Cambodia eVisa Rejected for MRZ Mismatch — How Australians Fix It Fast

Why MRZ mismatches hit Australian applicants more than most

An MRZ-mismatch rejection feels nit-picky the first time you see it. You typed your own name — the same name you have used since you were five — and Cambodian Immigration has thrown it back. The frustration is real, but the reason is mechanical, not personal. The Cambodian eVisa portal does not store your name as free text. It compares what you typed against the bottom two lines of your passport, line by line, character by character. If even one letter is different — one missing middle name, one apostrophe dropped, one hyphen turned into a space — the comparison fails and the file bounces.

Australians get caught by this disproportionately for three reasons. First, Aussie surnames love hyphens — Sullivan-Hayes, Maguire-Cooper, Nguyen-Williams. The DFAT passport printer has a fixed field width, so longer hyphenated surnames sometimes truncate or drop the hyphen entirely. Second, double-barrelled given names — Mary-Anne, Jean-Luc, John-Paul — get squashed for the same reason. Third, apostrophes in Irish-heritage surnames (O'Brien, O'Donnell, D'Arcy) sometimes survive on the visible bio page but drop out of the MRZ where only A-Z and angle-brackets are allowed.

This guide shows you how to read your own MRZ in under a minute, how to copy your name into the eVisa application so it matches every time, and how the free-resubmission path looks if you have already been bounced. The name-mismatch fix guide for Aussies covers the broader version of this issue — this article zeroes in on the MRZ specifically, which is where most of the actual rejections happen. Our Cambodia eVisa for Australian travellers pulls all the pieces — cost, documents, processing — into one place.

How to read your own passport MRZ in under a minute

Open your Australian passport to the photo page — the bio page. Down at the bottom, below the photo, your date of birth and the rest of the printed details, you will see two lines of capital letters, numbers and angle-bracket characters that look like nonsense. That is the MRZ — the machine-readable zone. Each line is exactly 44 characters long. The angle-brackets (<) are placeholders, not part of your name.

Line 1 holds your name. It always starts with P< (P for passport), then AUS (the country code), then your surname in capitals, then two angle-brackets (<<), then your given names separated by single angle-brackets. The rest of the line is padded with angle-brackets out to 44 characters. Line 2 holds your passport number, country code, date of birth, expiry date, sex and a final check digit — none of that goes into the name fields on the eVisa application.

For the eVisa, only Line 1 matters. Read it like this. Skip the P< at the start. Skip the AUS. Read everything up to the double angle-brackets (<<) — that is your surname exactly as the system sees it. Then read everything after the double angle-brackets, breaking on each single angle-bracket — those are your given names in order. Stop reading when you hit the run of padding angle-brackets at the end.

A worked example for a hyphenated Aussie surname

Take a fictional traveller, Mary-Anne Sullivan-Hayes. Her passport was issued in 2021 and the surname field on the printed bio page reads SULLIVAN-HAYES, but the MRZ at the bottom reads P<AUSSULLIVAN<HAYES<<MARY<ANNE<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<. Notice three things. The hyphen in the surname has been converted to an angle-bracket inside the name (SULLIVAN<HAYES), so the system treats it as two surname tokens. The hyphen in Mary-Anne has done the same thing on the given-name side. And the apostrophe, if there were one, would have dropped entirely. When she fills the eVisa form, surname should be entered as SULLIVAN HAYES (with a space, not a hyphen), and given names as MARY ANNE.

The three Aussie cases that bounce the most

After thousands of Australian applications, three name shapes account for almost every MRZ-mismatch rejection we see. Each one has a slightly different fix because the print quirk is slightly different. Here is the rank-ordered list, with the cause, the exact thing the MRZ does to your name, and how to type it into the eVisa form so it matches first try.

The Sullivan-Hayes case — hyphenated surname

This is the single most common Aussie MRZ rejection. The visible bio page above the MRZ proudly shows SULLIVAN-HAYES with the hyphen intact. The applicant types Sullivan-Hayes into the form. The MRZ below has converted that hyphen to an angle-bracket — SULLIVAN<HAYES — and the auto-checker compares the typed string against the MRZ, not the visible field. Mismatch, bounce. The fix is to type the surname as two words separated by a space, no hyphen. The Cambodian system reads SULLIVAN HAYES and SULLIVAN<HAYES as a match.

