Cambodia eVisa Name Mismatch Fix for Australians: 2026 MRZ-Matching Guide

The rejection most Aussies don't even understand until they read it twice

A name-mismatch rejection email is the one that confuses Australian applicants more than any other. The other rejection reasons read like obvious problems — your photo had glasses, your passport is too close to expiry, you typed the date in the wrong order. But "the name on your application does not match your passport" lands with the same reaction every time: it does match. You typed your name. You spelled it the way you have spelled it your entire life. So what is the system actually flagging?

The answer is the MRZ — the machine-readable zone. Those two lines of capital letters, numbers, and angle-bracket symbols at the very bottom of your passport's photo page. Cambodian Immigration's automated system does not read the printed name on the page the way you do. It scans the MRZ, character by character, and treats any deviation as a flag. The printed name above the MRZ is for humans. The MRZ is for machines, and Cambodian Immigration's machine is the one that matters at the application stage.

MRZ mismatches account for around 10% of Australian eVisa rejections — the third most common cause after photo issues and passport-validity problems. They are also the easiest to fix once you understand what is actually happening. This guide walks through the five common Australian patterns where the MRZ trips people up, how to read your own MRZ in 30 seconds, how to retype the application name to match, and the free-resubmission path through us. If you have just landed on this page after a different rejection, the wider Cambodia eVisa rejection guide for Australians covers every common cause.

What the MRZ actually is, and why it controls everything

Open your Australian passport to the photo page — the one with your name, your photo, the embossed coat of arms, and your date of birth. Look at the very bottom of that page. You will see two long lines of capital letters and numbers interrupted by angle-bracket characters like `<` and `<<`. That is the MRZ. It is an ICAO-standard format used by every passport-issuing country in the world, and it contains the same information as the printed page above it — but encoded for optical character recognition.

The first line starts with `P<AUS` (P for passport, AUS for Australia) and then contains your surname, two angle-brackets as a separator, your given names, and the rest filled with `<` symbols up to the line length. The second line carries your passport number, nationality code, date of birth, sex, expiry date, and a couple of check digits. When Cambodian Immigration's system processes your application, it lifts your name out of that first line and compares it character-by-character to what you typed into the application form. Any deviation — a missing middle name, an apostrophe that DFAT dropped at passport issue, a hyphen the MRZ kept that you typed as a space — fires a mismatch flag.

Five patterns account for almost every Australian MRZ-mismatch rejection. Each one is rooted in the way DFAT encoded a quirk of your real-world name into the MRZ — and the way that encoding does not match how you naturally type your name into a web form in 2026. The MRZ was designed in the 1980s by ICAO for early optical scanners that could only handle a restricted A-Z and 0-9 character set, with `<` as the universal filler and separator. Australian passports follow that same standard to this day, which is why a perfectly modern 2025-issued Aussie passport still has a 1980s-era encoding sitting at the bottom of the bio page. Here are the five common Aussie patterns, with the real-world name, what the MRZ contains, and what to type on the application to clear the flag.

Hyphenated surnames

Hyphenated surnames are the single most common MRZ-mismatch source for Australians, and they trip up double-barrelled families almost every time. The MRZ does not consistently keep hyphens — DFAT's encoder usually converts a hyphen into either a single `<` separator or nothing at all, depending on the issue date and the specific passport batch. So Olivia Smith-Jones, who naturally types "Smith-Jones" into the application form, ends up with a mismatch because her MRZ reads `SMITH<JONES`. The fix is to type the application name with a space where the hyphen sits, in capitals, exactly matching the MRZ. If your passport happens to have kept the hyphen as a hyphen in the MRZ (rare but it does happen on older passports), then type the hyphen too. The rule is: match the MRZ character-for-character, ignoring the `<` filler at the end.

Recently-married names

Recently-married Australians are the second-most-common MRZ-mismatch pattern, and the trap here is psychological more than technical. You got married, you took your partner's surname socially, you have been signing emails and booking dinners under the new name for six months — but your passport still carries the maiden-side name in the MRZ. The application has to match the passport, not the marriage certificate. Type the name as it appears in the MRZ, which means typing your maiden-side name on the Cambodia eVisa application. If you want the trip to be under your married name on every document, you need to renew the passport with DFAT first, then apply for the visa against the renewed passport. The DFAT name-change passport guide covers the formal process, the documents required, and the typical 3-week turnaround for a standard renewal under a new legal name. There is no middle-ground option where the application uses the married name and the passport keeps the old one — Cambodian Immigration scans the MRZ, full stop.

