Cambodia eVisa Refunds: When US Travelers Get Their Money Back

Free resubmission is why most refunds never happen

Most travelers who think they will need a refund are actually looking at a flag. An application that does not approve cleanly usually comes back with a plain-language note — "the photo shows a smile, please re-upload a neutral expression" or "the passport scan has glare on the lower edge, please retake without flash." You fix that one detail and the same application, with the same fee already attached, goes back into the processing queue. There is no new payment screen and no second $80 USD, which means there is nothing to refund.

This is the part that surprises people who have been burned by other online services: the fee follows the application through every correction. You are not buying a single submission attempt that evaporates if one field is off. You are paying once — $80 USD for a Tourist eVisa or $90 USD for a Business eVisa — and that payment stays valid through resubmission. A flag costs you a short delay and a re-upload, not money.

The variable that actually matters is speed, not cost. Your 3-business-day approval window runs on the application, so a same-day correction keeps the clock moving rather than resetting it. The travelers who turn a flag into a missed flight are the ones who let the email sit in their inbox for a week, not the ones who were charged a penalty — because there is no penalty. Reply quickly and you lose hours, not days.

We frame this as an outcome rather than a workflow on purpose: a flagged application is resubmitted free rather than re-billed, and it is checked end-to-end before it reaches Cambodian Immigration so the correction passes the second time. You never pay again to fix a typo. If you would rather avoid the flag entirely and skip even the short delay, our breakdown of what is included in your Cambodia eVisa price shows exactly what the fee buys and why a clean first upload is the cheapest path of all.

The two cases where a true refund applies — and how it reaches your card

Because free resubmission handles the flagged cases and validity handles the changed-plans cases, a literal refund is left with two clean situations. Both are about the charge being wrong, not about the application outcome, and both return money to the exact US card or wallet you paid with.

The first is a duplicate charge. If a checkout hiccup or a double-tap on "submit" billed your card twice for one application, the extra charge is returned to the original card. Before you assume a double-billing, though, check your statement twice. When you submit a payment, US banks routinely place a temporary authorization hold that looks like a second charge but has not actually moved money. A "duplicate" that appears minutes after a "try again" error is very often a pending hold that drops off on its own within a few business days, with no action needed.

The second is a genuine processing failure on our side — the rare case where something broke and no visa was ever filed for the money you paid. That is a real refund, returned to the card you paid with, because you received nothing for the charge. When a refund is issued in either case, it goes back to the same card or wallet automatically; the money cannot be redirected to a different card, because card networks route a refund along the original payment path. Expect the credit to post on your issuer’s normal timeline, typically a few business days after it is sent, the same way any online refund behaves.

For US travelers there is also a backstop sitting behind all of this: your card network. If a charge is genuinely wrong and is not resolved directly, a credit-card chargeback is your protection, and it is far stronger than anything a debit card offers — one more reason to pay for a visa with a credit card. The situation a chargeback exists for, though, is most often a scam checkout rather than a real visa service, so our guide on whether the Cambodia eVisa payment is safe and how Americans avoid visa-payment scams shows how to verify a checkout before you ever enter a card number.

If your statement genuinely shows two charges and one is not a pending hold, that is the clearest refund case there is. Our guide on what to do when a Cambodia visa is charged twice but no visa arrives for Americans walks through confirming the double-billing, getting the duplicate returned, and making sure your single valid application keeps moving.

Approved visa, changed plans, and the separate e-Arrival fee

The third scenario — a change of plans after the visa is already approved — is where the word "refund" causes the most confusion, so it is worth being direct. Once your eVisa is issued and emailed to you as a printable PDF, the work and the government fee behind it are complete. The visa exists; it was produced for you. That is structurally different from a duplicate charge or a failed transaction that never produced anything, which is why an approved-then-cancelled trip is not the same as a refund case.

The good news is that you usually do not need a refund here, because the visa itself gives you room. A Cambodia eVisa is valid for 3 months from the date of issue, so if your trip slips by a few weeks, you simply travel on the same visa within that window — no new application, no new fee. The intended arrival date on the form is not a hard lock; it is the validity window that governs when you can actually enter. For most schedule changes, rebooking inside three months is a cleaner answer than trying to claw back a fee for a document that was correctly produced.

There is one more payment to keep in the same mental bucket: the e-Arrival Card. Every air arrival in 2026 files it separately — a digital arrival declaration of 14 fields covering your passport, flight, and accommodation details, verified through us for $5 USD and submitted within 7 days before you land. It follows the same refund logic as the visa: a flagged Card is corrected and resubmitted free, a genuine duplicate is returned to your card, and because it is filed close to departure there is rarely a changed-plans gap to worry about. It shows as its own $5 line on your statement, never as a hidden add-on to the visa.

Putting it together: the cheapest outcome is the one where refunds never come up. A clean first application approves in 3 business days and arrives as a printable PDF, a flag is fixed free, a real duplicate is returned to your card, and a change of plans rides on the 3-month validity. If you want the full itemized picture before you pay — every dollar of the $80 or $90, and the $5 e-Arrival line beside it — our Cambodia visa cost guide for Americans breaks it all down.

Next steps and related reading for Americans: apply for your Cambodia eVisa when you are ready to lodge, check our guide to Cambodia eVisa payment methods for Americans to see which card or wallet to use, skim the FAQ on Cambodia visa payment for quick answers, and use our glossary of Cambodia visa terms to decode any acronym in this guide.