Noise complaints in Bangkok: the test is not how loud it is

Thailand has no quiet-hours rule. What it has instead is a health law that treats noise as a nuisance, a measurement method that subtracts your own street from the sound before judging it, and a severity threshold that a court has already applied against a complainant. Here is how each of the four available doors is actually built, and which one can order the noise to stop.

Compiled by the Town Wire News desk · Last verified October 2026 · How we made this

Nobody wrote down a bedtime

The question every newcomer asks first — what time does the noise have to stop? — has no answer, because Thai law never framed the problem that way. There is no statutory curfew on sound in a residential building, no municipal quiet period, and no hour after which loudness becomes an offence in itself.

What exists instead is Chapter 5 of the Public Health Act B.E. 2535, four pages of a law otherwise concerned with markets, food shops, waste and drains. Section 25 lists the things that count as a nuisance, and the list is a health list rather than a comfort list: unsanitary water and waste, keeping animals badly or in unreasonable numbers, buildings without ventilation or drainage, and then paragraph four, a catch-all covering any act causing smell, light, radiation, sound, heat, poison, vibration, dust, soot or ash to the point of degrading or possibly endangering health.

Noise, in other words, is not treated as a matter of neighbourly manners. It sits in the same clause as radiation and poison, and it inherits the same qualifier: to the point of degrading or possibly endangering health. That qualifier is the whole ball game, and we will come back to what a court has made of it.

The test is a subtraction

The second surprise is that when officials measure noise for a nuisance complaint, they are not comparing it to a limit. They are comparing it to your own street.

The method is set out in the technical annex used for noise nuisance, and it defines three quantities. The background level is what the place sounds like when the source is not running — formally the level exceeded 90 per cent of the time, measured for at least ten minutes, collected as at least three continuous readings, with the median of those readings used. The level while the source is running is measured at the place where the complaint comes from, with the microphone 1.2 to 1.5 metres above the floor, at least 3.5 metres from any reflecting surface outdoors, and at least a metre from walls and 1.5 metres from a window indoors. The disturbance level is the second minus the first.

If the disturbance level exceeds 10 dB(A), the sound is noise disturbance. That is the number that decides complaints.

Three refinements make it more interesting than a bare subtraction.

First, the source reading is corrected downward when the source is barely above the ambient, on a sliding table: where the source reading is 1.4 dB(A) or less above the level without the source, a full 7.0 dB(A) is subtracted; at 2.5 to 3.4 dB(A) above, 3.0 is subtracted; from 12.5 dB(A) above, nothing is subtracted. The effect is that marginal cases get pushed further below the threshold, deliberately.

Second, sound produced between 22:00 and 06:00 — or in places that need quiet, the annex naming hospitals, schools, places of worship and libraries — is measured as a five-minute average and then has 3 dB(A) added.

Third, and this is the provision that will interest anyone living above a bar, sound that is impulsive (the annex gives piling and press-forming), shrill (grinding, drilling into concrete) or carrying vibration gets 5 dB(A) added. The definition of the third category names, in terms, bass through an amplifier. Thai regulation has looked directly at the thing that comes through a concrete floor at one in the morning and written a penalty into the arithmetic for it.

Stack the two corrections and a bass-heavy sound at night carries eight decibels of handicap before the comparison is made. Against a quiet background, that is a large head start.

The 70 decibel number you have seen is the wrong number

Search for Thailand’s noise law in English and you will be told the legal limit is 70 decibels. That figure is real but it is answering a different question. It comes from National Environment Board Notification No. 15, dated 12 March 2540, which sets the general ambient standard: a maximum level not exceeding 115 dB(A) and a twenty-four-hour average not exceeding 70 dB(A).

The Pollution Control Department’s own explanatory material for that standard states what it is for: assessing the situation in an area, supporting environmental quality management plans, and supporting city planning that keeps environmental care alongside development. It is a planning instrument. Nobody is going to average your neighbour’s sound system over twenty-four hours before deciding whether to knock on the door.

