SG Arrival Card — your Singapore entry card, read and filed

Your SG Arrival Card can be submitted in the three days before you arrive, counting the day of arrival itself. Not a month ahead, not a week ahead. Three days.

That window is narrow and it tends to open exactly when you are busiest. If you are flying long-haul with a connection, it may open while you are already travelling. If you are driving up from Malaysia, it opens while you are still packing the car.

Send us your passport and travel details whenever suits you, today if you like. We prepare your Singapore entry card now, hold it ready, and file it the moment your window opens. Your confirmation reaches your inbox the same day.

A Singapore visa is permission to enter the country, and whether you need one depends entirely on your nationality. Most visitors to Singapore do not need a visa at all and travel on their passport alone. Others apply for a Singapore tourist visa before they leave home.

The SG Arrival Card is not a visa and does not replace one. It is the arrival form, and unlike the visa it applies to everyone. Whether you enter visa-exempt, on a Singapore tourist visa arranged in advance, or on any other basis, your SG card is the same requirement.

That cuts both ways, and it is why so many travellers get caught. If you have found that a Singapore visa applies to your nationality, you still need the SG Arrival Card on top of it. And if you have found that you do not need a visa at all, do not assume there is nothing left to file. There is, and this is it.

Your visa, if you need one, is the part to sort out weeks ahead. Your Singapore arrival card is the part that waits until the final three days, and it is the part we handle.

This one catches people out, and Changi being what it is, it catches a lot of them.

If you stay inside the transit area and connect straight to your onward flight with your bags checked through, you do not need an SG Arrival Card. You never formally enter Singapore.

If you leave the transit area, you do. That includes clearing immigration to visit Jewel, going into the city for a few hours between flights, or checking into a hotel outside the terminal for a long layover. The moment you pass through the counter you are entering Singapore, and the Singapore entry card applies.

A long layover at Changi is one of the better ones to have, and plenty of travellers plan to make use of it. If that is you, file the SG card before you fly rather than discovering the requirement at the immigration hall.

Every visitor to Singapore submits an SG Arrival Card. That means every person on the booking, not one form per family.

Children need one. Infants need one, completed by a parent or guardian. A family of four is four separate Singapore arrival cards, not one shared entry.

Singapore citizens and permanent residents are exempt and do not submit one at all. Long-term pass holders crossing at Woodlands and Tuas are also exempt.

Everyone else files a fresh Singapore entry card for every trip. There is no card that carries over from your last visit, and returning visitors submit again each time they come back.

Add everyone travelling with you to a single application and the shared details, your flight and your address in Singapore, are typed once and applied to each traveller.

Singapore immigration checks your arrival card when you reach the desk, and the officer sees it linked to the passport you hand over. When the form and the passport agree, that is the whole interaction, and at Changi it is often a walk through the automated lanes rather than a conversation at all.

Travellers whose Singapore entry card does not match their passport are the ones who end up standing aside while it is sorted out, at the end of a long flight, with the queue moving past them.

Almost every problem with an SG Arrival Card comes down to that mismatch, and that is exactly what we look for before yours goes in.