TDAC — Thailand Digital Arrival Card 2026: The Complete Foreigner Guide

TDAC vs the old TM6 card

TM6 was the paper arrival/departure card handed out on planes and at land borders from 1979 until COVID-19. Immigration suspended it in 2022 and permanently replaced it in May 2025 with the Thailand Digital Arrival Card (TDAC) — an online form filed 0 to 72 hours before entry.

TDAC captures the same data as TM6 (passport, flight, purpose of visit, Thai address) plus health-declaration fields, and issues a QR code that immigration officers scan at the counter.

• Cost: free — the only official portal is tdac.immigration.go.th
• Submission window: any time within 72 hours of scheduled arrival
• Applies to every foreign national — including tourists, DTV, Elite, LTR, retirement, work permit holders
• Applies to air, land, and sea entries — including road crossings from Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia

Step-by-step: filing your TDAC

We recommend filing the moment your flight is booked so it does not slip your mind. The portal runs 24/7 and supports Thai, English, Chinese, and Russian.

• 1. Open tdac.immigration.go.th and pick a language
• 2. Enter passport data letter-for-letter as it appears on the MRZ line
• 3. Add flight number / vehicle info and arrival date
• 4. Enter your Thai address in full — hotel name and full street address, or condo project + unit number
• 5. Declare purpose of visit (Tourist, Business, Transit, Study, Medical)
• 6. Submit and save the QR code — screenshot it and forward the email to yourself as backup

Rejections we see every week

Our Phuket concierge desk sees the same TDAC mistakes over and over — most of them turn a 30-second counter check into a 30-minute secondary inspection.

• Name spelled differently to the passport — even one accent character is enough
• Thai address written as 'Hotel' or 'Airbnb' with no street name — pick a real property
• Passport expiring in under 6 months on the arrival date — the form accepts it but the airline may not
• Filing more than 72 hours ahead — the record expires and must be re-filed
• Losing the QR code and having no email backup — the officer can look you up but it slows the queue

How TDAC interacts with TM.30 and the 90-day report

TDAC does not replace TM.30 — it only pre-populates the arrival address. If you stay in a licensed hotel, the hotel's TM.30 filing is auto-triggered when they scan your passport at check-in. If you stay in a condo, villa, or friend's house, the house-master still has to file TM.30 within 24 hours.

TDAC also does not touch the 90-day report (TM.47). Long-stay visa holders (Non-B, LTR, retirement, Elite, DTV) still file TM.47 every 90 continuous days in Thailand.

Look-alike domains and paid 'assistance' services

TDAC is free and the only official portal is tdac.immigration.go.th. Every arrival season produces a fresh crop of look-alike sites that rank on paid search, charge between USD 20 and USD 60 for a submission you could make yourself in six minutes, and in the worst cases simply harvest passport data without filing anything.

Three checks before you type a passport number into any TDAC page: the domain must end in immigration.go.th, not merely contain the words tdac or thailand; there must be no payment step at any point in the flow; and the confirmation must arrive as a QR code tied to your passport number rather than as a receipt or an 'application reference'. If you have already paid a third party, treat the passport data as exposed, keep the transaction record, and file again yourself on the official portal to be certain a real record exists.

Airline and hotel staff sometimes offer to file on your behalf as a courtesy. That is legitimate and free, but you should still receive the QR code yourself rather than leaving it in a staff member's inbox.

Families, transit passengers, and land crossings

The general rule that one passport equals one TDAC produces awkward edge cases that the portal handles less obviously than the standard air-arrival flow.

• Infants and children hold their own passports and therefore need their own TDAC, filed by the accompanying adult under the child's passport details
• Families can submit consecutively from a single account, but each submission produces a separate QR code — do not present one child's code for the whole group
• Airside transit passengers who do not clear Thai immigration do not file; passengers who exit to landside, including for an overnight stopover, do
• Land crossings from Malaysia, Laos, and Cambodia require TDAC in the same way as air arrivals, and border-post connectivity is often poor, so file before you leave the previous country rather than at the checkpoint
• Cruise and yacht arrivals file per passenger on the vessel's scheduled arrival date; the agent's crew list does not replace individual submissions for passengers
• Re-entering on a re-entry permit or a multiple-entry visa is still a new arrival and needs a new TDAC every time

What to prepare before you open the form

The submission itself is short, but it times out and it does not save partial drafts reliably. Collect five things first: the passport with the machine-readable zone visible so you can copy names character for character, the flight number and scheduled arrival date, the full Thai address including project or hotel name, street, sub-district, district, and province, the purpose of visit you will state at the counter, and a working email address you can access on arrival.

Two details cause most of the corrections we handle. First, the name fields follow the passport's machine-readable zone, not the printed name line, which matters for travellers whose passports render accents or multi-part surnames differently in the two places. Second, the Thai address must be a specific property. Officers compare the declared address against the TM.30 record that later appears for you, and a vague entry now creates a mismatch weeks later at an extension appointment.

Official sources

The Thailand Digital Arrival Card is administered by the Immigration Bureau, Royal Thai Police. The submission portal, current field requirements, and announcements about system downtime are published at tdac.immigration.go.th, and general immigration guidance including office jurisdictions and the e-service portal at immigration.go.th. Visa issuance itself is separate and sits with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at thaievisa.go.th.

Rules described here reflect the position at the date shown on this page. Arrival-card requirements have changed several times since 2022 and entry decisions remain at the discretion of the immigration officer at the checkpoint — a completed TDAC is a requirement for smooth processing, not a guarantee of admission.