Apply online before you fly. For US travelers in 2026, the Cambodia eVisa lands as a printable PDF in 3 business days, clears the airline gate cleanly, and lets you walk straight to Immigration — while the on-arrival counter is a slower, riskier fallback that only exists at a few airports.
Apply for the Cambodia eVisa online before you fly. For US citizens in 2026 the eVisa is the cleaner, safer route: it is approved in 3 business days, delivered as a printable PDF by email, and it clears the airline gate in the United States so you are never at risk of being denied boarding. The on-arrival counter still exists at the open international airports, but it is a fallback — you queue after a long-haul flight, the cost is comparable, and it does not exist at any land border. The Tourist eVisa is $80 USD all-in and the Business eVisa is $90 USD all-in, both approved in 3 business days. Sorting the visa before you leave home removes the single biggest variable from your arrival.
For years, US travelers heading to Cambodia treated the visa as something to sort at the airport — land, queue, pay, get a sticker, move on. That habit is exactly why the eVisa-versus-on-arrival question still comes up. But the ground has shifted under that old advice, and in 2026 the two routes are not the even trade-off they once looked like. One of them removes risk before you leave home; the other adds a queue at the most tired moment of your trip.
Three things changed the calculus. The Phnom Penh airport moved — the new Techo International Airport (KTI) replaced the old PNH on 9 September 2025, and the arrival flow there is built around travelers who already have their paperwork. Every air arrival now files a separate e-Arrival Card in the week before flying, regardless of how the visa was obtained. And all seven Thailand-Cambodia land borders have been closed since June 2025, which quietly killed the overland route that on-arrival visas used to serve. The practical upshot: the case for applying online first is stronger than it has ever been.
This guide lays out both routes honestly — what the on-arrival counter actually is, where it exists, what it costs, and why the eVisa wins for almost every American traveler in 2026. If you are still working out whether you even need a visa at all, start with do US citizens need a visa for Cambodia, and if your plan involved crossing from Thailand, read the Cambodia-Thailand land border status before you book. For the full reference on cost, documents, and processing, the Cambodia visa for United States citizens hub pulls it together.
The two routes lead to the same place — a Cambodia tourist or business visa in your passport — but the journey to get there is very different, and the difference is almost entirely about when and where you do the work.
The eVisa is the online route. You complete a short application from home, upload a passport scan and a photo, pay, and the approved visa arrives as a PDF in your email within 3 business days. You print it, carry it, and present it at the airline gate and again at Cambodian Immigration. The whole transaction is finished before you ever pack a bag, which means your arrival in Cambodia is just walk, present, stamp, go. The Tourist eVisa is $80 USD all-in; the Business eVisa is $90 USD all-in.
The visa on arrival is the old-school route: you land in Cambodia with no visa, walk to a dedicated counter in the arrivals hall, fill in a paper form, hand over a passport photo and cash, and wait for an officer to process and stamp you. It exists only at the open international airports — KTI in Phnom Penh, SAI in Siem Reap-Angkor, and KOS in Sihanoukville. It is a real option, but it is a fallback, not the default, and the rest of this guide explains why.
The single most important thing to understand is that the on-arrival counter does not exist everywhere. It is an airport-only service. There is no on-arrival option at any of the land borders, and the airline check-in agent in the United States can still refuse to board you if you show up with no visa and no eVisa PDF — because they are the ones penalized if Cambodia turns you away. The eligible entry points guide maps exactly which airports and crossings work for US travelers in 2026.
Here is the comparison for US citizens choosing between the two routes in 2026. The rows that decide it for most travelers are the bottom three — where it works, boarding risk, and what happens if something goes wrong.
Read down that table and the pattern is hard to miss. The eVisa front-loads all the effort to a calm moment at your kitchen table, where a flagged photo or a typo is a five-minute fix with free resubmission. The visa on arrival pushes every one of those same steps to the worst possible moment — standing in a queue after a 20-hour journey, with a flight crew gone home and a hotel transfer waiting.
The price difference is not the deciding factor people expect. The on-arrival counter is not a discount route — you still pay a real fee, in cash, on the day. What the eVisa buys you for a comparable price is certainty: you know you are getting in before you board, and you are not depending on the counter being staffed, the card terminal working, or your cash being the right currency. If the money is what is driving the question, the breakdown of why the eVisa is cheaper than visa on arrival lays out the real numbers side by side.
The case for the eVisa is not about saving a few dollars. It is about removing the variables that turn a long-haul arrival into a problem. Here is what applying online before you fly actually protects you from.
None of this is hypothetical. The travelers who run into trouble at KTI are almost always the ones who assumed the counter would be quick and frictionless. The ones who breeze through are the ones holding a printed PDF. If you want to see the exact sequence — form, upload, payment, approval — the step-by-step application walkthrough takes about ten minutes from start to finish.
Honesty matters here, so here is the narrow set of situations where a US traveler might genuinely reach for the on-arrival counter — and why even those cases usually still point back to applying online.
The classic argument is the true last-minute trip. If you are flying in less than 3 business days and the eVisa processing window does not fit, the counter looks like the only option. But this is rarer than it sounds for Americans, because the bottleneck is usually the US end of the journey — booking the flight, getting to the airport — not the visa. If you have a flight booked, you almost always have time to apply online before you fly, and applying online means you also clear the boarding gate cleanly. The counter only helps if you are genuinely inside the processing window with a confirmed seat, which is an unusual corner.
The other argument is "I have always done it that way." Plenty of Americans who traveled to Cambodia before the pandemic remember the on-arrival sticker as routine. It still works at the three open airports, so the muscle memory is not wrong — it is just no longer the smart default. The new KTI arrival flow, the mandatory e-Arrival Card, and the closed land borders all reward travelers who arrive with the visa already in hand.
There is no land-border version of this conversation at all. With all seven Thailand-Cambodia crossings closed since June 2025, the only realistic overland entries are from Vietnam at Bavet or from Laos at Tropaeng Kreal — and those crossings do not run a tourist on-arrival counter for Americans either. If your trip was ever going to involve a Bangkok-to-Siem Reap land hop, it is worth checking which airport or port of entry you can actually use before you book, because an eVisa flown in is the answer.
Bangkok est ouverte, Siem Reap est fermée — mais la frontière terrestre est fermée.
Lisez la mise à jour de 2026 →Association classique en Indochine. Comparez les coûts des visas.
Comparez les coûts →For almost every American flying to Cambodia in 2026, the decision is settled before it starts: apply for the eVisa online first. The Tourist eVisa is $80 USD all-in and the Business eVisa is $90 USD all-in, both approved in 3 business days, both delivered as a printable PDF by email, both with free resubmission if Immigration flags a correction and US-timezone support if you get stuck. You clear the boarding gate cleanly, you skip the arrivals counter, and you remove the one variable most likely to derail a long-haul arrival.
The on-arrival counter is not a trap, and it is not a scam — it is simply a slower, riskier fallback that made more sense in a world with open land borders and no mandatory e-Arrival Card. That world ended in 2025. Today the counter costs about the same, exists at fewer places, and pushes all the work to your most tired moment. There is no upside left that the eVisa does not beat.
Next steps and related reading for US citizens: apply for your Cambodia eVisa when you are ready to lodge, bookmark the Cambodia visa for United States citizens hub as your single canonical reference, confirm which airports and crossings you can actually use, and check the land-border status if your route ever touched Thailand.
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