Vietnam Digital Arrival Card 2026: What Noi Bai Arrivals Have to File

The Vietnam Immigration Department now runs a portal at prearrival.immigration.gov.vn where foreign travellers declare themselves before they land. You enter your passport, visa and flight details, the portal returns a QR code, and you show that code to the officer at the immigration desk. The official name is Pre-Arrival Information, shortened to PAI. Travel pages call it the digital arrival card or the Vietnam arrival card, and those all point at the same form.

This is the airport's replacement for the paper arrival card that used to be handed out on the descent into Noi Bai. The Vietnamese government is blunt that the two should not be confused: the immigration department describes the declaration as entry information only, and immigration officers on the portal are clear that it is not a visa application and not a visa processing service. Vietnam Airlines calls it an entry declaration and says passengers who have completed it can use the priority entry lane marked Pre-Arrival Info.

So it does not change whether you can enter Vietnam. That question is settled by your e-visa, your visa exemption or your temporary residence card before you ever reach the form. What the PAI changes is how long you stand in the queue at Noi Bai, and whether an officer has to send you sideways to a counter to fill in paperwork you could have done at the hotel the night before.

The system was piloted at Tan Son Nhat on 15 April 2026 and widened through the spring. By the middle of June it covered the four airports that handle almost all of Vietnam's international traffic. Noi Bai was switched on in mid-June 2026, a few days after Phu Quoc and on the same day as Da Nang. Cam Ranh, the airport for Nha Trang, appears on Vietnam Airlines' list of gates where the declaration is required.

Read that last row twice if you run the border instead of flying. The immigration department has said the land and sea gates are under study with the relevant agencies, and not one published rollout date has been for a road crossing.

The scope is broad. The US Embassy in Hanoi published a notice in mid-June 2026 saying the declaration applies to all international passengers who do not hold a Vietnamese passport, and that it can be completed on arrival or up to three days before. That covers tourists, business travellers, overseas Vietnamese on a Vietnamese-descended visa exemption, and anyone coming back into Hanoi on a freshly issued e-visa after a flight run.

• Visa-free arrivals still file it. The exemption gets you past the visa question, not past the arrival declaration.
• Children are included. The portal has an add-passenger step, so a family of four files one declaration with the adults listed first and the kids added to it.
• Vietnamese passport holders do not file. This is a form for foreign passports.
• Airside transit is out of scope. If you never pass immigration, there is nothing to declare.
• One exception to watch: passengers who are visa exempt and fly into Tan Son Nhat before a connecting flight to Phu Quoc are not caught by the rule on that arrival, per Vietnam Airlines.

Enforcement in the first weeks was uneven. Officers did not always ask to see the code, and a few travellers reported walking straight through. Treating that as an exemption is a bad bet. It costs nothing, it takes about five minutes with your passport open, and the downside of being waved aside at a busy arrival hour is a longer conversation than the form would have been.

Have your passport, your visa approval and your flight number within reach before you open the portal. The declaration collects:

• An image of your passport data page. Colour, both MRZ lines readable. This is the first field that stalls people, because a phone photo taken at a hotel desk in poor light often fails and has to be retaken.
• Passport number, full name as printed, date of birth, gender and nationality.
• Your visa or entry basis: e-visa, visa exemption, temporary residence card, and the visa number with its issue and expiry dates.
• Your date of arrival and flight number, plus where you flew in from.
• Purpose of entry and means of transport. For an air arrival that is the flight itself.
• An accommodation address in Vietnam, a hotel or a relative's home. The portal wants something specific, not "Hanoi".
• A workplace, if the purpose of entry is business or work.
• Your expected departure date from Vietnam.

When you submit, the portal emails a verification code. Enter that code to validate the declaration, and the system then issues a file number and a QR code you can save or print. The email address matters more than it looks: a typo in it means you never receive the code and the submission sits unvalidated.

The accommodation field is the other one worth thinking about in advance. Visitors with a hotel booking type the hotel. Longer-stay people who move around should use the address they genuinely expect to be at on arrival night, and if that changes, update the declaration rather than leaving it wrong. The portal has a lookup and update function for exactly this.

The portal accepts a declaration no earlier than 72 hours before your scheduled arrival, and the official notices allow you to complete it after landing as well. Both are true, and only one of them is pleasant. Submitting two or three days before the flight gives you room to fix a rejected passport photo or a mistyped email address while you are still somewhere with a keyboard.

The health declaration is a separate matter and does not go on this table. A Ministry of Health declaration is activated when there is a specific disease risk in play, applies to everyone including Vietnamese citizens, and is not part of the immigration portal. If both are live on your travel date, you file both.

Hanoi has two ways to reset a stay. One is the van down the Ho Chi Minh Highway to Lao Bao, which is what most of our passengers book and which runs Tuesday and Saturday. The other is a flight out of Noi Bai, usually to Bangkok, for the people whose dates do not line up with a van or who want a stamp somewhere other than the Laos pattern.

The pre-arrival declaration landed on the airport door only. So the Lao Bao run keeps its paperwork exactly as it was: an approved Vietnam e-visa before you board, the Laos landing form and visa at Dansavanh, then the fresh entry stamp on the way back. Laos has its own online form now, and that one is the mirror image of this page: same three-day window, different government.

If you fly the return leg instead, you now have one more item on the list. Coming back into Noi Bai means a PAI declaration on top of the new e-visa you arranged before leaving Vietnam. Two separate systems, two separate government departments, and neither one covers the other.

• Paying a middleman for a free form. Search results are full of "Vietnam arrival card" services. The government portal is free, and the only address is prearrival.immigration.gov.vn. Anything that wants a payment card is selling you something you can do yourself in five minutes.
• Filing outside the window. The portal will not accept a declaration more than 72 hours ahead. Do it a week early and you are simply turned away, which people read as the system being broken.
• Treating the QR code as entry permission. It is not. A declaration filed against an e-visa that has not been approved yet is a declaration with nothing behind it. The e-visa is the part with lead time: three to five business days on the standard tier, which is why our desk files it before anything else.
• No offline copy. Screenshot the QR code and the file number, and keep them where you can open them without data. Arrival halls are the worst place to depend on wifi.
• An email address with a typo. The verification code goes to that address and nowhere else, so a mistyped domain leaves you with an unvalidated declaration you cannot look up.

We cannot file this one for you, in the same way we cannot take the Laos selfie for you: it needs your document in your hand and your email address on the record. What the visa desk does is make sure the piece underneath it is solid. Send us your passport details and travel date and we check that the e-visa approval is in place before you book the flight, and remind you about the declaration for the return leg.