Thailand TDAC: How to Complete the Digital Arrival Card (Free) Without Getting Scammed

Since 1 May 2025, Thailand no longer hands out paper arrival cards on the plane. They have been replaced by an online form called the Thailand Digital Arrival Card (TDAC), and every foreign national entering the country — by air, land, or sea — has to submit one before they arrive. That includes visa-free tourists, visa runners, long-term residents, and cruise passengers going ashore.

The form itself is genuinely simple. The trouble comes from three places: the short submission window that trips people up, the strict rules about correcting mistakes afterward, and the small industry of lookalike websites that charge money for what is free on the official government portal.

Here is everything you need to know before you fly.

What the TDAC Actually Is

The TDAC is an online immigration form that replaced the old TM6 paper arrival card you used to fill out mid-flight. It is not a visa, it does not change how long you are allowed to stay, and it does not replace any visa you already hold. It is simply Thailand’s digital record of who is entering the country, when, and where they are staying.

You submit it once per entry. Cross a land border for a weekend in Cambodia and come back? That is a new TDAC. Leave for a work trip and return two weeks later? New TDAC again.

Who Does Not Need One

The list of exemptions is short:

• Thai citizens — obviously.
• Transit passengers who never pass through immigration. If you stay airside between connections, you are fine. The moment your itinerary requires passing immigration — collecting checked luggage, changing terminals, checking in for a separate onward ticket — you need one.
• Border Pass holders, a special document category mostly relevant to people living near specific land borders.

Everyone else needs one. Yes, even if you have been to Thailand twenty times.

The Three-Day Window, Explained Properly

This is the part most people get wrong. You can submit the TDAC starting three days before your arrival date — not earlier. The system checks your declared arrival date against the calendar, and if you try to submit too early, it rejects the date, often with a vague “invalid format” style error that never actually tells you that you were just early.

Two practical details worth knowing:

• The window counts dates, not hours. If your flight lands at 00:40 AM on the 10th, your arrival date is the 10th, so the earliest you can submit is the 7th. People arriving on red-eye flights get caught out by this constantly.
• Late is allowed. You can technically submit at the airport before immigration. But standing in the arrivals hall filling in forms over airport Wi-Fi is exactly the stress this system was supposed to remove, so do it from your couch instead.

If you are still planning the trip itself, our Bangkok arrival checklist covers what to sort out after you land, and the Suvarnabhumi Airport guide handles everything else about getting through BKK smoothly.

What to Have Ready Before You Start

The whole thing takes about ten minutes if you are prepared, and much longer if you keep getting up to find documents. Have these on hand:

• Your passport
• The flight number of the flight that lands in Thailand — not the flight leaving your home country
• The address of your first place of stay in Thailand (just the first one)
• Your occupation as written or commonly understood
• Basic contact details for your trip

One formatting rule matters more than people expect: every field must be filled in using English (Latin) characters. No Arabic or Cyrillic script, no French accents, nothing your keyboard autocorrects into a diacritic. Immigration matching systems compare what you type against what is machine-readable in your passport, and mismatched entries cause problems at the border — especially now, for reasons covered below.

You may also be asked basic health declaration questions, and travelers coming from countries with yellow fever risk can be required to show proof of vaccination.

Step-by-Step: Filling In the Form

1. Go only to the official site: tdac.immigration.go.th. Bookmark it now, before your trip. Do not search “TDAC apply” at the last minute and click the first result — the sponsored slots above the real link are precisely where the paid lookalike sites live.
2. Click Arrival Card.
3. Enter your personal details exactly as printed in your passport: full name, passport number, nationality, date of birth, occupation.
4. Enter your travel details: arrival date, mode of transport, and the flight number of your arriving flight.
5. Enter your first accommodation address in Thailand.
6. Answer the health declaration questions.
7. Submit. You will receive a confirmation email almost immediately.
8. Save the confirmation offline — screenshot the QR code, download the PDF, print a copy if you like redundancy. Your record exists in the immigration system either way, but showing a QR code beats explaining that your email will not load.

Fixing Mistakes After You Have Submitted

The official portal has an Update Arrival Card option. To retrieve your submission you need three things: your TDAC number, your date of birth, and your nationality. Keep that confirmation email; it contains the number you will need.

What you can change:

• Flight numbers, arrival dates, and other travel details
• Accommodation addresses
• Contact information

What you cannot change once submitted:

• Your full name as written in your passport
• Your nationality
• Your date of birth

Get any of those three wrong and there is no edit button — you submit an entirely new registration. This is why the “type it exactly as in your passport” rule above matters.

The Copycat Fee Sites

Let me be blunt: the TDAC is free. It always has been. There is no expedited processing tier, no convenience fee, no “fast approval.”

Despite that, dozens of websites charge anything from a few dollars to eighty for submitting it on your behalf. They cluster at the top of search results through sponsored ads, some borrow government logos and imagery, and Thai immigration police have warned about them repeatedly. The Thaiger documented the pattern in late 2025: fake portals promising faster handling of a form that has no human queue to jump.

The defense is boring but effective:

• Use only a domain ending in .go.th — that is Thailand’s government domain.
• Never enter card details anywhere near a TDAC form.
• If a site asks for payment, close the tab. That is the whole test.

What Changed in 2026

Two updates worth knowing if you last visited before this year:

Automated gates now check your TDAC. Biometric passport holders at Suvarnabhumi and Phuket can use automated gates that read your face alongside your TDAC QR code. The gate only opens when your TDAC details match your passport exactly — which is the real reason typos and accents in your form data matter now. A mismatch means a redirect to a human officer, not a catastrophe, but a queue all the same.

A dedicated app is rolling out. In June 2026 the Immigration Bureau announced trials of THIM (Thailand Immigration Management), a mobile app intended to absorb TDAC submissions, passport scanning, and group applications, with wider rollout planned around August 2026. Until the transition is complete, the web portal remains the official channel — treat any app store listing outside official announcements with suspicion.

And a reminder that predates all of this: staying longer than 90 days still requires giving 90-day reporting a separate slot in your schedule. The TDAC did not absorb it.

FAQ

Do I really need a TDAC if I am entering visa-free?

Yes. Visa exemption changes how you qualify to enter, not whether you announce the entry. Every foreign national arriving by air, land, or sea submits one.

When should I submit?

Any point from three days before your arrival date up until you reach immigration — including at the airport if you forgot. Just remember the red-eye rule: a landing time of 00:40 belongs to that calendar day.

How much does the TDAC cost?

Nothing. If a website charges you for it, you are on a copycat site.

I am only transiting through Bangkok. Do I need one?

Not if you never pass through immigration. If your connection involves exiting to collect bags, switching terminals, or checking in for a separate onward flight, you pass immigration, and you need one.

I misspelled my hotel. Can I fix it?

Yes — flights, accommodation, and contact details can all be updated via the official Update Arrival Card page using your TDAC number, date of birth, and nationality.

What happens if I arrive without one?

In exceptional cases, help points at immigration checkpoints exist to assist travelers who genuinely could not submit in advance. That is a fallback, not a strategy. Airlines and border systems increasingly cross-check TDAC records, so the five minutes online before departure is the cheap version of this problem to solve.