TDAC for Children: Do Kids and Infants Need One?

Packing lists, passports, snacks for the plane, and somewhere in the middle of all that, a form that has to be filled out for every single person in your party, including the one who's still in diapers. If you're planning a family trip to Thailand, here's the part that surprises most parents: the Thailand Digital Arrival Card isn't optional for kids just because they're small.

Yes, even the baby needs one

The Immigration Bureau's own FAQ settles this without room for interpretation: "All travelers, including infants and children, are required to have a TDAC." Age doesn't exempt anyone. A six-month-old on your lap for the flight needs a card the same as you do.

This hasn't been a quiet rule buried in fine print. It's been mandatory for every non-Thai national entering Thailand by air, land, or sea since May 1, 2025, when it replaced the old TM.6 paper card that flight attendants used to hand out mid-flight. There's no "kids skip this one" carve-out anywhere in that requirement.

One sitting covers the whole family

Here's the part that should actually make your day easier: you don't file separately for each child. A single submission covers up to 10 travelers, so a family of four, or a multi-generational trip with grandparents along, usually fits in one go.

After you finish entering one traveler's details, an "Add Other Travelers" button appears, and the next person's form opens up. Shared information like your flight number and hotel address carries over rather than making you retype it for every kid. Our full walkthrough of the form, section by section, covers exactly how that flow works and what each screen is asking for: see the field-by-field walkthrough if you want to see every screen before you sit down with the kids' passports.

Two things make this go faster with children in the mix. Do the adult with the most complete documents first, since you'll want the flight and address details fresh on screen when the kids' near-identical entries follow. And keep every child's passport open to the photo page before you start; the number is small print, and copying it wrong is the single most common mistake we see in family submissions.

Whose email actually matters

Parents often assume each child needs their own inbox somewhere for a QR code to land in. They don't. The system delivers every card from a submission to one email address, the one you type in near the end of the form. Put in the parent's email who'll actually be checking their phone in the arrivals hall, and every card in the group, including each child's, shows up there. Nobody needs to set up an email account for a four-year-old.

That single inbox becomes the thing you're relying on at the airport, so pick one you can open on your phone without a corporate VPN or a login you can't remember at 6am after a long flight.

The occupation box, for a kid

Parents stall on this one more than any other field. The occupation box on the form is a plain text field, not a dropdown pulled from an approved list of job titles, and there's no supporting document required behind it. For a child too young for school, "Child" is a perfectly normal answer. Older kids usually get "Student." Our occupation field guide goes through the reasoning in more detail if you want to see why the field exists at all and what adults in your party should write too.

The four fields you can't fix later

Every traveler on the form has four fields the system locks after submission: full name, passport number, nationality, and date of birth. Everything else, flight details, hotel address, contact number, can be updated afterward. Those four can't; the only remedy is filing a fresh TDAC with the correct details, and the system treats whichever submission came most recently as the valid one.

This matters more for kids than adults, oddly enough. Children's passports get renewed more often, parents are typing a number they haven't memorized the way they know their own, and it's easy to transpose two digits while also managing a toddler who wants to leave. Slow down on that one field per child. It's cheap to get right the first time and mildly annoying to fix afterward.

Timing it around a family flight

The card is issued within 72 hours (3 days) of arrival, counted back from when you land in Thailand rather than when you leave home. For families that usually means filling it in the night before you fly, or right alongside online check-in when you're already gathering documents for everyone. Our timing guide covers the window in more depth, including what to do if your flight gets rescheduled inside that 72-hour band.

The mistake worth watching for is starting too early. The card is only issued inside that final 3-day window, so a note in your phone's calendar for the day the window opens beats trying to get ahead of it a week out.

If you'd rather hand it off

We run an assisted-filing service and have submitted 1,749 TDACs on the official system since June 2025, a good share of them multi-traveler family submissions with kids included. We handle the sitting-down-and-typing part so you don't have to do it for a family of five while also chasing a toddler around a hotel room. Send us your documents, we check every entry, including each child's passport number, before anything gets submitted, and the QR codes land in your inbox the same way they would if you'd filed it yourself.

Either way, the rule doesn't change: everyone travels with a card, from the newest passport in your bag to the one that's been stamped a dozen times.