MFAIC officers in Phnom Penh don't open files Saturday or Sunday. Apply Wednesday in Sydney and your PDF lands the following Monday. Here's the weekend rule mapped against Aussie timezones, Cambodian public holidays, and the 3 business days promised on the tin.
Saturdays and Sundays don't count. Cambodia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MFAIC) processes eVisa applications Monday to Friday Phnom Penh time, and the 3-business-day clock pauses across both weekend days. Apply Wednesday in Sydney before about 1pm AEST and your approved PDF lands the following Monday — three working days, one weekend bridged. Apply Thursday and the third working day falls into the weekend, so the PDF arrives the following Tuesday. A Friday-afternoon submission behaves like Monday-morning Phnom Penh, meaning five calendar days from submit to inbox at the absolute minimum. The 3-business-day promise still holds — the calendar just expands around it.
Every week we hear the same surprised email from Australian applicants: "I submitted on Saturday morning Sydney time and nothing has happened." The portal acknowledges the file, the payment goes through, and then silence sits for two days. The applicant assumes something broke. Nothing broke. MFAIC officers in Phnom Penh — the actual humans who review and stamp your application — don't work weekends, and the 3-business-day clock on which the entire processing model rests doesn't move on Saturdays or Sundays. The portal accepts submissions any time. The review queue runs five days a week.
Three calendar days from submit to PDF only ever works inside a single working week. The moment any of those three days falls into a Saturday or Sunday Phnom Penh time, the calendar stretches. Add the standard three-hour gap during AEST and the four-hour gap during AEDT, and the practical weekend lag for an Aussie applicant is one to three extra calendar days depending on which weekday you actually submit. None of this is a system flaw — it's the boring arithmetic of two governments running normal Monday-to-Friday weeks on opposite sides of the Coral Sea.
This guide walks the weekend rule day by day, with the AEST and AEDT math layered on top, then covers what happens when a Cambodian public holiday lands inside the same week. If you have not started yet, the apply page bakes the weekend rule into the timing estimate it shows you at checkout — no surprises after submit. Our Cambodia visa for Australians pulls all the pieces — cost, documents, processing — into one place.
MFAIC's eVisa processing unit runs a standard Cambodian government week: Monday to Friday, roughly 8am to 5pm Phnom Penh time, closed on every gazetted Cambodian public holiday. Officers don't rotate on weekends, there is no Saturday duty roster, and there is no overnight processing tier no matter what a third-party reseller's website tells you. Phnom Penh, like Canberra, simply closes its government doors at the end of business Friday and reopens Monday morning.
What this means for your 3-business-day clock: each day the clock ticks must be a Cambodian working day. Saturday Phnom Penh time, Sunday Phnom Penh time, and every Cambodian public holiday is skipped. If your application is submitted at a moment when officers are still at their desks for the day, that day generally counts. If officers have already gone home for the evening or week, the file sits until they return.
If you want your approved PDF before the weekend, Wednesday morning Sydney time is the latest practical submit window. Wednesday before 1pm AEST in Sydney is still Wednesday morning Phnom Penh time. Day one is Wednesday, day two Thursday, day three Friday — the file lands in your inbox by Friday afternoon Phnom Penh, which is Friday evening or Saturday morning Sydney depending on daylight saving. You travel into your weekend with the PDF already printed.
Thursday-morning Sydney submissions are the next-cleanest option. Day one Thursday, day two Friday — then the weekend lands on day three. Officers don't open the file Saturday or Sunday; day three resumes on the following Monday. The PDF lands in your inbox Monday afternoon Phnom Penh, which is Monday evening or Tuesday morning Sydney. Five calendar days from submit, three working days of actual processing, one weekend absorbed.
This is the most common pattern we see from Aussie applicants who plan ahead by a week and a half: Thursday-morning submit, Tuesday-morning PDF, plenty of buffer for the Friday flight to KTI the following week. The when-to-apply article maps flight distance to submission day if you want a more granular guide on choosing the right window.
Sasha, an Australian nurse in Newcastle, books her Phnom Penh flight for Wednesday next week and sits down on a Wednesday morning to apply. The Sydney time is 9am AEST — 6am Phnom Penh. Officers are not at their desks yet, but the portal accepts the file and adds it to the front of the day's queue. By 9am Phnom Penh time, three hours after Sasha hit submit, officers begin work and her file sits in the morning batch.
Day one Wednesday: file reviewed, no flags. Day two Thursday: payment confirmed, approval routed. Day three Friday: stamped PDF generated and emailed. Approval lands in Sasha's inbox 3pm Phnom Penh, which is 6pm Friday in Newcastle. Three business days, two calendar days of weekend ahead, PDF already printed and tucked into the passport sleeve. Her flight is still four days away.