Apostrophes and special characters

Apostrophes, accents, and other special characters are the third common pattern. DFAT encodes O'Brien as `OBRIEN` in the MRZ — the apostrophe is dropped entirely, not replaced with `<`. Names with accents (like é, ñ, or ü) similarly get stripped to their plain Latin equivalent. So if you naturally type "O'Brien" or "Müller" on the application form, you will trip the MRZ check because the MRZ does not contain those characters at all. The fix is to type the plain MRZ version — `OBRIEN`, `MULLER` — even though it looks wrong to you. Match the machine, not the printed page. The Cambodia eVisa documents required guide for Australians covers what the passport bio page scan itself needs to look like alongside this name-typing rule.

How to read your MRZ and retype the application in 5 minutes

Reading the MRZ is not technical — once you know where to look and what the symbols mean, the whole exercise takes about three minutes. Here is the exact sequence to follow if you have just been rejected for a name mismatch and you want to nail the fix on the first attempt rather than the second.

• Step 1: open your Australian passport flat on a desk, photo page facing up, in good daylight. The MRZ is the two lines at the very bottom of the page, below your photo and signature.
• Step 2: identify the surname block. Line 1 starts `P<AUS` then your surname in capitals. The surname runs until you hit two angle-brackets `<<`, which mark the separator between surname and given names.
• Step 3: identify the given-names block. Immediately after the `<<` separator, your given names appear in capitals, separated by single `<` characters between each name. The block ends when you hit a long run of `<` symbols filling the line out to the standard length.
• Step 4: write out the full name in capitals on a piece of paper or a notes app, with a single space wherever the MRZ has a single `<` between names, and nothing where the MRZ has its `<<` separator (just start the given names after the surname). Drop every `<` filler at the end of the line.
• Step 5: open the resubmission email from us (or the application form if you are pre-submission), and type the name you just wrote out, in capitals, into the surname and given-name fields. Some forms split it into separate fields — put everything up to the `<<` into the surname field, and everything after the `<<` into the given-names field.

That is the whole exercise. Three minutes if your passport is on the desk, five if you have to dig it out of a drawer. The single biggest mistake Aussies make at this stage is omitting a middle name because they never use it day-to-day. If your MRZ says `SMITH<<JOHN<MICHAEL`, the application has to read `SMITH` in the surname field and `JOHN MICHAEL` in the given-names field. Dropping the `MICHAEL` because you only ever go by John will trip the mismatch flag a second time. Include every character the MRZ contains, in the order it contains them.

If you are using our resubmission flow, the easier path is to just reply to the email with the corrected name written out in capitals — we update the field on our side and resubmit, so you do not have to navigate the form a second time. If you are mid-application and have not yet submitted, the Cambodia eVisa application walkthrough for Australians has a screenshot-by-screenshot guide to the name fields.

Fixing it through us vs the direct government portal

Through us, an MRZ-mismatch fix is a 2-minute correction with zero second fee. Our resubmission email names the specific field, often quotes the MRZ line so you can see what the machine read, and tells you exactly what to type. You reply with the corrected name, we update the application on our side, we resubmit to Cambodian Immigration. The new 3-business-day Immigration clock starts the moment the corrected file reaches them, and the typical end-to-end timeline from rejection to approved PDF for an MRZ fix is 1-2 business days because the underlying data on the file is already vetted. The full Cambodia eVisa resubmission guide for Australians covers the wider mechanics across every rejection reason, not just MRZ.

Through the direct government portal, the same fix usually costs another government fee. The portal treats a corrected re-upload as a new application — same form, same uploads, fresh $30 USD tourist or $35 USD business fee, no refund on the original rejection. The portal also does not send the plain-English fix email; the rejection notice is generic and rarely explains that the MRZ was the issue. Plenty of Australian applicants on the direct route read "name does not match passport" three times, decide they have spelled their name correctly because they have spelled it the same way for forty years, and re-submit the identical name a second time — which gets flagged a second time, with a second fee.

