The passport photo you submitted does not meet Vietnam Immigration Department technical requirements. This is the single most frequent cause of eVisa rejection. The automated system rejects photos that fail on background colour, face positioning, file format, resolution, or image quality - and the rejection notice simply says "application error" without specifying which criterion failed.

Common photo mistakes that cause rejection: coloured or outdoor background instead of plain white, face too small or not centred, shadows on the face or background, sunglasses or hats, file too large or in the wrong format, low resolution or blurry image, and photos taken more than 6 months ago where appearance has changed significantly.

The name you entered on the application does not exactly match the name printed in your passport. Vietnam Immigration cross-references your application name against the machine-readable zone (MRZ) at the bottom of your passport biographical page. Any discrepancy - even a single letter, a missing middle name, or a hyphen in the wrong place - triggers rejection.

Common name errors: middle names omitted entirely, middle names included when passport shows initials only, hyphenated surnames entered with a space, names with accents entered without accents or vice versa, first and last name fields swapped, and preferred names used instead of legal passport names.

Your passport does not have at least 6 months of remaining validity from your intended date of entry into Vietnam. This is a hard requirement with no exceptions. The 6-month calculation is from your entry date - not from today and not from the date you submitted the application. If your passport expires on 1 December 2026 and you plan to enter Vietnam on 15 July 2026, your passport only has 4.5 months of validity from entry - your application will be rejected.

The entry date you specified on your application has already passed by the time the Immigration Department processed your submission, or the date is outside the permitted 90-day window from your application date. This happens most often when: an application took longer than expected to process and the entry date passed during processing, the traveller entered the wrong month or day, or the application was a resubmission where the original entry date was simply copied over without updating.

The date of birth entered on the application does not match the date of birth recorded in the Vietnamese immigration database for your passport number, or does not match the date printed in your passport. This error is frequently caused by day/month confusion - travellers from countries using MM/DD/YYYY format sometimes enter dates in that format on a portal that expects DD/MM/YYYY, resulting in the month and day being transposed.

Example: A traveller born on 5 March 1990 enters "03/05/1990" intending it as March 5, but the portal reads it as 3 May 1990. The mismatch causes rejection.

A child who holds their own individual passport was included in or attached to a parent or guardian eVisa application instead of having their own separate application. Vietnam eVisa policy requires every traveller with their own passport - including infants and toddlers - to have their own individual eVisa application. There are no group applications and no family applications. The only exception is a child whose name is officially listed inside a parent passport and who does not hold their own separate travel document.

Your passport has been flagged in the Vietnamese immigration system due to a previous overstay, entry refusal, deportation, or violation of Vietnamese immigration law. This type of rejection is less common than the document-related reasons above but more serious. It can also occur if your passport number is incorrectly associated with another person who has a violation record, or if there is an error in the immigration database.

Unlike the other rejection reasons on this list, this one cannot always be fixed by simply correcting your application. It may require contacting the Vietnam Immigration Department directly or consulting a specialist visa agent.