Every foreign passport holder entering Thailand has to file one. It is free, it takes about ten minutes, and you can only do it in the 72 hours before you arrive. Here is the whole thing, start to finish.
Check for .go.th at the end — that suffix is reserved for Thai government bodies and cannot be registered by anyone else. No .com, .org or .info address is the real thing, however official it looks. We are not affiliated with Thai Immigration and we do not file it for you; the link is there so you can go straight to the source.
The six things that decide whether you have a problem at the airport.
Almost certainly yes. The exemptions are narrower than people assume.
That is the whole exemption list. If you are unsure whether your transit counts, assume you need one — filing an unnecessary TDAC costs you ten minutes and nothing else.
Roughly ten minutes if you have your passport and booking in front of you.
The form opens 72 hours before your arrival time and not a minute earlier. Try on day four and the portal simply will not accept you, which is the single most common reason people assume the site is broken.
File it the day before you fly. Early enough that you are not doing it in a boarding queue, late enough that your flight and hotel details are settled.
Type tdac.immigration.go.th into the address bar rather than clicking a search result. The copycat sites buy ads and optimise hard for exactly this query, and several look more polished than the government one.
Three tells that you are in the wrong place: a fee of any size, a request for payment card details, or a promise to "process" or "approve" your card. The real TDAC is a declaration, not an application — there is nothing to approve and nothing to pay.
Copy the passport number character by character from the document. The error that causes the most trouble is entering the digit 0 where the passport shows the letter O, or the reverse — it silently breaks the link between your submission and your passport scan, and the officer's screen comes up empty.
Your name must match the passport exactly, in the same order, including any middle names printed there. A wrong birth year has the same effect as a wrong passport number.
Give a specific address. "Bangkok" or "hotel" gets rejected; a hotel name with its district is fine. If you are staying with friends or in a condo, use the building name, street and district.
If your plans change after you file, the official FAQ says details other than name, passport number, nationality and date of birth can be changed with the portal's Update function, or you can submit a new form (only the latest one counts). Check the portal for how it treats an accommodation change close to arrival.
You get a QR code by email within a few minutes. Screenshot it. Do not rely on finding the email in an airport queue on roaming data with 4% battery.
Save it somewhere offline — your phone's photo album is fine — and if you are travelling as a family, save every person's code, not just your own.
Hand over your passport as normal and have the QR code open on your phone. In practice most officers work straight from the passport scan and never ask to see it — but the queue you join depends on the submission existing, so the code is your proof it does.
The TDAC is not an approval. It gets you into the line; the immigration officer still decides on entry.
In rough order of how often it happens.
It is not a visa. It does not give you permission to enter Thailand or extend how long you can stay. If you need a visa you still need one, and if you are visa-exempt you still are.
It is not an ETA. Thailand has discussed an electronic travel authorisation of the kind the UK and EU run, where you are pre-screened and approved before you fly. The TDAC is not that. It is a declaration form that moves the old paper arrival card online, and there is no approval decision attached to it.
It is not the TM30. The TM30 is a separate residence notification filed after you arrive, by whoever owns the place you sleep in. Different form, different obligation, different consequences for getting it wrong.
It replaced the TM6. The paper arrival card most long-time visitors remember filling out on the plane was suspended in June 2022 and formally replaced by the TDAC on 1 May 2025.
It is not the tourist entry fee, and that fee is not being collected yet. The levy has been discussed for years. As of mid-September 2026 the proposal is a 450-baht fee (it replaced the earlier 300-baht air-arrivals plan): a national tourism committee endorsed it in mid-August, public consultation runs to 28 September, and collection is targeted for early 2027 after Cabinet approval and a Royal Gazette notice (The Nation, 12 Sept; a press report, not a government notice). How it would be collected is undecided, and paying online before filing the TDAC is one option under discussion. Today the official TDAC portal charges nothing. A site asking for 300 or 450 baht now is not collecting a government fee.
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