Vietnam’s tourist e-visa asks for two files and nothing more: a recent portrait photo and an image of your passport’s data page. That sounds easy, and mostly it is. The catch is that the Government portal reads both files by machine before any officer looks at your application. It pulls your details from the passport image, looks for your face in both files and compares them. A file a person might accept, such as a slightly dark photo or a passport page with one corner cut off, can fail a machine check outright. So the rules below are worth following to the letter.
The portrait photo
The portal’s own wording for the photo is short: a recent photo, 4x6 cm, jpg/jpeg, face looking straight, no hat, no glasses, polite clothes, white background. In practice that means:
- Recent. It should look like you do today, not like the photo in a passport issued years ago.
- 4x6 proportions. Taller than it is wide.
- JPG, under 2 MB. The portal’s own pages do not all give the same limit, so keep the file under 2 MB and it will pass whichever one applies. A normal phone photo may need saving at a smaller size.
- White background, face straight to the camera. No hat, no glasses of any kind, and ordinary, decent clothes.
The photos that fail are predictable:
- Sunglasses, or any glasses at all.
- A hat or cap.
- A face cropped out of a group photo, with someone’s shoulder or hair at the edge.
- A photo of a printed photo, or a photo of a screen.
- Two faces in the frame, even a small one in the background.
- Beauty filters or heavy editing.
- A coloured, patterned or busy background.
You do not need a studio. Stand against a plain white wall in daylight, with the light in front of you rather than behind. Ask someone to hold the phone at eye level, look straight into the camera, and crop the photo to 4x6 proportions afterwards.
The passport data page
This is the page with your photo, name, date of birth and passport number. Upload one page only, the data page, not the cover and not a two-page spread with a visa on it.
- The whole page, all four corners. The portal’s wording is “no lost corners”.
- Both machine-readable lines. These are the two lines of letters, numbers and
<signs along the bottom of the page. They must be fully in frame and readable. - No glare and no finger. Light bouncing off the laminate, or a thumb holding the page flat, can hide a character.
- Colour, sharp and straight on. A clear phone photo with the passport flat on a table is fine.
The machine-readable lines matter because the portal fills in your personal details from them and matches the face on the page against your portrait. It rejects a passport image in which it cannot find those lines, or cannot find a face.
Validity
Carry a passport with at least six months’ validity on your travel date. The portal’s own minimum is lower: the passport must still be valid 30 days after the visa ends. But airlines and border officers may apply six months, so six months is the rule to plan by.
If your passport is being renewed, wait for the new one and apply on it. The application is filed with the passport number and the data page you upload, so it should be the passport you will actually travel on.
What the portal checks automatically
When the photo and passport image are uploaded, the portal runs its own checks. It looks for:
- A face it can detect.
- A face looking straight at the camera.
- A real photo, not a photo of a photo.
- One face only.
- A portrait that matches the face on the passport page.
If the match is weak, the portal warns that a “low match rate” means the application may be rejected. That warning is worth taking seriously. A rejection for a bad photo is still a refusal, and the Government fee paid with the application is not returned.
What we check by hand
Before we file anything, a person on our team opens your application and checks it against our list for Vietnam:
- Dates. The visa dates you asked for must end within 90 days of the day the visa is issued. Apply no more than two to three weeks before you travel: the e-visa’s 90 days are counted from the day it is issued, not from your arrival.
- Gates. Your entry and exit points must be on the Government’s list of border gates for the e-visa, and are the ones you plan to use.
- Photo and passport image. The rules above, checked by eye as well as by the portal.
- Purpose. We file as a tourist unless you tell us otherwise. Business, work and study need permits, so we will talk to you before filing those.
What you don’t need
For a tourist e-visa you do not upload a bank statement, a flight ticket, a hotel booking or travel insurance. The form asks for an address in Vietnam, and a hotel is fine, plus your planned entry and exit gates, but no booking has to be attached. The portal has an optional area for extra images; a tourist application does not need it.
Children under 14 who travel on a parent’s passport go on that parent’s application, each with their own portrait photo. A child with their own passport needs their own e-visa.
Our price is USD 75 single entry or USD 100 multiple entry, all-in, with the Government fee included. When your two files are ready, apply on the Vietnam visa page. If you are not sure a photo or passport image will pass, send it to us on WhatsApp first and we will tell you.