What a court did with a nuisance complaint

The best available guide to how the severity qualifier in section 25 is read is a Supreme Administrative Court judgment from 30 December 2552, red case Or. 411/2552, on appeal from the Central Administrative Court. It was not about noise — it was about cats — but it is about the same paragraphs, and the reasoning transfers.

A resident of Soi Pracha Uthit 87 in Thung Khru complained that a neighbour’s three or four cats were roaming into his house, eating and fouling there, and that the district director had done nothing about it since his complaint in October 2548. He sued the district director for neglecting a statutory duty.

The court set out sections 25(2), 25(4), 27 and 28, and then drew the line: a nuisance under those paragraphs must be serious enough to cause severe danger to public health, or to affect living conditions suitable for the ordinary life of the complainant and the neighbouring residents. On the facts, the cats were kept in a cage indoors and let out occasionally, which is in the nature of animals; the complainant was genuinely annoyed, but not to a degree that endangered health or prevented him from living his ordinary daily life. The appeal was dismissed.

Two details of that ruling matter more to a noise complainant than the outcome.

The first is corroboration. The district had sent officers to the area and asked the people living nearby, and none of them reported being troubled. The court recited that finding as part of its reasoning. If you are the only household complaining, you are in the same evidential position as the man with the cats.

The second is what discharging the duty looks like. The district was held to have complied because it inspected, asked around, asked the city’s veterinary public health division to collect strays, wrote to the neighbour and the surrounding building owners asking for cooperation, and wrote back to the complainant. The nuisance, from the complainant’s point of view, continued. Process, not result, was the measure. Plan for that: a district that answers your complaint with an inspection and a letter has, on this authority, done its job, and the way to move it further is to give it something the letter cannot absorb — several complainants, dated logs, and a request for measurement.

Who actually holds the power

Section 4 of the Act defines the local official who wields Chapter 5. For a municipality it is the mayor; for a sub-district administration, its chief executive; and for the area of Bangkok, it is the Governor of Bangkok. In practice the power runs through the district office, which is why the respondent in the case above was a district director rather than the Governor.

What that official can do is set out in three sections and is worth reading as an escalation.

Section 26 gives the general power to forbid anyone from creating a nuisance in a public place or a private one, to abate nuisances, and to issue written orders to stop, remove and control them.

Section 27 handles nuisances in or affecting public places. The official may order the person causing it, in writing, to stop or prevent it within a reasonable time stated in the order, and may specify the method and the measures to stop it recurring. If the order is ignored and the nuisance may cause serious danger to health, the official abates it directly — and the person responsible pays the cost.

Section 28 is the one that reaches the flat next door, because it handles nuisances in private places. Same written order, same reasonable time, same power to specify the method. If the order is ignored, the official may abate the nuisance and, where it arose from the act, neglect or consent of the owner or occupier, recover the cost from them. And paragraph three goes further than most people expect: where a nuisance in a private place may cause serious danger to health or affect living conditions suitable for the life of the people, the official may order in writing that the owner or occupier not use, and not let anyone use, all or part of the place until the official is satisfied that the nuisance has stopped.

Section 28/1, added by the third amendment in 2560, adds a collective tool: where a nuisance under section 27 or 28 covers a wide area and endangers public health, the official may declare the area a nuisance control zone, under criteria the Minister publishes in the Gazette on the committee’s recommendation.

The teeth are in section 74: failing to comply with an order under section 27 paragraph one, or section 28 paragraph one or three, without reasonable cause — or obstructing the official who is carrying out the abatement — carries up to three months’ imprisonment or a fine of up to 25,000 baht or both. That penalty is the reason the written order is worth pursuing rather than another visit from the front desk.

