Cambodia eVisa Name Mismatch Fix for Australians: 2026 MRZ-Matching Guide

How to read your MRZ and retype the application in 5 minutes

Reading the MRZ is not technical — once you know where to look and what the symbols mean, the whole exercise takes about three minutes. Here is the exact sequence to follow if you have just been rejected for a name mismatch and you want to nail the fix on the first attempt rather than the second.

• Step 1: open your Australian passport flat on a desk, photo page facing up, in good daylight. The MRZ is the two lines at the very bottom of the page, below your photo and signature.
• Step 2: identify the surname block. Line 1 starts `P<AUS` then your surname in capitals. The surname runs until you hit two angle-brackets `<<`, which mark the separator between surname and given names.
• Step 3: identify the given-names block. Immediately after the `<<` separator, your given names appear in capitals, separated by single `<` characters between each name. The block ends when you hit a long run of `<` symbols filling the line out to the standard length.
• Step 4: write out the full name in capitals on a piece of paper or a notes app, with a single space wherever the MRZ has a single `<` between names, and nothing where the MRZ has its `<<` separator (just start the given names after the surname). Drop every `<` filler at the end of the line.
• Step 5: open the resubmission email from us (or the application form if you are pre-submission), and type the name you just wrote out, in capitals, into the surname and given-name fields. Some forms split it into separate fields — put everything up to the `<<` into the surname field, and everything after the `<<` into the given-names field.

That is the whole exercise. Three minutes if your passport is on the desk, five if you have to dig it out of a drawer. The single biggest mistake Aussies make at this stage is omitting a middle name because they never use it day-to-day. If your MRZ says `SMITH<<JOHN<MICHAEL`, the application has to read `SMITH` in the surname field and `JOHN MICHAEL` in the given-names field. Dropping the `MICHAEL` because you only ever go by John will trip the mismatch flag a second time. Include every character the MRZ contains, in the order it contains them.

If you are using our resubmission flow, the easier path is to just reply to the email with the corrected name written out in capitals — we update the field on our side and resubmit, so you do not have to navigate the form a second time. If you are mid-application and have not yet submitted, the Cambodia eVisa application walkthrough for Australians has a screenshot-by-screenshot guide to the name fields.

Fixing it through us vs the direct government portal

Through us, an MRZ-mismatch fix is a 2-minute correction with zero second fee. Our resubmission email names the specific field, often quotes the MRZ line so you can see what the machine read, and tells you exactly what to type. You reply with the corrected name, we update the application on our side, we resubmit to Cambodian Immigration. The new 3-business-day Immigration clock starts the moment the corrected file reaches them, and the typical end-to-end timeline from rejection to approved PDF for an MRZ fix is 1-2 business days because the underlying data on the file is already vetted. The full Cambodia eVisa resubmission guide for Australians covers the wider mechanics across every rejection reason, not just MRZ.

Through the direct government portal, the same fix usually costs another government fee. The portal treats a corrected re-upload as a new application — same form, same uploads, fresh $30 USD tourist or $35 USD business fee, no refund on the original rejection. The portal also does not send the plain-English fix email; the rejection notice is generic and rarely explains that the MRZ was the issue. Plenty of Australian applicants on the direct route read "name does not match passport" three times, decide they have spelled their name correctly because they have spelled it the same way for forty years, and re-submit the identical name a second time — which gets flagged a second time, with a second fee.

The all-in pricing on our side exists precisely because MRZ rejections are common enough that pretending they are not would just hide the cost. Tourist eVisa $80 USD (~$122 AUD) and Business eVisa $90 USD (~$137 AUD) include the resubmission path because, across thousands of Australian applications, about 1 in 10 has an MRZ wrinkle that needs a corrected re-type. Paying once and having that path baked in is almost always cheaper than the direct route once a rejection lands. The break-even is short: a single direct-portal rejection plus a fresh government fee plus the time spent guessing which field was the issue almost always exceeds the gap between the $30 USD government fee and our $80 USD all-in, especially if the trip is time-sensitive and the rejection has eaten into the original buffer.

There is also a quieter reason the all-in price tends to land cheaper for double-barrelled, hyphenated, and recently-married Australian applicants specifically: those are the names DFAT's MRZ encoder handles inconsistently across batches, and those are the names where the auto-flagger trips most often. If your surname has a hyphen, an apostrophe, multiple components, or has changed in the last few years, the probability of an MRZ flag on the direct route runs meaningfully higher than the 10% base rate.

Prevention: how to apply right the first time using the MRZ method

The cleanest version of this whole flow is to never trip the MRZ flag in the first place. The trick is to use the MRZ as your source of truth for the application from the moment you start typing, rather than typing the name the way you usually write it and hoping it lines up. Here is the prevention sequence — about two extra minutes compared to typing on autopilot, and it saves the day or two of resubmission loop entirely.

• Before you start the application: open your passport flat on the desk, photo page up, MRZ visible at the bottom.
• Write the MRZ name out in capitals on a notepad or notes app — surname up to the `<<`, then given names separated by spaces, dropping all the `<` fillers at the end of the line.
• Match it against the printed name on the photo page above. If they look the same, great. If they look different (apostrophe vanished, hyphen became a space, middle name suddenly appeared), the MRZ version is the one the application cares about.
• Type the MRZ version into the application's name fields, in capitals. Most application forms accept capitals natively; some auto-format. Either way, the character sequence matches and the machine clears it.
• Cross-check before submission: read your typed name and the MRZ side by side, character by character, focused on the parts that often differ (hyphens, apostrophes, middle names, accents). If they match, submit.

This prevention method takes the MRZ-mismatch flag from a 1-in-10 risk to a near-zero one, and it is the same method our document-review team uses on every application that comes through us before we send it to Cambodian Immigration. If you also want to pre-empt the second most common Aussie rejection cause — passport-validity issues — the Cambodia eVisa passport validity rules for Australians guide covers the 6-month threshold that catches a meaningful percentage of applicants who cut renewal close.

Putting MRZ matching in context for Aussie travellers

An MRZ-mismatch rejection feels personal because it touches your name, but it is almost always a five-minute encoding issue — a hyphen that DFAT dropped at passport issue, an apostrophe that vanished into the machine-readable zone, a middle name you never use that the system insists you include. Once you see the MRZ for what it is — a literal-string source of truth that the application has to mirror — the rejection becomes the easiest one on the rejection list to fix. Through us, the resubmission is free, the new clock is short, and the trip lands on the original schedule almost every time. The wider Cambodia visa edge cases guide for Australians covers a handful of related quirks (legal-name changes mid-trip, passport-renewal timing, name on the e-Arrival vs the visa) that occasionally come up alongside MRZ issues. The Smartraveller Cambodia advisory is the official safety-net read once the visa is sorted, covering the standing health, safety, and entry context that matters once you land. And for the upstream question of who needs a visa at all, the Do Australians Need a Visa for Cambodia explainer is the clean starting point. The country-specific Cambodia visa for Australian citizens hub page covers eligibility, pricing, and processing time end-to-end if you want one place to bookmark for the trip.

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.