Thailand Digital Arrival Card: A Field-by-Field Walkthrough

The Thailand Digital Arrival Card (TDAC) is the online form every non-Thai national fills in before entering Thailand. It's been mandatory since May 1, 2025, whether you arrive by air, land, or sea, and it replaced the TM.6 paper card that flight attendants used to hand out. Every traveler needs one, including infants; there's no age exemption.

We run an assisted-filing service and have submitted 1,749 TDACs on the official system since June 2025, which means we've seen every screen of this form more times than anyone should. This page walks through it the way we'd explain it to a friend: what each section wants, where people actually get stuck, and the handful of fields you genuinely cannot afford to get wrong.

You can wrestle with the form yourself, or hand it to us and skip to the part where the QR codes show up in your inbox. Either way, the form is the same, so everything below applies.

What to have in front of you

The Immigration Bureau's FAQ lists exactly what the form needs: passport details, flight number and arrival date, your address in Thailand, travel purpose, health declaration answers, and an email address to receive the card.

In practice that means: passport open on the photo page, your flight confirmation, and your first hotel booking (or the address where you'll actually sleep on night one). Get these three documents on screen before you start and the whole thing goes quickly. Reading glasses too, if you use them; the passport number is small print, and it's the one thing you'll be copying character by character. The email address matters more than people think, because the QR code is delivered to that inbox and nowhere else.

When to fill it in

The card is issued within 72 hours (3 days) before your arrival, counting back from when you land in Thailand, not from when you take off. Doing it alongside your online flight check-in is a natural pairing: your documents are already out, and there's still time to fix problems calmly.

One group can skip all of this: transit passengers who stay airside and never pass immigration control don't need a TDAC at all. The moment you clear immigration, even for one night at an airport hotel, you do.

Opening the form

A security check runs when the form loads, so expect a blank-ish screen for a few seconds before anything appears. That's normal, not a broken page, though it reliably makes first-time filers reload it. Give it a moment, and don't worry if it feels slow on hotel WiFi. The form works fine on a phone, but if you have a laptop or tablet handy, the bigger screen makes the address section noticeably less fiddly.

Personal information

The first section is about the traveler. Most of it transcribes straight off the passport, and that's exactly how you should treat it: copy, don't type from memory.

Four fields deserve extra care, because they're the ones the system will never let you change afterwards:

Field	Fixable after submission?
Full name	No, resubmit only
Passport number	No, resubmit only
Nationality	No, resubmit only
Date of birth	No, resubmit only
Everything else (flight, dates, address, contact)	Yes, can be updated

A passport number with one transposed digit is the classic failure. The form won't catch it, and immigration matches the card against the passport you hand over. If you spot the error later, the fix is a completely new submission; the system considers only the most recent one valid, so the broken card simply gets superseded.

The occupation box trips people up for the opposite reason: people expect a strict list of official job titles and instead find an ordinary text box. There's nothing to match and no document check. Write a short honest description in English: Retired, Student, Homemaker, Software Engineer. For a child too young for school, Child is fine, and a freelancer is better off naming the trade (Photographer, Consultant) than writing something vague. Don't overthink this one; occupation isn't even on the Immigration Bureau's list of required information, the form just happens to ask.

If you hold a Thai visa there's a box for its number. Most tourists enter Thailand without a visa and simply leave it empty.

Trip and accommodation

The second section covers how you arrive and where you'll stay.

Arrival date and flight number come straight off your booking. Transport mode and purpose of travel are dropdown menus. Pick the purpose that matches your actual trip; the only real mistake here is contradiction, like selecting an employment purpose while describing yourself as a tourist elsewhere. The form also asks about your onward departure (date and flight), so having your exit booking nearby saves a pause.

The country list is longer than you'd expect, 260 entries, so type the first few letters of your country instead of scrolling for it.

The address block is where the form gets genuinely fussy, and it's the section we correct most often. Thailand's official administrative hierarchy backs it: the dropdowns hold 77 provinces and 927 districts, and each district splits further into sub-districts. Your hotel booking says "Bangkok", but the form wants province, then district, then sub-district, then the street address, plus the type of place you're staying in.

