Short Trip or Long Stay? Picking Your Cambodia Visa as an American

The short trip: anything inside 30 days

If your Cambodia plans fit comfortably inside 30 days, the Tourist eVisa is the right and obvious choice. This covers the large majority of American visitors: a week split between Siem Reap for Angkor Wat and the coast at Kep or Koh Rong, a two-week loop through Phnom Penh, Battambang, and Kampot, or a long weekend tacked onto a wider Southeast Asia trip. Your dates sit inside a month, you know roughly when you are flying home, and there is no realistic scenario where you would want to stay past day 30. That is the short-trip traveler exactly.

The Tourist eVisa also handles the trips that feel like they might be "business" but are not. Visiting your son who teaches English in Phnom Penh is tourism. Attending a friend's wedding is tourism. A yoga retreat, an informal unpaid volunteer stint, a scouting trip where you are not signing anything or being paid — all tourism. Cambodian Immigration reads "business" as paid or contractual activity, so unless money or a signed engagement is involved, a short leisure trip stays firmly on the Type-T.

For a short trip, the Tourist eVisa is not a downgrade — it is the correct tool, and saving the $10 over the Business eVisa is fine because you will never use the feature that $10 buys. The one thing to be honest with yourself about is whether your trip is truly capped at 30 days. If there is any real chance it stretches, the Tourist eVisa will not bend: it is a hard ceiling, and stretching it is no longer an option in 2026. We cover why in the next two sections.

Short trips also tend to be defined by purpose more than by date, so if you are weighing the Tourist eVisa against the Business eVisa for a borderline case, our side-by-side on the Cambodia Tourist visa vs Business visa for Americans lays out every difference that matters before you commit.

The long stay: when you may run past 30 days

If your stay might run longer than 30 days, the Business eVisa is the right call — and it is the only call, because it is the single Cambodia eVisa you can extend from inside the country. This is the visa for the American who is planning a season rather than a trip: a remote worker basing in Kampot or Siem Reap for a few months, a retiree testing whether Cambodia suits them for the cool-season stretch, a writer or photographer settling in for a project, or anyone whose return date is genuinely open.

The mechanics are simple. You arrive on your 30-day Business eVisa stay, and before it runs out you arrange an in-country extension for 1, 3, 6, or 12 months without leaving Cambodia. There is no border run, no fresh round-trip flight, no resetting the clock from outside. For a long stay that is the entire value proposition: the Business eVisa is the only standard eVisa that grows with your plans instead of capping them at a month.

The $10 premium over the Tourist eVisa is rounding error against what a long stay is worth to you. The cost of getting this wrong is not $10 — it is being forced out of the country on day 30 with months of plans still ahead, and having to leave and re-enter on a new visa just to continue. For anyone whose stay is open-ended, the Business eVisa removes that constraint entirely. Our Cambodia Business visa (Type-E) guide for US citizens covers exactly how the in-country extension path works and what each duration unlocks.

A practical rule the desk uses for the gray zone: if you would be even mildly annoyed to be pushed out of Cambodia on day 30, you are a long-stay traveler, and the Business eVisa is your visa. A stay that lands "right around a month" is the most common place Americans get caught — they file the cheaper Tourist eVisa expecting a clean 30 days, then a project runs over, a flight gets rebooked, or they simply want one more week, and there is no in-country fix. When in doubt, treat it as a long stay and file the Type-E.

Why the long-stay choice got sharper after November 2025

For years, the short-trip-versus-long-stay decision was lower-stakes than it is now, because the Tourist eVisa came with a fallback: a one-time automatic extension you could arrange to push a 30-day stay a little longer. That fallback is gone. The tourist auto-extension ended in November 2025. As of 2026, the Tourist eVisa is a hard 30-day ceiling with no in-country path to stay longer — when it ends, you leave Cambodia, and if you want to return you apply for a fresh eVisa.

That change is precisely why long-stay travelers can no longer treat the cheaper Tourist eVisa as a starting point they will stretch later. Before November 2025, filing a Type-T and extending was a viable plan B for a stay that crept over a month. Today it is not a plan at all. If you choose the Tourist eVisa and your stay outgrows 30 days, your only options are to leave the country or to overstay and pay a daily penalty — neither of which is a position you want to be negotiating from once you are already settled in Cambodia.

The Business eVisa absorbed all of that flexibility, and after the auto-extension ended it became the default for anyone whose stay is not firmly capped at 30 days. There is also no overland shortcut to reset a stay: all seven Thailand–Cambodia land borders have been closed since June 2025, so the old "hop across and come back" trick is off the table. If you expect to make several separate trips rather than one long stay, the calculus shifts again — our guide to single vs multiple entry for Americans explains why each arrival needs its own eVisa.

A 60-second guide: match your dates to a visa

If you want to skip the reasoning and just pick, run your trip through these questions in order. The first one that matches is your answer.

• Is your whole trip firmly inside 30 days, with a known return date? Choose the Tourist eVisa (Type-T) at $80 USD. It fits, you save $10, and you never touch the extension feature.
• Could your stay realistically run past 30 days — a project, a season, an open return? Choose the Business eVisa (Type-E) at $90 USD. It is the only eVisa you can extend in-country, for 1, 3, 6, or 12 months.
• Is your stay sitting right around a month, where a small slip pushes you over? Choose the Business eVisa. The $10 buys the one thing the Tourist eVisa cannot do — add time without leaving.
• Are you making several separate trips this year rather than one stay? You need a new single-entry eVisa for each arrival, so file one per trip and pick the type by that trip's length.

That is the whole decision. Short and defined points to the Tourist eVisa; long, open, or borderline points to the Business eVisa. If you would like the same logic as an interactive walk-through tailored to your purpose and dates, our which Cambodia visa do I need guide for US citizens turns these questions into a step-by-step chooser.

Next steps and related reading for Americans: apply for your Cambodia eVisa once you have matched your dates to a type, read the Cambodia Business visa (Type-E) guide for US citizens if a long stay needs extending, skim the FAQ on Cambodia visa types for quick answers, and use our glossary of Cambodia visa terms to decode any class code or acronym in this guide.