Friday-afternoon submissions Sydney time are the single worst pattern for Aussie applicants. By 4pm AEST in Sydney, Phnom Penh is at 1pm Friday — early afternoon, but the file is now joining a queue of every other last-minute Friday application and officers are working through the end-of-week batch. By 5pm Sydney, Phnom Penh is 2pm Friday and the queue is closing. By 7pm Sydney, Phnom Penh is 4pm Friday — fifteen minutes to closing, your file will not be touched today.
From there the weekend rule takes over completely. Saturday Phnom Penh: officers off. Sunday Phnom Penh: officers off. Monday morning Phnom Penh: queue reopens, your Friday file is picked up. Day one Monday, day two Tuesday, day three Wednesday — approved PDF lands Wednesday afternoon Phnom Penh, which is Wednesday evening Sydney. Five calendar days from your Friday-afternoon submit, sometimes six if Monday's queue is heavy after a busy weekend.
The Friday-application-timing article goes deep on this exact scenario, including the AEDT versus AEST hour math during daylight saving months. If a Friday submit is your only option and your flight is tight, also read the rush-options article to understand which fallbacks genuinely exist and which are reseller marketing.
Australia runs three practical timezones for Cambodia-bound applicants. AEST — Australian Eastern Standard Time — is UTC+10, used by Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, and Hobart from April to October, and used by Brisbane and most of Queensland year-round. AEDT — Australian Eastern Daylight Time — is UTC+11, used by Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, and Hobart from October to April. Perth and Western Australia sit on AWST — UTC+8 — year-round, no daylight saving. Cambodia runs on Indochina Time, UTC+7, year-round.
The practical translation: AEST is three hours ahead of Phnom Penh, AEDT is four hours ahead, and Perth is one hour ahead. A 9am Monday submission in Sydney during AEDT lands at 5am Phnom Penh — officers are not yet at their desks, the file goes to the front of the morning queue. A 9am Monday submission in Perth lands at 8am Phnom Penh — officers are arriving, the file is one of the first reviewed. A 9am Monday submission in Brisbane during winter lands at 6am Phnom Penh — same effective result as Sydney in AEDT.
Adelaide and Darwin sit on different rules again. Adelaide runs ACDT — UTC+10:30 — in summer and ACST — UTC+9:30 — in winter. Darwin stays on ACST year-round. For the weekend rule it doesn't really matter which half-hour offset you sit on; the question is only whether your submit moment is before or after the close of the Phnom Penh working day, which ends at 5pm local — that's 8pm AEDT in Sydney, 7pm AEST in Brisbane, 6pm AWST in Perth.
The weekend rule is predictable. What catches Aussie applicants out is the second-order effect: a Cambodian public holiday landing on a Monday or Tuesday, immediately after a weekend you have already factored in. Now your three working days are bridged across both a weekend and a closed Monday — five or six calendar days minimum from submit to PDF.
Khmer New Year in April is the biggest of these blocks. Three days closed, typically the 14th, 15th, and 16th. If those dates land on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday, a Friday submit the week before doesn't see day one until the following Monday — and that Monday is already after a five-day Cambodian holiday week. Approval can stretch to ten calendar days for a single visa application. Pchum Ben in late September or early October, and Water Festival in November, follow the same compounding pattern with their own three-day closures.
The companion public-holiday processing article walks the full 2026 Cambodian holiday calendar with the compounding math for each one. Worth reading once before booking trips around Anzac Day, the September school holidays, or any November bridge trip.
Smaller one-day holidays — Queen Mother's Birthday, King's Birthday, Independence Day — add only one working day to the math each, but if they land on a Monday or Friday they also functionally extend the weekend by a day. Always check the Cambodian calendar against your intended submit week before counting on a same-week approval.
If you take one heuristic from this article, make it the Wednesday rule: submit by 1pm AEST Wednesday and your PDF lands by Friday evening. Everything else is variations on how much weekend math you have to absorb. Approved in 3 business days is the locked product fact; the calendar around those three days is what you control by choosing your submit day.
If a flagged application is your worry, the pending-fixes guide covers the specific causes — passport photo, name mismatch, blank-page rule — and the documents-required walkthrough lists every input MFAIC expects in the order they expect it. Smartraveller's Cambodia advisory remains the official Aussie-government source for trip prep and entry rules.
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.
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カンボジア旅行が30日を超える場合、入国時に取得するビザがすべてを決定します。観光eVisa（タイプT）は30日間で硬く上限が決まっており、延長は一切できません。ビジネスeVisa（タイプE）は国内で延長できる唯一の種別で、1ヶ月、3ヶ月、6ヶ月、12ヶ月の延長が可能です。飛行前にアメリカ人が正しく選択するための方法をご紹介します。
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タイ・カンボジア間の陸路国境がまだすべて閉鎖されているため、バベットは現在ベトナムからカンボジアへの主要な陸上ルートとなっています。ホーチミン市から6時間、印刷したeVisa1枚、eArrival Cardなし—2026年に米国市民が実際どのように通過するかを説明します。
