Key points
- Trinidad and Tobago replaced its paper immigration and customs cards with an online form on March 17, 2026, that needs to be filed before you travel.
- A round trip needs two separate submissions — an arrival card and a departure card — each producing its own QR-code receipt, with no reminder from the government about the second one.
- The portal opens exactly 72 hours before each leg and refuses details submitted earlier, so it cannot be dealt with while you plan.
- It is free, needs no account, and accepts your passport image as .jpg or .png only — HEIC photos from iPhones and PDF scans are rejected.
- The form grants no length of stay: the immigration officer still decides that on arrival.
If you are flying to Port of Spain or Tobago and searching for the Trinidad and Tobago immigration form, what you are looking for is the Online Arrival/Departure Card. It is the same document travellers used to fill in with a pen somewhere over the Caribbean — the immigration slip and the customs declaration — except that since March 17, 2026 it lives on a website and has to be completed before you get to the airport.
This guide covers what it is, who files it, and the two details that catch almost everyone out.
What replaced the paper cards
Trinidad and Tobago retired its paper D/E cards in March 2026, after years of delay. The Minister of Homeland Security launched the platform in Port of Spain on March 11, the site went live on March 14, and filing became mandatory on March 17.
One submission now covers two forms that used to be separate slips of paper:
- The immigration arrival form — who you are, where you are staying, why you are visiting.
- The customs declaration — what you are bringing in, including currency, which it asks about twice: over US$5,000 or its equivalent, and over TT$20,000, which is roughly US$2,950 and so the lower bar of the two.
What you get back is a receipt with a QR code. You print it or save it to your phone, and officers scan it at the immigration and customs desks.
Who has to file it
Everyone. It is not nationality-based and it is not visitor-only: returning nationals and residents file the same form as tourists and business travellers.
Children under 18 do not file separately. A head of family submits for themselves, a spouse and any children travelling with them, all inside one application, up to 10 of them alongside the head of family, so 11 travellers in all. A party larger than that has to be split across more than one submission — the portal simply tells you to create another application when you hit the cap.
The first thing travellers get wrong: there are two forms
The government talks about “the card”, singular. There are in fact two submissions per round trip:
- an arrival card, filed before you fly in
- a departure card, filed before you fly out
They are independent. Each has its own QR-code receipt, and nothing in the system reminds you that the second one exists after you have completed the first. If you are travelling for a week, the departure form has to be filed from your hotel — not before you leave home.
The second thing: the 72-hour window
The portal will not take your details until 72 hours before your arrival or departure. Not a month, not a week — three days.
This is genuinely counterintuitive, and it produces a predictable pattern: travellers who try to be organised open the site while booking flights, find it will not accept their trip, and conclude the platform is broken. It is not. It is simply closed until the window opens.
The practical consequence is that you have to remember to come back twice: once inside the 72 hours before your outbound flight, and again inside the 72 hours before your return.
What you need before you start
- A valid passport
- A copy of your passport biodata page as a .jpg, .jpeg or .png image
- Your flight details
- A valid email address
- Your answers to the customs questions
The passport image is the most common technical stumbling block. The portal accepts those three formats and nothing else, and it rejects everything else with a bare “Invalid file type” that does not say why. Two very ordinary things fail this test: photos taken on an iPhone, which are saved as HEIC by default, and scans made with a phone app, which usually come out as PDFs.
Your email address matters more than it looks. The receipt and the Travel Code that the departure card asks for both arrive by email, and the form asks you to confirm the address for exactly that reason. Mistype it and you have no receipt and no way to retrieve one.
What the form does not do
It is worth being precise about this, because the online-form era has made a lot of arrival cards sound more powerful than they are.
The Online Arrival/Departure Card is not a visa, and it does not grant you a length of stay. Whether you need a visa for Trinidad and Tobago depends on your nationality — citizens of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, most of the EU and the CARICOM states do not — and the immigration officer at the desk still decides how long you may remain in the country. The card is a declaration you file, not a permission you are granted.
You will also see it described in places as requiring an account. It does not. The government portal opens straight into the form, with no login. There is no route for editing a submission afterwards. The Travel Code in that email is what the departure card asks for, to link it to your arrival record.
Where to get help if it goes wrong
This is the platform’s weakest point. There is no FAQ page, no contact page and no support channel attached to it — the addresses where those would normally live return errors, and the landing page carries no links out at all. The Immigration Division’s general phone lines and mailboxes exist, but the portal never points you to them.
That is the gap iVisa fills. If you would rather not track two windows and two submissions, or you want someone to check the customs answers and the passport image before anything is filed, we prepare the Trinidad and Tobago Online Arrival Card for your whole party — in your language, filed the moment each window opens, with support if something needs fixing.
