Working legally in Thailand: the Non-B and work permit

Two documents, two ministries#

The Non-Immigrant B visa is issued by a Royal Thai embassy or consulate abroad and, since 1 January 2025, applied for through the government e-Visa portal. A single entry costs 2,000 THB and is valid three months; a multiple entry costs 5,000 THB and is valid a year. Either way each entry gets you 90 days, which you then extend to a full year inside Thailand.

The work permit is issued by the Department of Employment. It is valid for a maximum of one year, renewable, and it names your employer, your job description and your workplace. Change any of those and you must amend the permit — 3,000 THB to change employer, 1,000 THB to change job description or location.

The order of operations matters. Your prospective employer files form WP.3 with the Office of Foreign Workers Administration, which produces a pre-approval letter. That letter supports your Non-B application abroad. It is valid one month, and you must enter Thailand and collect the permit within roughly 30 days of it being issued. Miss that window and the process restarts.

What your employer has to prove#

This is where the two-ministries problem bites hardest, because the capital requirement and the Thai-employee ratio are frequently reported as a single rule. They are not, and knowing which is which tells you which agency will reject you.

There are also alternative Department of Employment criteria that let an employer past the strict capital-per-head arithmetic where the business is clearly substantial: paying more than 3,000,000 THB in tax the previous year, exporting more than 30,000,000 THB, bringing in more than 5,000 foreign tourists, employing more than 100 Thai workers, or deploying technology that Thai staff cannot yet perform provided it is transferred to at least two Thai nationals. Foundations, associations and non-profits are treated separately again.

BOI-promoted companies sit outside the ratio entirely. Positions are approved by the Board of Investment rather than measured against Thai headcount, which is the main reason foreign firms bother with promotion. We could not find a BOI page stating the exemption in those exact words, so treat it as well-established practice rather than a clause you can quote.

Minimum salary by nationality#

There is no minimum salary in the work permit law. The figures below are an Immigration criterion, attached to your annual extension of stay, and they are unashamedly graded by passport.

How the process runs#

The digital work permit#

Jobs foreigners cannot do#

Thailand reserves a list of occupations for Thai nationals. The current instrument is a Ministry of Labour notification of April 2020, made under the Foreigners' Working Management Emergency Decree, and it sets out 40 occupations across four lists: 27 absolutely prohibited, 3 open only under an international agreement, 8 open conditionally as skilled or semi-skilled work with an identified employer, and 2 open only under a government-to-government labour agreement.

The absolutely prohibited list is the one that catches people. It includes general labour, driving, working as a shop attendant, hairdressing and beauty work, Thai traditional massage, tour guiding and hawking goods. Some of these are the obvious informal jobs a foreigner might drift into; others, such as tour guiding, surprise people running legitimate businesses. We could not confirm the Royal Gazette citation for the 2020 notification, so treat the four-list structure as well-reported rather than something we have read in the original.

Note that at least one Thai government publication still circulates the superseded list of 39 occupations from the 1979 royal decree. If a document you are given cites 39, it is out of date.

Where remote work actually sits#

This is the question everyone asks and almost nobody answers honestly, so here is the honest answer.

The old Alien Employment Act of 2008 defined work as exerting physical energy or employing knowledge, whether or not for wages. On that reading, answering a work email by the pool required a work permit. That definition is where the folklore comes from, and it was never seriously enforced against remote workers, but it was genuinely the law.

The Emergency Decree of 2017 replaced it, panicked everyone with penalties comparable to trafficking offences, had four of its sections suspended within weeks, and was then substantially amended by a second decree effective 28 March 2018. The amendment reframed working as engaging in an occupation, whether or not there is an employer, and broadened the exemptions for people entering temporarily for meetings, seminars, training and sporting or cultural events. The practical effect was to narrow the definition. We could not obtain an official English translation of the amended definition, so we are describing the effect rather than quoting the text.

What does not exist is any official statement, from the Department of Employment or the Ministry of Labour, addressing whether a foreigner physically in Thailand working online for an overseas employer needs a work permit. We looked. That absence is the actual state of the law, and any site telling you confidently that remote work is definitively legal or definitively illegal is filling a gap the Thai government has not filled.

What has changed is that the DTV exists, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' own specification sheet names its purpose of entry as workcation — digital nomad, remote worker, foreign talent, freelancer. The government has created a visa category for the activity. It has not issued a work permit exemption for it, and the DTV paperwork is silent on work permits in both directions. The defensible position is that the state has acknowledged remote work as a legitimate reason to be in Thailand; it is not a statutory safe harbour, and the distinction matters if anything ever goes wrong.

What is not ambiguous: you cannot work for a Thai employer, invoice Thai clients, or take on Thai-sourced work on a DTV. That requires a work permit and the corresponding visa category, and no amount of remote-work framing changes it.

Penalties#

The alternatives worth knowing#

Marriage to a Thai national is the cheapest legitimate route to a small business, because it halves the capital requirement to 1,000,000 THB. See the marriage visa guide for the visa side of it.

BOI promotion removes the Thai-staff ratio and routes your paperwork through the One Start One Stop Investment Center, which processes visa and work permit applications within three hours on complete documentation. Note that OSOS has moved: it is now at One Bangkok on Rama IV Road, not Chamchuri Square, which almost every other guide still lists.

The Long-Term Resident visa is a ten-year visa administered by the Board of Investment. The Work-from-Thailand Professional category asks for USD 80,000 a year of income, or USD 40,000 to 80,000 with a relevant master's degree, and requires your employer to be a listed public company, a subsidiary of one, or a private company with at least three years of operation and USD 50 million of combined revenue over three years. That revenue threshold was reduced from USD 150 million and most guides have not caught up. LTR holders get annual rather than 90-day reporting and a digital work permit, and Highly-Skilled Professionals get a flat 17 per cent personal income tax rate.