A Cambodia visa overstay costs US travelers $10 per day, charged in cash at the airport when you leave. Here is exactly how the per-day fine works, how it escalates past the cheap zone, and how to make sure you never pay a cent of it in 2026.

Cambodia charges US citizens a visa overstay fine of $10 USD per day, collected in cash at the airport Immigration counter on the day you leave. A 3-day overstay costs $30, a week costs $70, and the meter keeps running for every day past your 30-day stay. This per-day fee applies to short overstays. Once an overstay runs long — roughly past 30 days — Cambodian Immigration can stop treating it as a fee and start treating it as an immigration offense, which opens the door to detention, deportation at your own cost, and a ban on returning. Your 30-day stay is counted from the day you enter, single entry, and the tourist auto-extension ended in November 2025, so the only legal way to stay longer is a Business eVisa you can extend in-country. The reliable way to pay nothing is to count your days from the entry stamp and leave on time.
A Cambodia visa overstay costs a US traveler $10 USD per day. You do not pay it when you arrive and you do not pay it online — it is collected in cash at the Immigration counter at the airport on the day you fly out. Stay three days past your 30-day limit and the officer adds $30 to your departure. Stay a week over and it is $70. The meter is simple, it is per day, and for a short overstay that is genuinely the whole story.
Where it stops being simple is duration. A day or two over your stay is an administrative fee that you settle at the counter and forget. A month over is no longer a fee — it is an immigration offense, and the consequences shift from a line on a receipt to detention, deportation paid out of your own pocket, and a flag against your passport that can block you from coming back. The difference between those two outcomes is entirely about how many days you let slide, which is exactly why this guide leads with the number and then shows you where the number stops mattering.
Below you will find the exact per-day cost, how the fine escalates from a fee into a serious problem, where your 30-day clock actually starts, and the cheapest move of all — never triggering the fine in the first place. The short version: count your days from the entry stamp, not the eVisa issue date. If you are still planning the trip, our guide to how long US citizens can stay in Cambodia sets the baseline this whole article is built on, and you can always apply online when you are ready.
The overstay fine is charged at $10 USD for each day you remain in Cambodia past the last valid day of your stay. It is calculated by counting calendar days, not business days, so weekends and Cambodian public holidays still count against you. The officer at the departure counter checks your entry stamp against the date on your boarding pass, does the subtraction, and tells you what you owe before they let you through.
There is no online portal for the overstay fine and no card terminal at the Immigration desk. You pay in US dollars in cash, which is the working currency at Cambodian airports, and you pay it at the moment you are trying to leave. That timing matters: an overstay you have not planned for can mean scrambling for an ATM in the departures hall while your flight boards. Travelers who realize mid-trip that they are going to run over should set the cash aside early rather than discover the bill at the worst possible moment.
A short overstay does not get you arrested, banned, or marked as a problem traveler. For a handful of days, Cambodian Immigration treats it as a routine fee — you pay, the officer notes it, and you board. Thousands of travelers each year miscount by a day or two, settle the fee, and never think about it again. The system is built to let small overstays resolve themselves at the counter without drama.
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The Cambodia e-Arrival Card is a separate step from your eVisa, and a small one — $5 USD verified through us, 14 fields, filed within 7 days before you fly. Here is exactly what that fee covers, why it is not bundled into your visa price, and the timing that keeps you moving at the gate.
The Cambodia e-Arrival Card is 14 fields across three sections, filed within 7 days before you land. Here is exactly what each field wants, in the order the form asks for it, plus the date-format slip that flags US travelers at the kiosk.
The Cambodia e-Arrival Card asks for 14 pieces of information across three sections — your identity, your flight and stay, and a short customs declaration. Here is exactly what each field wants and the four things to have in front of you before you start.
The $10-per-day number can lull you into thinking an overstay is always just math. It is not. There is a threshold — in practice somewhere around the 30-day mark — where Cambodian Immigration stops treating your overstay as a fee to collect and starts treating it as an offense to act on. Past that line, the cost is no longer measured in dollars per day.
A long overstay can lead to detention at the airport while your case is processed, deportation at your own expense, and an entry ban that keeps you out of Cambodia for a stretch of years. None of that is automatic at day 31, and there is no published bright line you can game — the point is that the longer you stay, the more discretion an officer has to escalate, and the worse the downside gets. By the time an overstay is measured in weeks, you are no longer negotiating a fee; you are hoping an immigration officer chooses leniency.
For US citizens, a serious overstay also pulls in the US Embassy in Phnom Penh, which can help with a replacement passport or welfare contact but cannot waive a Cambodian fine, reverse a deportation, or lift a re-entry ban — those are entirely Cambodia's call. The practical takeaway is that a short overstay is a cash inconvenience and a long overstay is a genuine travel emergency, so the moment you realize you might run long, the right move is to fix your stay legally rather than let the days accumulate. If your trip is open-ended, our guide on whether you can still extend a Cambodia tourist visa explains why the answer changed in late 2025.
The single most common reason Americans overstay by accident is mixing up two different dates: when the eVisa is valid until, and how long you are allowed to stay. They are not the same number, and confusing them is how a careful traveler ends up at the counter owing a fine they never saw coming.
Your Cambodia eVisa is valid for 3 months from the date it is issued. That is the window in which you must enter the country. But the moment you enter, a separate 30-day stay clock starts — and that 30-day stay is what an overstay fine measures against. The 3-month validity is your deadline to arrive; the 30 days is your deadline to leave. An American who enters on the last day of the 3-month window still gets a full 30-day stay from that entry date. Both visa types are single entry, so leaving and coming back does not reset the clock — it ends the visa.
The number that matters for overstay purposes is the entry stamp in your passport. Count 30 days from that stamp and that is your last legal day. Do not count from your eVisa email, your flight booking, or the day you applied. Because the eVisa is single entry, there is no re-entry buffer and no grace period built into the stay — day 31 is an overstay even if your eVisa technically still shows months of validity left. Our breakdown of single-entry versus multiple-entry Cambodia visas for Americans explains why that single-entry rule is the trap that catches the most travelers.
Validity is not the same as your stay
Your eVisa is valid 3 months from issue — that is when you can arrive. Your stay is a hard 30 days from the day you enter — that is when you must leave. The overstay fine counts against your 30-day stay, not the 3-month validity. If you only remember one thing from this article, make it this one.
The cheapest overstay fine is the one you never trigger. Avoiding it costs nothing and takes about two minutes of planning, and it comes down to four habits that returning travelers learn fast and first-timers usually learn the hard way.
If you already know your trip might run long, the fix is to plan for length before you leave home rather than improvise at day 28. A Business eVisa can be extended in-country for 1, 3, 6, or 12 months, and arranging that extension is dramatically cheaper and calmer than an overstay that tips into offense territory. Our Cambodia visa extension cost guide for Americans lays out what each extension path actually costs, so you can compare it against the $10-per-day meter and the risk that sits behind it.
For most vacationers, none of this is a problem — a 30-day stay is far longer than a typical Cambodia trip, and a phone reminder is all the protection you need. The travelers who get caught are the ones who picked a Tourist eVisa for an open-ended trip, then realized too late that the 30-day ceiling was firm. Choosing correctly at the start removes the whole question. When you are ready, you can apply online in about ten minutes, and for the complete set of entry rules and fees our Cambodia visa cost guide for Americans is the canonical reference.
Next steps and related reading for Americans: apply for your Cambodia eVisa when you are ready to lodge, bookmark our Cambodia visa guide for United States citizens as the single canonical reference, skim the FAQ on Cambodia visa cost for quick answers, and use our glossary of Cambodia visa terms to decode any acronym in this guide.