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The e-Arrival Card is not your visa — here is the difference

This is the single most important thing to get straight, because filing the e-Arrival Card and skipping the eVisa is how Americans get turned away. They are two different documents that do two different jobs, and Cambodian Immigration checks for both.

Your eVisa is your permission to enter Cambodia. It is the document that says the government has approved you to come, for how long, and for what purpose. As a US citizen you apply online for it ahead of time, it is approved in 3 business days, and it arrives as a printable PDF by email. Your e-Arrival Card is your arrival declaration — it tells Immigration and customs who is landing, on which flight, where you are staying, and whether you have anything to declare. One is approval to come; the other is the paperwork of actually showing up.

A useful way to hold it in your head: the eVisa is the ticket, the e-Arrival Card is the boarding announcement. You cannot board on the announcement alone, and the ticket without checking in does not get you through the gate. You need both, in that order — eVisa approved first, e-Arrival Card filed in the final week before you fly.

If you have an approved eVisa already and you are only here to sort the arrival side, the good news is the hard part is done. The e-Arrival Card is the lighter of the two. Our walkthrough on whether you need the e-Arrival Card with a Cambodia eVisa settles the "do I really need both?" question for good, and it is a firm yes.

What the e-Arrival Card actually asks: the 14 fields

The e-Arrival Card is 14 fields, and that is the whole thing. It is short enough that the temptation is to rush it — which is exactly where the avoidable slips happen. The fields break into three sections: who you are, how you are arriving, and what you are bringing in.

Section 1 — Your identity

Your full name exactly as printed on your US passport, your passport number, your nationality, your date of birth, and your sex. The watchword here is "exactly as printed." If your passport reads your name one way and you type it another — a dropped middle name, a maiden name, a typo in the passport number — the card can fail to match your eVisa, and matching is what gets you through the kiosk quickly.

Section 2 — Your flight and stay

Your inbound flight number, your date of arrival, the port you are arriving at, and the address where you will stay in Cambodia. A hotel name and city is enough for the address — you do not need a booking reference or a confirmation PDF. The flight number and arrival date have to be right, because this is the part Immigration cross-checks against the manifest. Americans connecting through Bangkok, Singapore, or Seoul should enter the final leg into Cambodia, not their US departure flight.

Section 3 — Customs declaration

A short set of yes/no customs and health questions — whether you are carrying currency over the declarable threshold, restricted goods, and so on. For the typical US tourist or business traveler the honest answer to all of them is no, and that is fine. These are the same questions that used to be on the paper card; nothing here is a trap, it just has to be answered truthfully.

That is the full shape of it — three sections, 14 fields, no documents to upload beyond the passport details you type in. If you want each field walked through one at a time before you sit down to file, our guide on the information you need for the Cambodia e-Arrival Card goes field by field, and the step-by-step on how to fill out the e-Arrival Card shows the order the form presents them.

When to file it: the 7-day window that catches people out

The e-Arrival Card has a timing rule that is the mirror image of the eVisa, and getting it backward is the most common scheduling mistake Americans make. You file the e-Arrival Card within the 7 days before you arrive — not months ahead, the way you do the visa. File it too early and the system will not accept it yet.

So the natural rhythm of a US trip looks like this: apply for your eVisa weeks ahead, let it land in your inbox as a PDF, and forget about it. Then, in the week before you fly, file the e-Arrival Card. A good anchor is to do it the same day you check in online for your flight, or the day before you leave — by then your flight details are locked, which means you can enter them correctly the first time.

The reason the window matters is that the card is tied to a specific arrival. Cambodian Immigration wants a current declaration for the flight you are actually on, with the flight number and date that match the manifest. A card filed three months out against a flight you had not booked yet is useless to them. Seven days out, your plans are real, and the data holds.

For Americans, the practical trap is the date. The form uses a day-month-year layout in places, and US travelers default to month-day-year. Enter 06/07 thinking July 6th when the system reads June 7th, and your arrival date is suddenly a month off — which is the single most common reason a US-filed card gets flagged at the kiosk. It is a five-second mistake that costs you a trip back to the queue.

How Americans get both sorted without a kiosk surprise

Here is the clean sequence. First, get your eVisa approved — Tourist $80 USD or Business $90 USD, both delivered as a printable PDF by email in 3 business days, both with free resubmission if Immigration flags a correction. Our complete guide to the Cambodia visa for US citizens walks the whole approval side end to end. Print it or save it offline so you have it at the gate. That is your permission to enter handled.

Second, in the week before you fly, file the e-Arrival Card. When you file a verified card through us for $5 USD, it is checked end-to-end before it reaches Cambodian Immigration — name spelling against your passport, flight number against your final leg, and the date format that catches so many Americans out. The single date-format slip that sends travelers back to the queue is exactly the kind of thing that check is built to catch.

Two documents, two timelines, one trip. The eVisa is the big one and you do it first; the e-Arrival Card is the light one and you do it last. Americans who plan for both at the start sail through arrivals, while the ones who treat the e-Arrival Card as an afterthought are the ones improvising at the kiosk. If the small fee raised an eyebrow, our breakdown of the Cambodia e-Arrival Card fee for Americans explains exactly what the $5 covers and why it sits separate from the visa.

Next steps and related reading for US travelers: file your verified e-Arrival Card when your flight is locked in, read the full Cambodia visa requirements for US citizens if you have not started the visa yet, walk through how to fill out the e-Arrival Card field by field, and check exactly what information you need for the e-Arrival Card before you sit down to file.