TDAC Occupation Field: What to Actually Type

Of all the boxes on the Thailand Digital Arrival Card, occupation is the one that stalls people the longest, and it's the one least worth the worry. Travelers stare at it wondering if "Retired" is specific enough, whether a homemaker needs to write something more official-sounding, or whether a freelancer has to pick from some list of approved trades. There is no list. Type what you are, in plain words, and move to the next box.

It's a text box, not a test

The occupation field on the official form is ordinary free text, the same kind of box you'd use to type your name into a hotel check-in form. There's nothing to match it against and no document the form asks you to attach. You're not being graded on phrasing.

It also helps to know this: occupation doesn't even appear on the Immigration Bureau's own list of what a TDAC needs. That list covers passport details, your flight and arrival date, the address where you're staying, your travel purpose, health declaration answers, and an email for the card. Occupation isn't on it. The form asks for it anyway, and you should still fill it in, but it's worth knowing the box carries less weight than it feels like it does when you're staring at it late at night before a flight.

Your situation, and what to type

Most people overthink this because they're picturing a government clerk cross-checking job titles. Nobody is. Here's what actually works for the situations that come up most:

Your situation	What to type
Retired	Retired
Homemaker or housewife	Homemaker
Employed, full time	Your job title: Nurse, Teacher, Software Engineer
Self-employed or freelance	Name the trade: Photographer, Consultant, Designer
Unemployed or between jobs	Unemployed, or your most recent job title
Student	Student
Child too young for school	Child

None of these need qualifiers, dates, or company names. "Retired" doesn't need a former job title tacked on. "Homemaker" doesn't need explaining. If your situation genuinely doesn't fit a row above, describe it in your own words and don't second-guess it; a free-text field exists so you can do exactly that.

The retired and unemployed get treated the same way

We see the same two questions from these two groups constantly, and they land in the same answer. A retired traveler doesn't need to write their old job title, a pension type, or how long they've been retired. Just Retired. Someone between jobs can write Unemployed and it changes nothing else about their form. If it feels more natural to put your most recent job title instead, that's fine too. There's no wrong choice here, only an honest one.

Freelancers ask a slightly different question: which trade name counts. The answer is whichever one you'd say out loud if a stranger asked what you do. Photographer, Consultant, Designer, Writer, all of these work better than the vague catch-all "Freelancer," simply because they say something real, but "Freelancer" on its own is still a perfectly acceptable answer if that's genuinely how you'd describe yourself.

Filling it in for your kids

Every traveler needs their own TDAC, and the Immigration Bureau is explicit that this includes infants and children; there's no age exemption. A parent completes the child's section as part of the family submission, and the occupation box shows up there too.

For a toddler or a child not yet in school, Child is the standard answer. For a school-age kid, Student reads more naturally, and either one is accepted without issue since, again, there's no list being checked against. A single submission covers a group of travelers together, up to a cap of 10 people, so a family of four or five fills in one flight and one address once, then repeats the personal details, occupation included, for each child. If you want the fuller picture on filing for kids specifically, from whose email receives the QR codes to the four fields you cannot fix on a child's card, that's covered in our guide to children and families on the TDAC.

You can change it later if you need to

The TDAC locks exactly four fields after submission: full name, passport number, nationality, and date of birth. Those four can only be corrected by filing a fresh TDAC, since the system treats your most recent submission as the one that counts. Occupation isn't one of the four. If you typed something you want to revise, a correction is available, so there's no reason to freeze up over the wording before you submit.

Why the form asks for it at all

The TDAC has been mandatory for every non-Thai national entering Thailand since May 1, 2025, replacing the old paper arrival card. The form collects three sections per traveler (personal information, trip and accommodation, and a health declaration), and occupation sits in that first section alongside your name and passport details. It's a standard field on an arrival form, the same kind you'd find on paper immigration cards in plenty of countries. Thailand just moved it online.

We fill in this exact box for a living

We run an assisted-filing service and have submitted 1,749 TDACs on the official system since June 2025, which means we've typed "Retired" and "Homemaker" and "Child" into this box more times than we can count. Nobody has ever come back to us with a problem traced to occupation. The fields that actually cause trouble are the ones we cover in our full field-by-field walkthrough of the form: the passport number, the delivery email, and the address hierarchy. Occupation has never made that list, and it's not going to be the reason your trip goes sideways.

If you'd rather skip typing any of it yourself, that's what our service is for: we fill in the form on the official system for you and get the QR codes to your inbox. Either way, now you know exactly what belongs in that one small box.