The all-in pricing on our side exists precisely because MRZ rejections are common enough that pretending they are not would just hide the cost. Tourist eVisa $80 USD (~$122 AUD) and Business eVisa $90 USD (~$137 AUD) include the resubmission path because, across thousands of Australian applications, about 1 in 10 has an MRZ wrinkle that needs a corrected re-type. Paying once and having that path baked in is almost always cheaper than the direct route once a rejection lands. The break-even is short: a single direct-portal rejection plus a fresh government fee plus the time spent guessing which field was the issue almost always exceeds the gap between the $30 USD government fee and our $80 USD all-in, especially if the trip is time-sensitive and the rejection has eaten into the original buffer.

There is also a quieter reason the all-in price tends to land cheaper for double-barrelled, hyphenated, and recently-married Australian applicants specifically: those are the names DFAT's MRZ encoder handles inconsistently across batches, and those are the names where the auto-flagger trips most often. If your surname has a hyphen, an apostrophe, multiple components, or has changed in the last few years, the probability of an MRZ flag on the direct route runs meaningfully higher than the 10% base rate.

Prevention: how to apply right the first time using the MRZ method

The cleanest version of this whole flow is to never trip the MRZ flag in the first place. The trick is to use the MRZ as your source of truth for the application from the moment you start typing, rather than typing the name the way you usually write it and hoping it lines up. Here is the prevention sequence — about two extra minutes compared to typing on autopilot, and it saves the day or two of resubmission loop entirely.

• Before you start the application: open your passport flat on the desk, photo page up, MRZ visible at the bottom.
• Write the MRZ name out in capitals on a notepad or notes app — surname up to the `<<`, then given names separated by spaces, dropping all the `<` fillers at the end of the line.
• Match it against the printed name on the photo page above. If they look the same, great. If they look different (apostrophe vanished, hyphen became a space, middle name suddenly appeared), the MRZ version is the one the application cares about.
• Type the MRZ version into the application's name fields, in capitals. Most application forms accept capitals natively; some auto-format. Either way, the character sequence matches and the machine clears it.
• Cross-check before submission: read your typed name and the MRZ side by side, character by character, focused on the parts that often differ (hyphens, apostrophes, middle names, accents). If they match, submit.

This prevention method takes the MRZ-mismatch flag from a 1-in-10 risk to a near-zero one, and it is the same method our document-review team uses on every application that comes through us before we send it to Cambodian Immigration. If you also want to pre-empt the second most common Aussie rejection cause — passport-validity issues — the Cambodia eVisa passport validity rules for Australians guide covers the 6-month threshold that catches a meaningful percentage of applicants who cut renewal close.

Putting MRZ matching in context for Aussie travellers

An MRZ-mismatch rejection feels personal because it touches your name, but it is almost always a five-minute encoding issue — a hyphen that DFAT dropped at passport issue, an apostrophe that vanished into the machine-readable zone, a middle name you never use that the system insists you include. Once you see the MRZ for what it is — a literal-string source of truth that the application has to mirror — the rejection becomes the easiest one on the rejection list to fix. Through us, the resubmission is free, the new clock is short, and the trip lands on the original schedule almost every time. The wider Cambodia visa edge cases guide for Australians covers a handful of related quirks (legal-name changes mid-trip, passport-renewal timing, name on the e-Arrival vs the visa) that occasionally come up alongside MRZ issues. The Smartraveller Cambodia advisory is the official safety-net read once the visa is sorted, covering the standing health, safety, and entry context that matters once you land. And for the upstream question of who needs a visa at all, the Do Australians Need a Visa for Cambodia explainer is the clean starting point. The country-specific Cambodia visa for Australian citizens hub page covers eligibility, pricing, and processing time end-to-end if you want one place to bookmark for the trip.

Next steps and related reading for Australians: apply for your Cambodia eVisa when you are ready to lodge, bookmark our Cambodia visa hub for Australian citizens as the single canonical reference, skim the FAQ on Cambodia visa eligibility for quick answers, and use our glossary of Cambodia visa terms to decode any acronym in this guide.