The Mary-Anne case — double-barrelled given name

Same problem, different field. The bio page shows MARY-ANNE on the given-name line. The MRZ shows MARY<ANNE. The applicant types Mary-Anne — bounce. The applicant types MaryAnne with no space — bounce. The applicant types Mary Anne with a space — match. The Cambodian portal does not accept hyphens in name fields at all, so even if your MRZ kept the hyphen, the form will strip it. Always type with a space.

The O'Brien case — the apostrophe drift

This one is the rarest of the three but it catches Irish-heritage Aussies and the rejection-email language is sometimes confusing because nothing visible on the bio page is wrong. The MRZ only allows A-Z, 0-9 and angle-brackets — there is literally no character for an apostrophe in the spec. So O'Brien on the visible bio page becomes OBRIEN in the MRZ. If you type O'Brien into the form, the apostrophe survives in your input but does not survive in the MRZ comparison. Type OBRIEN with no apostrophe. The visible bio page is the historical record; the MRZ is what the auto-checker actually sees.

The exact fix flow — bounce email to approved PDF

Once you have read your MRZ and worked out the correct spelling, the rest is mechanical. Through us, the fix flow is short — most Aussies are back to an approved PDF within 1-2 business days of the original bounce. Here is the sequence step by step.

• Step 1: open the bounce email from us. Plain English, points at the MRZ line, includes the exact characters we read from your bio-page scan, suggests the spelling to use on the form.
• Step 2: open your passport to the bio page. Read Line 1 of the MRZ yourself. Confirm the spelling we suggested matches what your MRZ actually shows — if there is any difference, that is the spelling to use.
• Step 3: reply to the email with the corrected surname and given-name string. No fresh form, no new payment, no scanned attachments needed — just the text spelling.
• Step 4: we update the application file and resubmit at no extra charge. Cambodian Immigration's 3-business-day clock restarts the moment the corrected file reaches them.
• Step 5: approved PDF lands in your inbox, Delivered as a printable PDF by email. Typical end-to-end timeline from bounce to approved PDF is 1-2 business days for an MRZ-only fix.

The Cambodia eVisa resubmission guide for Australians has the same flow written for any rejection cause, not just MRZ — it is worth a glance if you want the wider context. The most important thing to internalise is that the original payment covers the fix. There is no second $80 USD (~$122 AUD) charge, no fresh application from scratch, and no card processing on the resubmission side.

Edge cases — when the MRZ itself is wrong

Almost every MRZ-mismatch case is solved by the applicant retyping their name to match what the MRZ shows. But occasionally — perhaps one in every few hundred Aussie applications — the MRZ itself is the problem. DFAT's printer made a mistake, the surname is missing a letter the visible bio page kept, or the given-name list ran off the end of the line and got truncated at character 44.

If you are in that case, the fix is not on the eVisa side — it is on the passport side. DFAT will replace a passport with a print error free of charge, but you need to go through their passport-print-error process at a passport office, and the turnaround is usually 5-10 business days. The good news is this is rare enough that you will know it when you see it: your MRZ will be missing a letter that is clearly on the printed bio page, or the given-names line will end mid-word.

If you suspect a print error, the DFAT passport replacement page covers the process. For everyone else — which is the overwhelming majority of MRZ-mismatch rejections — the fix is in this article. The Cambodia eVisa passport bio scan guide for Aussies covers the related issue where the scan itself was the problem, not the spelling.

What if I have changed my name since the passport was issued?

Cambodian Immigration only cares about the name on the passport you are travelling on. If you got married last year and updated your driver's licence but not your passport, the MRZ still shows your maiden name and that is the name to type. Same rule the other way — if you reverted to a previous surname socially but the passport still shows the married version, type the married version. The visa file follows the passport, not the social state.

Putting it all together for Aussie travellers

An MRZ-mismatch bounce is one of the easier rejection causes to put right — two minutes of reading the bottom of your passport, two minutes of retyping the name, and the file goes back through Cambodian Immigration on the original payment. If you have not applied yet and want to avoid the bounce in the first place, the Australian eVisa application walkthrough covers the upload flow in full and flags the MRZ-spelling step explicitly. If you have been bounced, the email in your inbox already has the spelling we read from your scan — replying with the corrected text is the entire fix, and Aussie-timezone support is on the same thread if anything is unclear.

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.