There is a sweet spot for lodging a Cambodia eVisa: late enough that the 3-month validity still covers your trip, early enough to clear the 3-business-day approval and the separate e-Arrival window without a single stressful night. Here is exactly when to apply.
Apply about 2 to 3 weeks before you fly. That window is late enough that the 3-month validity comfortably covers your travel dates, and early enough to clear the 3-business-day approval with room to fix anything Immigration flags. The eVisa is valid for 3 months from the date it is issued and gives you a 30-day single-entry stay that only starts when you arrive, so there is no benefit to applying months ahead — and a real risk of the validity lapsing before a delayed trip. Keep one date in mind separately: the e-Arrival Card runs on its own 7-day timer and must be submitted within the week before arrival, never earlier.
Apply roughly 2 to 3 weeks before you fly. That single sentence answers the question for the large majority of US travelers, but it hides two moving parts that pull in opposite directions — and getting them backward is the most common timing mistake we see on the applications desk. One part wants you to apply early so you are never racing a deadline. The other wants you to apply late, because the validity clock starts the moment your visa is issued, not the moment you land.
Think of it as a balance. Apply too late and a flagged photo or a passport-number typo can eat into your final days before departure. Apply too early and you risk a delayed or rescheduled trip slipping past the 3-month validity window, which means paying for the whole thing again. The 2-to-3-week window is where those two risks are both small at once. It clears the 3-business-day approval with margin and leaves the validity comfortably intact.
This guide walks through the validity math that sets your earliest sensible apply date, how the 3-business-day clock actually counts, where the separate e-Arrival window fits, and what to do when your dates are fixed and tight. For the full picture on a Cambodia visa for US citizens, start with our main guide; if you want the raw processing numbers first, our guide on how long a Cambodia eVisa takes covers the 3-business-day timing in detail, and you can apply whenever you are ready to lodge.
Here is the part most US travelers get wrong: the Cambodia eVisa is not like a passport you tuck away for a year. It is valid for 3 months from the date it is issued — not from the date you enter. So if you apply and get approved in June, the visa is good for any single entry up to roughly the end of September. Land after that and the document has expired, even if you never used it.
On top of the 3-month validity sits a second, separate clock: your stay. The eVisa is single-entry and grants a 30-day stay that begins the day you cross into Cambodia. The 3 months is your window to use the visa; the 30 days is how long you can remain once you do. Those two numbers are independent, and confusing them is what leads people to either over-apply or panic about a deadline that does not exist.
The practical consequence: there is no reward for applying four or five months ahead of a trip. If your flight is in October, applying in June means the visa could lapse before you even board — and there is no extension on an unused tourist eVisa to rescue it. The earliest sensible apply date is roughly 3 months before your planned entry, and even that is cutting the validity fine if your dates might slip. For a fixed trip, count back from arrival, not from when the idea first occurred to you.
One more wrinkle worth flagging: the tourist auto-extension that used to give travelers extra runway ended in November 2025, so the 30-day stay is now a hard ceiling for tourists, with no in-country grace built in. If your trip is genuinely far out and your dates are uncertain, it is safer to wait. Our guide on how far in advance to apply works through the edge cases for travelers booking months ahead.
Approval lands in 3–5 days. The word that does the work there is business. Weekends do not count, and neither do US public holidays or Cambodian public holidays that fall inside the window. This is the single most underestimated piece of eVisa timing for American travelers, because a quick mental count of "three days" rarely matches what the calendar actually delivers.
A worked example makes it concrete. Lodge your application on a Monday morning and you are typically looking at approval by Thursday — three clean business days. Lodge it on a Friday, and Saturday and Sunday are dead air; the clock effectively resumes Monday and you are looking at the middle of the following week. Add a holiday Monday like Labor Day or Memorial Day and that pushes another day. None of this is a delay in the bad sense — it is simply how business days work, and planning around it removes the surprise.
We always tell US travelers to plan for the approval to land, and then to have at least one spare day after that before they fly. The reason is correction headroom. If Immigration flags something — a photo that needs a cleaner background, a passport scan with glare, a name that does not match the passport exactly — you want time to fix it and resubmit while the trip is still comfortably ahead of you. Resubmission is free if a correction is needed, but it only helps if there is a day left to use it.
So the real math for a fixed departure is: 3–5 days for approval, plus a buffer day, then map that onto a real calendar including weekends and holidays. That is how a "three-day visa" becomes a 2-to-3-week recommendation in practice — not because the processing is slow, but because the buffer is what keeps a small hiccup from becoming a missed flight. If you want to see the full lodge-to-inbox sequence, our step-by-step application walkthrough lays out every field and what each one feeds.
