TDAC for Children and Families: One Card Each (2026)

There is no family arrival card. A household of five is five separate submissions and five separate QR codes, and almost every difficulty families run into is a downstream consequence of that one rule rather than a separate problem.

The rule itself is easy to accept once you have heard it. What catches families out is arriving at the desk having filed one card for the family, discovering it covers one person, and refiling four more on a phone while a queue builds behind them.

Children's passports carry the same machine-readable zone as an adult's — the two lines of capitals and chevrons across the bottom of the photo page — and the same rule applies: type what the zone says, not what the family says.

Two things about children's documents differ enough to matter.

They expire sooner. Most countries issue children's passports for five years rather than ten, and some for as little as three for infants. Thailand asks for six months of validity beyond your arrival date from every traveller regardless of age. The passport that was fine for last summer's trip is the one most likely to fall inside that six-month margin now, and a child's is far likelier to do so than a parent's. Check the expiry on every passport in the household before you book, not before you file.

The surname may not match yours. Children carry their own surname as printed, which in plenty of families is not the surname of the parent filing. Enter the child's name from the child's own machine-readable zone and nothing else. A card filed under the parent's surname because it seemed tidier is a card that will not be found.

Most of the form is the same for a two-year-old as for an adult. Four fields make parents hesitate, and all four have simple answers.

Using one parent's email for the whole family is deliberate, not a workaround. Every code arrives in one inbox, in one thread, and can be found in one search on a phone in an arrival hall. Splitting them across two parents' inboxes is how a family reaches the desk with four of five codes.

Choose group submission on the official portal and add up to 10 travelers. It reuses shared trip and accommodation details where appropriate, while keeping a separate identity record and TDAC/QR for each person. Review every traveler on the preview screen before submitting.

Keep all passports and a written checklist beside you, use one reliable email inbox, and download every individual TDAC after submission. If a permitted detail later changes, use Update Arrival Card; if full name, passport number, nationality, or date of birth is wrong, submit a new correct form. The group limit and correction rules are stated in the official TDAC FAQ.

The official portal charges nothing, for anyone, at any age. That is worth stating plainly because families are the group most exposed to the difference between free and not.

The reason to state it this way round is that a per-traveller price is nearly invisible when you are booking for one and very visible when you are booking for five. If you are filing for a household, check how a service prices the second, third and fourth person before you start — some taper, others do not, and on a family of five that difference is larger than the first fee.

None of which changes the underlying position: the portal is free and, with straightforward details, usable. What a family is buying, if it buys anything, is somebody checking five sets of passport data before submission rather than after, and the filing happening inside the window without anyone having to remember it on the day.

The codes are only half of it. What happens on the ground has its own shape once children are involved.

Check the gate result on every card. Each traveller's TDAC email says whether that person can use the automatic gates (AUTOMATED BORDER CONTROL - ELIGIBLE) or must go to a counter (IMMIGRATION COUNTER - MANUAL PROCESSING). If any of you must go to a counter, queue there together. If one parent clears an automatic gate alone, they are on the other side of immigration from their children.

One adult carries every passport and every code. Not one each, not the older children carrying their own. Passports and codes travel together, in one bag, with one person.

Print them, and save them. One sheet of paper per family with each code labelled by name, plus every code saved to a phone's photo library. Arrival halls are exactly where roaming fails and the airport Wi-Fi wants a sign-up you cannot complete with a toddler on your hip.

The officer scans passports, not codes. The card is retrieved from the passport number, so the codes are your proof when something does not resolve rather than the thing being checked. Get the five passport numbers right and a mislaid code is survivable. Get one wrong and the printout helps nobody.

Almost everything on this page is recoverable. Two things are not, and with a family you are exposed to both five times rather than once.

Every passport number. The card is found by passport number and nothing else. Read each one aloud, character by character, watching for 0 against O and 1 against I. Children's passports are the ones nobody has memorised.

The email address. One address, a parent's, checked once and reused for every member of the household. Get it wrong and the emailed cards go nowhere. You can still download each card on the confirmation screen and correct the address with Update Arrival Card, but it is far easier to get it right once.

Filing for the first time? Our field-by-field walkthrough of the form covers every question on the card, with a worked example.