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Due to the coronavirus lockdown, extending your visa in Cambodia is now probably a necessity. Here’s how to do it.

For most visitors to Cambodia you will enter on a tourist visa on arrival, or through the e-visa (online visa), both of which are usually valid for one month, and under normal circumstances can be extended for a further month by paying a fee of around $60. After that, you would be required to then leave the country to either change your visa or get a new one.

This has, of course, changed with the new policy of not only not granting these visas, but with the county mostly being on lockdown, this has left a lot of foreigners in limbo.

This limbo was taken away (to an extent) when the government announced they would allow extensions of more than one month, but how does this work in the real world? We are very happy to tell you!

If you have not extended your visa, you will have to extend doing the normal process at least once. The cost for this around $60, with there being numerous agents in multiple cities who can help with this. The time to do this visa extension is between 8-12 days, but this is something you will need to speak directly to your agent about. Cambodia charges $10 per day for visa overstays, and it is unclear if this will still be the case during coronavirus.

If you were to extend today, you would get your visa around April 11th, valid until May 11th, a time when multiple borders are still likely to be closed and travel generally still frowned upon. This is where the main change takes place. Instead of the 1-month prohibition on extensions, it is now possible to extend at least one more time, which would take anyone currently in Cambodia to at least June. It has actively been implied that further extensions will be made available, and at around $5 per extension, rather than the previously mentioned $60 for the first extension.

If during this time, travel restrictions are loosened, or borders such as Thailand are opened, it is possible to leave the country and change to an “ordinary visa,” which can thus be swapped into a business visa that offers up to 12-month extensions!

A lot of this information is available online, but we hope it helps fellow Pioneers in exodus here. It’s a holiday in Cambodia indeed!