Tourist eVisa is for holidays, sightseeing and family time. Business eVisa is for meetings, paid work, conferences, supplier visits, due-diligence, sponsored events and any stay longer than 30 days. The honest decision tree for Aussies, with the borderline calls that trip people up.
Pick the Tourist eVisa ($80 USD / ~$122 AUD) if your stated purpose is holiday, sightseeing, family visit, or leisure with friends — and your stay is 30 days or fewer. Pick the Business eVisa ($90 USD / ~$137 AUD) if your trip involves meetings, paid work, conferences, sales calls, supplier visits, due-diligence, sponsored events, or any stay longer than 30 days. Mixed trips with even one structured business activity should be Business from the start. Both are processed in 3 business days and delivered as a printable PDF by email.
The single most common question we field at the Aussie intake desk is some version of 'I'm going to Cambodia for a holiday but I might have one meeting — Tourist or Business?' The answer is almost always Business, and the reason is structural: Cambodian Immigration does not pro-rate the visa class by day. Either the trip is leisure, in which case Tourist is correct, or the trip contains structured commercial activity, in which case Business is correct. There is no half-Tourist class for a holiday with a meeting tacked on.
Two changes in 2025 made this more important than ever. Tourist auto-extension ended in November 2025, so the Tourist eVisa is now a hard 30-day cap with no in-country extension option. And Cambodian Immigration tightened the questioning at the border desk — the officer at Phnom Penh's KTI (Techo International, which replaced PNH on 9 September 2025), Siem Reap (SAI), and Sihanoukville (KOS) now reads your class code from the QR scan and asks 'purpose of visit?' to verify the trip matches. A T-class entry followed by a candid 'I've got meetings on Tuesday' is the most common preventable mistake Aussies make at the border in 2026.
This guide walks through what counts as a Tourist purpose, what counts as a Business purpose, and where the line sits when your trip is genuinely mixed. If you only need the headline answer, the Tourist eVisa for Australians and Business eVisa for Australians specialist guides cover each class end to end. The Cambodia visa types explained piece is the full five-class catalogue, and the T vs E detailed comparison runs the worked scenarios for every common Aussie trip pattern. See our full Cambodia eVisa Australian guide for the end-to-end walkthrough.
The Tourist eVisa is built for the leisure cohort that makes up the bulk of Australian arrivals to Cambodia. If your trip is recreational, social, and contains no structured commercial activity, you are a Tourist. The list below is what we see at intake every week — these are the trips that sail through both the application and the border desk on a T-class.
The 30-day cap is the hard constraint
Tourist auto-extension ended November 2025. If your stay is even potentially longer than 30 days — and Aussie travellers regularly underestimate this — apply for the Business eVisa from the start. You cannot upgrade a T-class to an E-class in-country. The only fix is exit-and-reapply, which means a flight out, a fresh $90 USD (~$137 AUD) application, and a 3-business-day wait before you can re-enter.
The Business eVisa covers a wider band of activity than most Aussies realise. It is not just 'paid work in Cambodia' — it is any structured commercial or professional activity, regardless of whether you personally are being paid. If any of the items on this list sit inside your trip, the whole trip is Business.
The Business eVisa positioning matters because Cambodian Immigration treats the E-class as the structural answer to 'this person is here for something other than pure leisure.' The Business eVisa for Australians specialist guide covers the application end to end, and the Business eVisa cost-difference piece walks through the $10 USD (~$15 AUD) premium against the Tourist eVisa. The cluster also has dedicated guides for supplier-factory visits, investor due-diligence trips, conference attendance, and extended engagements that go beyond the initial 30-day stay.
Almost every confused Aussie applicant we speak to is sitting on a borderline case. The trip is mostly leisure but contains one professional element, or mostly business with a long-weekend tagged on the end. Here is how we actually rule on the cases that walk through the door each week.
If you are flying into Phnom Penh or Siem Reap for an industry workshop, conference, or training session — even if you are 'just attending' and not speaking — the trip is Business. The networking dinners, casual coffees, and corridor chats that happen around the structured sessions are still part of the same commercial purpose. Cambodian Immigration treats the workshop attendance itself as the qualifying activity, not the formality of paid work changing hands. Tag two days of Angkor on the end and the trip is still Business.
If the primary purpose of the trip is family — staying with relatives, attending a cousin's wedding, school-holiday week with the kids — and you happen to grab one informal coffee with a contact who happens to be a client back in Australia, the trip is still Tourist. The test is whether the meeting is structured (calendared, with an agenda, on behalf of your employer) or incidental (a catch-up with a mate who happens to do business with your company). Incidental does not make a trip Business. Structured does. If you are unsure, ask whether the meeting would have happened if you had not been in Cambodia anyway — if no, it is structured.
This is the one Aussie digital workers get wrong most often. If you are 'on holiday' but plan to do paid work for your Australian employer from the hotel for two or three days, the trip is Business. Remote work is still paid work, and Cambodian Immigration does not exempt it because the laptop happens to be in a beach bungalow. The Business eVisa is the correct class. If you are taking annual leave and genuinely not opening the laptop, you are Tourist.
If a tourism board, hotel group, or travel brand is paying for your trip in exchange for content, the trip is Business — even though the activities look exactly like a holiday. The sponsorship is the qualifying commercial relationship. Same logic for hosted journalist trips, brand-ambassador visits, and content-creator partnerships.
If you are attending a wedding as a guest, Tourist. If you are the paid wedding photographer, videographer, planner, or celebrant — even if the wedding is for a relative — Business. The paid professional role is the qualifying activity. The exception is the Khmer-Australian dual-citizen edge case, which is a separate K-class conversation entirely.
Run these five questions in order. If you answer yes to any of questions one through four, you are a Business trip. If you answer no to all four and yes to question five, you are a Tourist trip.
The $10 USD (~$15 AUD) insurance principle
If your trip sits anywhere on the borderline, applying for Business is the cheapest insurance you can buy. The premium over Tourist is $10 USD (~$15 AUD). A wrong-class entry at the border can mean secondary inspection, downgrade, denial, or — at minimum — a stressful start to the trip. The Business eVisa is approved in 3 business days and delivered as a printable PDF by email, exactly like the Tourist. If in doubt, go Business.
If your trip is genuinely a clean leisure trip — Aussie family heading to Siem Reap for a week, mates doing the islands, a couple's anniversary in Kampot — Tourist is the right answer and you do not need to overthink it. The Aussie cost guide and the processing-time guide cover what to expect once you have picked. The application walkthrough is the step-by-step for either class. And every air arrival also needs the 14-field e-Arrival Card submitted in the 7-day window before flight — that is a separate $5 USD (~$7.50 AUD) verified product, checked end-to-end before it reaches Immigration.
Next steps and related reading for Australians: apply for your Cambodia eVisa
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