The scale of those lists surprises people. Bangkok alone has 50 districts in the form's dropdown, and a traveler who has never heard of them is suddenly expected to know that a Silom hotel sits in BANG RAK while the convention hotels near the port are in KHLONG TOEI. You aren't expected to memorize any of this. The answer is printed on your hotel's booking confirmation, which is why we keep repeating the same advice. Two practical tips from our own filings:

• Use your hotel's full address from its booking confirmation, not from memory. The district and sub-district are on it, usually in the fine print.
• If you're moving between hotels, the form wants where you stay on arrival night. You don't list an itinerary.

Phone number and contact details

The contact section wants a phone number split in two: country code first, then the number itself. Use a phone that will actually work while you travel, since it's the contact point attached to your card. For families, one parent's number covers everyone in the submission; nobody is going to call your eight-year-old.

The same section is where the email expectations start, and it's the right moment to decide which inbox will own this trip. Whichever address you use has to be one you can open at the airport, on your phone, possibly on airport WiFi. A work inbox behind a corporate VPN is a bad choice for a QR code you need in an arrivals hall.

Health declaration

The final per-traveler section is short. It asks whether you have symptoms, and it asks about a yellow fever vaccination certificate only when your nationality or your departure country is on Thailand's yellow fever risk list. Most travelers from Europe, North America, and East Asia never see the yellow fever question at all. Answer honestly and move on; for a routine holiday this section takes seconds.

Arriving by land or sea

Everything above assumes a flight, but the requirement isn't an airline thing. The TDAC applies to air, land, and sea arrivals alike, and the form handles this through the transport mode dropdown: pick the way you'll actually cross, and the flight number question gives way to details that fit a bus, train, car, or boat.

The timing rule is identical, within 3 days of arrival, counted back from when you cross the border. The practical difference is connectivity. An airport has WiFi; the queue at a land crossing from Malaysia or Cambodia often doesn't. If you're crossing overland, fill the form in your hotel the night before rather than betting on a signal at the border post.

Families and groups

You don't file separate forms per person. After finishing one traveler, an "Add Other Travelers" button lets you enter the next, up to 10 travelers in a single submission. Shared details like the flight and hotel carry over, so a family of four is one sitting, not four.

Remember the rule from the top: everyone needs a card, including the baby. The Immigration Bureau's FAQ says it plainly: all travelers, including infants and children, are required to have a TDAC. Use one parent's email for the whole group and every card arrives in the same inbox. Groups larger than 10 just split into a second submission; nothing links them and nothing needs to.

Preview, the email box, and the final checkbox

The form ends with a preview of everything you've entered. Treat this screen as the real work. When customers send us their details to file, the errors we catch before submitting cluster in the same three places every time: a passport number with swapped or missing characters, a delivery email with a typo in the domain, and a hotel district that doesn't match what the booking confirmation says. The form itself won't flag any of these, because to the form they're all plausible values. Read the passport number character by character against the actual passport here; this is the last moment it's cheap to fix.

Then you enter the delivery email. This is the single most consequential box on the page, because the Immigration Bureau sends the submission details and QR code to that email only. A typo here means your card exists but you'll never receive it. Read it back twice.

Finally, tick the declaration checkbox, press Agree, and submit.

After you submit

The QR code lands in the inbox you gave, one card per traveler. Check spam before assuming it failed. Showing the QR on your phone at immigration works; printing is allowed but optional. If you prefer paper, print each traveler's card and keep the pages with the passports; the officers take either, and for a family it's often easier than passing one phone down the line. Our habit, and worth copying: screenshot each QR the moment it arrives, so a dead phone signal in the arrivals hall can't separate you from your own card.

Spotted a mistake afterwards? Anything outside the four locked fields can be updated. For the locked four (name, passport number, nationality, date of birth), file a fresh TDAC with the correct details and ignore the old one; the most recent submission is the one that counts.

That's the whole form. It's honestly not hard, just unforgiving in a few specific places: the passport number, the delivery email, and the address hierarchy. If you'd rather hand those details to a service that has filed this form 1,749 times and double-checks the result, that's what we're here for.