There is no family e-visa in any meaningful sense: authorisations are issued per person, so every traveler needs an application of their own and pays a fee of their own, including a newborn who will spend the whole trip in a sling. Applying for a family is therefore not one large task but several ordinary ones, and the part that decides how it goes is consistency. The same trip dates, the same addresses and the same spellings have to appear on every form, because small differences between family members’ answers are what turn a routine batch into a queue of questions.
One application per person, including the baby
The per-person rule holds almost everywhere e-visas exist. Age changes only who completes the form, never whether one is required. A parent or legal guardian fills in and submits a child’s application, but it still belongs to the child: answer every question as the child, using the child’s passport details and place of birth, and sign where the portal reserves a space for a parent or guardian. Where it asks for the applicant’s contact details for a five-year-old, use yours.
Each child also needs a passport of their own. Adding children to a parent’s passport has been retired by most issuing countries, and a destination that reads machine-readable travel documents has nowhere to attach an e-visa for a child who holds no document. If anyone in the household is still traveling on a parent’s passport, replacing it is the first job, well ahead of any visa application.
The consistency that keeps a batch clean
Applications are assessed individually, so one member’s rejection does not cancel the others. The reverse is where families get caught: a mismatch between two forms raises a question neither would have raised alone. If the parents give one arrival date and the teenager gives another, or the hotel address is spelled three ways across four applications, an officer has a reason to look more closely at all of them.
Before anyone submits, agree the shared answers once and copy them exactly: arrival and departure dates, flight numbers where they are asked for, the address of the first night’s accommodation, the spelling of a shared surname as it appears in each passport’s machine-readable zone, and the contact telephone number. Where forms legitimately differ, such as a child born in another country or a parent with a different surname, leave the difference in place and check it matches the supporting documents.
Children: photos and consent letters
Automated photo checks apply the same rules to a six-month-old as to an adult: plain background, eyes open, neutral expression, face square to the camera, nobody else visible in the frame. That is genuinely difficult with an infant, and the usual failure is a supporting hand or shoulder appearing at the edge of the picture. Laying the baby on a plain white sheet and shooting from directly above solves most of it. Our guide to visa photo rejections and how to pass automated checks covers the specifications.
When one parent travels with the children and the other stays behind, many destinations and airlines expect a signed letter of consent from the absent parent, often notarised, and some portals ask for it during the application itself. The same applies to grandparents or family friends traveling with someone else’s child. Our guide to consent letters for minors sets out what it should contain and when it is needed.
Running the batch
Government portals send the reference number, every status update and the approval itself to the email address on the form. One address for the whole household keeps the batch in a single inbox, at the cost of four near-identical emails arriving together, so label each one as it lands and record its reference number against a name straight away. That short list is what you will want when one approval runs slower than the rest.
Submit everyone at the same time. Fees, photo specifications and validity periods change on announced dates, and a family that spreads its applications over three weeks can straddle one of those changes, leaving a single member holding an authorisation issued under different terms from everyone else’s.
What it costs
Multiply everything by heads. The consular fee is charged per applicant, and children are rarely discounted; a few destinations reduce or waive it for under-12s, which is worth checking, but budget on the full amount for each person. Any service fee is charged per application too, and fees are generally non-refundable whether or not the application succeeds.
Check the requirement once per passport in the family
Each passport in the family carries its own requirement. Where everyone holds the same nationality, one check covers the household. In a mixed-nationality family the answers diverge: one parent may need an e-visa, the other may enter visa-free, and a child on a third nationality may need a consular appointment booked weeks ahead. Run every nationality in the group against the destination and the full route, transit stops included, in the entry requirements checker.
Dual nationals need one more decision. The answer depends on which passport they travel on, and that choice has to hold across the ticket, the application and the return journey. Our guide to applying for an e-visa with dual citizenship explains how to make it and stick to it.