My Cambodia eVisa Is Taking Longer Than 3 Days: Common Causes for US Applicants

The most common real cause: a flagged photo or passport scan

Once you have genuinely passed 3 business days, the single most common reason is that Cambodian Immigration flagged something small on your photo or passport scan and asked for a correction — and the email that says so landed somewhere you have not looked. The file is not stuck or rejected. It is paused, waiting for one re-upload from you, and the clock picks up again the moment you reply.

Photo flags are the leader by a wide margin. The usual triggers are a faint shadow behind the head, an off-white or colored wall instead of plain white, glasses of any kind, a hat or head covering, a hint of a smile, or resolution that is too low. None of those mean your application failed — they mean the system wants a cleaner version of the same photo. A phone photo taken against a plain white wall in even daylight clears the flag almost every time.

Passport-scan flags are the runner-up. The usual culprit is glare bouncing off the laminate from a camera flash, a corner of the bio page cropped out of frame, or text too soft to read. The fix is a fresh capture in side daylight rather than flash, with all four edges of the page inside the frame and every line of the machine-readable zone at the bottom legible. Again, this is a re-upload, not a restart.

The critical thing is finding the correction email, because it is the trigger that releases the file. Check spam and junk first, then search your whole mailbox for the sender or for "Cambodia eVisa," and confirm the address you applied with has no typo. Corporate inboxes that strip attachments are a frequent offender. Our guide on common Cambodia eVisa rejection reasons covers what gets flagged and how to pass first time, so the resubmission goes straight through.

The second cause: a name or detail that does not match your passport

After photo and scan flags, the next most common reason a file sits longer than expected is a mismatch between what you typed and what your passport actually says. Cambodian Immigration reads the machine-readable zone at the bottom of your passport bio page, and the application has to line up with it exactly — character for character. A small difference that looks harmless to you can pause the file for a check.

The usual slips are predictable. A middle name left off because you never use it, but it sits in your passport. A hyphenated surname entered without the hyphen. An accented character dropped or substituted. A maiden name on the passport but a married name on the application after a recent wedding. A passport number with a transposed digit or an O typed where a zero belongs. Each of these is a one-line fix, but the system cannot guess your intent, so it pauses and asks.

The rule to apply is simple: whatever is printed in your passport is what goes on the application, exactly as printed, even if it is not the name you go by day to day. If you married recently and your passport still shows your maiden name, apply in your maiden name. Our guide on fixing a Cambodia eVisa name mismatch with your passport walks through how the machine-readable zone is parsed and how to match it precisely, so the file clears on the resubmission.

Dates trip people up too. The intended arrival date and your date of birth both have to be entered in the format the form expects, and a US-style month-day-year habit can put the wrong number in the wrong box. If a date looks impossible to the system — a thirteenth month, a day that does not exist — it pauses for a correction. Reading every field back once before you submit catches almost all of these before they ever become a delay.

When you have passed 3 business days and still see nothing

Sometimes you recount carefully, find no correction email, and you have genuinely passed 3 working days with the status still unchanged. This is uncommon, but when it happens there are a few ordinary explanations worth ruling out before you worry — and every one of them is recoverable.

• A correction email that bounced or was filtered. If the address you applied with had a typo or a full mailbox, the request for a new photo never reached you, so the file looks idle when it is actually waiting on a reply you never saw.
• A corporate inbox stripping attachments. Many company mail systems silently remove PDFs and sometimes block automated senders entirely, so both the correction request and the approval can vanish before you see them. A personal Gmail, Outlook, or iCloud address avoids this.
• A holiday you did not realize fell inside the window. A Cambodian public holiday in the middle of the week removes a working day that is invisible from a US calendar, stretching the real timeline past what you expected.
• A payment that did not fully clear. If your card was declined or held mid-transaction, the application may not have entered the queue at all — the fix is confirming the payment went through, not waiting longer.
• An email simply sitting in a tab or folder you do not watch. The approval may already be issued and auto-filed somewhere other than your main inbox.

This is exactly the point to use support rather than keep refreshing. When you apply through us, US-timezone support can pull up your file by reference number, confirm whether a correction is waiting on you, and tell you the real status instead of leaving you to guess. If a flagged photo or scan is the holdup, resubmission is free and the clock keeps running once you reply. To set your expectation for the normal delivery rhythm, our guide on how long a Cambodia eVisa takes lays out the typical timeline end to end.

The short version

Recount first: the 3-business-day clock counts working days only, so weekends, US holidays, and Cambodian public holidays do not move it, and most "delays" disappear once you count correctly. If you have truly passed the window, the cause is almost always a flagged photo or passport scan whose correction email went to spam, or a name that does not match your passport exactly. Find the email, fix what it asks for, reply, and the clock keeps running. A genuine delay never costs you your fee — resubmission is free if Immigration flags a correction, and your Tourist eVisa ($80 USD all-in) or Business eVisa ($90 USD all-in) is on file the moment it is issued.

One reminder before your trip: the visa is one form and the e-Arrival card is a different form, and both are mandatory for every air arrival in 2026. The visa is what you are waiting on here; the e-Arrival is filed within 7 days before you fly. The Cambodia visa guide for United States citizens stays the single canonical reference for everything around the trip.

Next steps and related reading for Americans: apply for your Cambodia eVisa when you are ready to lodge, check your eVisa status with your reference number, read how long an eVisa stays pending so a normal wait does not worry you, and see the common rejection reasons so your resubmission passes the first time.