This is where timing gets genuinely counterintuitive, and where careful planners sometimes trip themselves up. The Cambodia e-Arrival Card is a separate, mandatory step for every air arrival — and unlike the visa, you cannot do it early. It must be submitted within the 7 days before you arrive. Lodge it eight or ten days out and the system will not accept it; the window simply has not opened yet.
So the two steps have opposite timing instincts. The visa rewards a small head start — apply 2 to 3 weeks out, clear the 3-business-day clock, relax. The e-Arrival Card punishes a head start — it is the thing you do in the final week, once your flight details are locked. The clean sequence for most US travelers is: visa first, two to three weeks before departure; e-Arrival second, inside the 7-day window once the visa is already in hand.
The e-Arrival Card itself is $5 USD verified through us, 14 fields covering your flight, passport, and arrival details, submitted in that final week. It is short, but the date and flight-number fields are exactly the kind of thing a tired traveler fat-fingers the night before a long-haul. Doing it a few days before you fly — not the morning of — gives you a calm moment to check it against your boarding details rather than fixing it in a check-in line.
A useful way to hold both timers in your head: the visa is a two-to-three-week-out task, the e-Arrival is a final-week task, and they never overlap. If you want the field-by-field detail before you start, our guide on how to fill out the e-Arrival Card walks through each of the 14 entries and the formats Immigration expects.
Two things stretch the timeline beyond the standard 3–5 days, and both are predictable. The first is Cambodian public holidays — Khmer New Year in mid-April and Pchum Ben in the fall are the big ones, when processing offices slow down and the business-day count effectively pauses. If your trip lands near either, add a few extra days to your buffer and apply at the earlier end of the window. The second is your own home-side timing: US holiday weekends do not stop Cambodian processing, but they can affect when you sit down to apply, so plan the lodge date deliberately rather than leaving it to a busy pre-trip evening.
Peak booking season — the December-to-February dry season and the summer family-travel months — does not change the 3-business-day standard, but it does mean more travelers are in the queue and more of them are making the same avoidable photo and passport mistakes. The fix is not to apply earlier than the validity allows; it is to apply within the sensible window and get the upload right the first time so you never touch the correction loop at all.
If your trip is days away, the eVisa is still very much doable — the 3-business-day approval is reliable, and plenty of US travelers lodge with a week or less to spare and fly without drama. The risk is purely the lack of a cushion. Inside 3–5 days of your flight, there is no room left for a correction round, so everything has to be right on the first submission. Use a clean photo against a plain background, match the name to your passport exactly, and double-check the passport number before you pay.
If you are right up against the wire, do not guess at the timeline — our last-minute Cambodia visa guide covers exactly what is realistic inside a tight window and how to give a rushed application the best chance of clearing on the first pass.
Pull it all together and the timeline is simple to run. Count back from your arrival date, not from today. Roughly 2 to 3 weeks out, lodge the eVisa — that clears the 3-business-day approval with a comfortable buffer and keeps the 3-month validity well within reach. Once it is approved and the PDF is in your inbox, print a copy and set it aside. Then, in the final week before you fly, submit the e-Arrival Card inside its 7-day window with your locked flight details. Visa first and early-ish, e-Arrival second and late. That order is the whole game.
Get the order right and the whole process is calm: a Tourist eVisa at $80 USD or a Business eVisa at $90 USD, approved in 3–5 days, delivered as a printable PDF by email, with free resubmission if Immigration flags a correction and US-timezone support if you get stuck. When your dates are set, apply for your Cambodia eVisa, then put the e-Arrival reminder in your calendar for the week before you fly.
Did this guide help you?
যদি আপনার কম্বোডিয়া ভ্রমণ ৩০ দিনের বেশি হয়, তাহলে আপনি যে ভিসায় প্রবেশ করবেন তা সবকিছু নির্ধারণ করে। Tourist eVisa (Type T) কঠোরভাবে ৩০ দিনে সীমাবদ্ধ এবং কোনো মেয়াদ বাড়ানো যায় না। Business eVisa (Type E) একমাত্র শ্রেণী যা দেশের মধ্যে বাড়ানো যায় — ১, ৩, ৬, বা ১২ মাসের জন্য। আমেরিকানরা উড়ে যাওয়ার আগে কীভাবে সঠিকভাবে বেছে নেবেন তা এখানে।
Three things cross the counter at Cambodia Immigration: your US passport, your eVisa, and your e-Arrival QR code. Here is exactly what the officer wants to see, in what order, and the small mismatches that turn a 30-second stamp into a side-desk detour at KTI.
With every Thailand–Cambodia land border still closed, Bavet is now the main overland way into Cambodia from Vietnam. Six hours from Ho Chi Minh City, one printed eVisa, no e-Arrival Card — here is how US citizens actually do it in 2026.
