a forecast. What it does establish is a defensible floor — you now know $413 was achievable on LOS–NBO inside the window, so a quote well above $815 is worth a second search.

Carriers behind the readings: KP. Where a row shows a dash the gate returned no carrier code with the quote, which usually means a multi-carrier or agency-issued itinerary. Do not read a carrier name here as that airline’s own published fare — it is the marketing carrier on the cheapest itinerary a gate had loaded that week.

Do you need a visa to fly LOS–NBO?

1 entry route applies to most African passports for Kenya: eTA (electronic Travel Authorisation) — replaced visa-on-arrival in January 2024. Fee $30 USD; maximum stay Up to 90 days as decided at port of entry. That row is compiled on a South African (ZA) passport and was verified 2026-05-18, so check it against your own passport on the linked government portal before booking.

Worth knowing before you book: EAC nationals (Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, DRC) enter free. Apply at least 3 days before travel.

The trap on LOS–NBO is not usually the destination visa — it is the transit. A connection can put you airside in a third country that requires a transit visa for your nationality even though you never leave the terminal, and airlines deny boarding at origin when documentation for the whole itinerary is not in order. Check every country your ticket touches, not just Kenya, and check it against your own passport rather than a fellow traveller’s.

Search live fares

7 weekly departures across 2 carriers mean a live LOS–NBO search returns several price points for the same day; our cached floor for the corridor is $712. Scheduled nonstop block time is 5.5 hours, so any result far above that is connecting whatever the screen says.

Search LOS -> NBO on Aviasales ->

Comparing LOS–NBO quotes fairly takes three corrections. Passenger count and cabin have to match across the tabs you are comparing. Elapsed time has to be read beside the price, since a connection can add most of a day to the 5.5-hour nonstop. And the baggage line has to be checked, because the cheapest fare family is usually the one carrying the least.

If anything about your LOS–NBO trip can move, make it the dates. The gap between the cheapest and dearest departure month in our own fare log is routinely larger than any difference between one booking site and another. Fixed dates put you in competition with everyone else holding the same date, and the answer there is to book early rather than to keep looking.

About Nairobi

6 catalogued corridors in this site’s data reach Nairobi (NBO), Jomo Kenyatta International, ICAO HKJK, from 6 catalogued origins and 5 carriers in total. That count is this site’s coverage of Nairobi, not the airport’s published schedule. Each of those corridors has its own guide with carriers, weekly frequency, scheduled block time and whatever the fare cache holds.

Nairobi is the capital of Kenya and one of the main economic and transport centres of East Africa. For travellers from Lagos it is a business and trade destination, linking the major economies of West and East Africa.

Beyond LOS, our catalogue reaches Nairobi from 5 other origins: Cairo (CAI), Dar es Salaam (DAR), Entebbe (EBB), Johannesburg (JNB) and Kigali (KGL). That matters when the LOS–NBO fare is unattractive: on a continent where positioning flights are cheap, flying out of a different gateway is a real option, and each of those corridors has its own guide, carriers and cached fare floor on this site.

Nairobi is a based hub for Kenya Airways. A hub airport behaves differently from an outstation: connecting banks are built around it, spare aircraft and crew sit there, and a disruption is far more likely to be recovered the same day. It also means the hub carrier usually sets the price on routes into NBO, and competitors price against it rather than the other way round.

FAQ

Which airlines fly Lagos to Nairobi? Direct LOS-NBO flights are operated by Kenya Airways, Ethiopian Airlines. Compare baggage baseline and alliance in the carrier table above.

How long is the LOS-NBO flight and how often does it run? Block time is about 5.5 hours. The LOS-NBO route runs roughly 7 flights per week across all carriers.

How much does a LOS-NBO flight cost and when is it cheapest? Typical economy fares sit in the $400-900 USD band. Intra-Africa and Gulf-hub transit fares move week-to-week; 4-8 weeks is the typical sweet spot.

What is the checked baggage allowance on LOS-NBO? It varies by carrier and fare class — see the baggage-baseline column in the carrier table above. Full-service carriers usually include 23-30 kg, while low-cost carriers sell it as an add-on. Confirm on the airline’s site before booking.

What currency is used in Nairobi? Nairobi uses USD. Fares in this guide are quoted in USD; budget on-the-ground spending in USD.

Related routes and reading

2 related pages follow, each chosen because it shares an endpoint, a carrier or an audience cluster with LOS–NBO — not because of a keyword match. The annotations say what each one adds, so the ones that do not apply to your trip can be skipped.

• Lagos airport (LOS) — Murtala Muhammed International, Nigeria: 19 catalogued departure corridors and 2 arrival corridors.
• Nairobi airport (NBO) — Jomo Kenyatta International, Kenya: 19 catalogued departure corridors and 6 arrival corridors.

The relationship behind each link is structural: a common origin or destination airport, a common operating carrier, a common country, or the same audience cluster in our segmentation. No keyword matching is involved, so an unexpected entry here usually means a shared hub or a shared airline rather than a shared destination.

The corridor links are there to be used as alternatives, not as further reading. If the LOS–NBO fare or schedule does not work, a different African gateway to Nairobi is often the better fix — positioning within the continent is cheap relative to the long-haul sector, and the fare gap between two origins to the same destination is regularly wider than the positioning ticket. The catch is that separately issued sectors carry no protection if the first one runs late.