Do Families and Children Each Need Their Own TWAC Form?
Taiwan’s Digital Arrival Card, known as TWAC, replaced the old paper form on October 1, 2025, and it’s now required for every foreign visitor entering Taiwan. It’s free, submitted online through the official portal at twac.immigration.gov.tw, and takes just a few minutes. But one question keeps tripping up families traveling together: does every person need their own form, or can one parent simply fill it out once for the whole family?
The short answer: yes, every traveler needs their own form
Every person entering Taiwan in 2026 needs an Individual Travel Authorization (TWAC) submission, including children and infants. There’s no option to register a family as a single entry. A family of four, two adults and two kids, means four separate submissions, each with its own passport details.
For children specifically, that means:
– a parent or guardian fills out the form on the child’s behalf
– the form uses the child’s own passport details, not the parent’s
– each child receives their own QR code once the submission is complete
So why does everyone mention “group submission” then?
This is where a lot of the guides out there start contradicting each other. Some say there’s no group feature, others insist there is. The truth sits in between, and it’s worth getting right.
The platform does let one person submit forms for up to sixteen travelers under a single login. That’s genuinely useful for families, tour groups, or business delegations, since it means not everyone has to log into the system separately. But that’s not the same as creating one combined record for the group. Each of those sixteen travelers still ends up with their own individual form, their own data in the system, and their own separate QR code at arrival. In other words, “group submission” describes a shortcut in the process, one login instead of many, not a shortcut in the paperwork itself. Every traveler’s declaration remains personal and separate no matter who hits submit.
What happens if you skip it before your flight
Missing the TWAC before landing isn’t the end of the world, and it usually doesn’t come with a fine. But it does cost you something real: time.
Travelers who arrive without a completed TWAC get directed to kiosks or a web form right there in the arrival hall, where they fill it out on the spot. The catch is that while you’re doing that on your phone or at a kiosk, everyone who filed ahead of time walks past you through the faster lanes. That speed difference is really the whole point of the system:
– with a paper card or on-the-spot filing, processing runs about five to ten minutes per traveler
– with a TWAC submitted in advance and scanned as a QR code, it’s closer to one or two minutes
At a busy hour at Taoyuan Airport, that gap can add up to twenty or forty extra minutes of queuing for a whole family, especially if you’ve got a few kids along, each needing their own scan and check.
Why getting the details right matters so much
This is the part worth paying closest attention to: how accurate your entries are has a direct bearing on whether you sail through or end up filling the form out a second time, and sometimes a third.
The mistakes that cause the most trouble tend to be the same ones over and over:
– a name that doesn’t match the passport exactly, no nicknames, no shortened versions, no reversed order of first and last name
– a wrong passport number or birth date, which happens easily with children’s documents when parents are filling things out in a hurry
– picking the wrong purpose of travel, say choosing “sightseeing” when it should be “business,” which can create a mismatch when the details get checked
The trouble is that different sources give conflicting answers about what happens once you’ve already submitted and then spot an error. Some guidance says a submitted form can’t be edited at all and you need to file an entirely new one with the correction. Other guidance points to an “Update” function on the official portal that lets you go back in and fix a submission using your passport number and the email you used originally. In practice, the safer approach is to treat every submission as final and check the details carefully before you hit send, rather than counting on being able to fix mistakes easily afterward.
That’s exactly why families with a few kids often end up filing the form two or three times: once with a mistake, once trying to correct it, and a third time if the correction doesn’t go through the way they expected.
How to avoid the whole headache
If you’re traveling with your family and want to be sure everything, passport numbers, dates of birth, the spelling of names, is correct before it actually goes into the TWAC system, we offer a data check before submission. The idea is simple: every traveler gets confirmation that their card is accurate and valid the first time, so nobody’s stuck refiling, or in most families’ case, refiling twice, right before the flight.