One structural change is worth noting for anyone comparing older English write-ups. Thailand has been converting fine-only offences into administrative penalties, and the Public Health Act is on the schedule of statutes affected. In the consolidated text, section 75 — the overcrowded-building offence, punishable by fine alone — is already printed as an administrative penalty of up to 5,000 baht. Section 74 keeps its prison option and therefore stays a criminal offence.

And if the order goes the other way — if you are the one ordered to stop something — section 66 gives thirty days from learning of the order to appeal in writing to the Appeal Consideration Committee, which section 66/1 puts under the chairmanship of the Director-General of the Department of Health. Filing does not suspend the order unless the committee says so.

The condominium layer, and what it cannot do

Most noise problems in Bangkok happen inside buildings that have a juristic person, a manager and a committee, and the first instinct is to take the problem there. That is usually right, but it helps to know what you are asking of a body whose statutory purpose is narrower than people assume.

Section 33 of the Condominium Act B.E. 2522 says the juristic person exists to manage and maintain the common property, and to do what is necessary for that object. Your neighbour’s living room is not common property.

What reaches inside a unit is the registered regulations. Section 32 requires the regulations to contain, among other things, the management of common property and the use of private and common property — so quiet-hours clauses, renovation windows and short-let bans live there rather than in the statute. Section 36 makes the manager act in accordance with the object, the regulations and the resolutions of the general meeting and the committee, and requires the manager to provide for safety and orderliness within the condominium. But the manager’s one express litigation power against an owner, in section 36(6), is to sue for common expenses more than six months in arrears.

So the practical question to ask your juristic office is not “will you do something” but “what do the registered regulations say about this, and what have you done under them?” If the regulations are silent, the fix is a general meeting resolution, which the manager must then register with the official within thirty days.

There is one provision in the Act with numbers big enough to change behaviour, and it is not about noise as such. Section 17/1, added by the fourth amendment in 2551, provides that where an area of a condominium is arranged for trade, the access to that area must be organised separately so as not to disturb the normal peaceful living of the co-owners — and then, in its second paragraph, prohibits anyone from carrying on trade in a condominium at all except in an area so arranged. Section 65 punishes breach with a fine of up to 50,000 baht, plus up to 5,000 baht a day for as long as it continues.

That is the provision to reach for when the problem upstairs is not a party but a business: a unit being run as a bar, a studio taking paying clients, a room let by the night with a new set of arrivals every evening. It does not require a decibel measurement. It asks a simpler question about what is being done, and where.

The police, and what a petty offence buys you

Calling the police is the fastest way to end tonight and the weakest way to end the problem. Section 370 of the Penal Code covers a person who makes a sound, causes a sound or creates a din without reasonable cause, to the point that the public is alarmed or disturbed. The maximum penalty is a fine of 1,000 baht — the figure substituted by the 2558 amending Act that raised petty-offence fines across the board, and the Ministry of Justice’s own public legal-education material uses this provision when explaining noisy neighbours.

The heavier petty offence in the same neighbourhood of the Code is section 397, which covers bullying, harassing or causing another person distress, and which the same 2558 reform extended to conduct in private places; it carries up to a month or 10,000 baht. Neither section produces anything that binds the offender next weekend. That is precisely why the Public Health Act route, slow as it is, is the one that changes the situation: it ends in an order, and the order has section 74 behind it.

Which door for which noise

Making a complaint that survives contact with the office

Bangkok’s general complaint channel is the city’s Traffy Fondue platform, which routes reports to the responsible agency and is the same pipe that the 1555 city hotline feeds. When we queried the platform’s public interface on 28 August 2026 it returned 1,425,054 records, and the individual tickets we looked at carried the district name and the routing tag, which tells you what the system is doing with a report: sorting it to a district and giving it a state.

Four things make a noise report harder to close without action.

Dates and times, written down as they happen. Not “every night” but the hours, over a period. The measurement method itself is time-specific — night measurements are five-minute averages, background and source readings have to come from the same part of the day — so an officer arriving at three in the afternoon cannot test what you are complaining about unless you have told them when it happens.

More than one household. The case law rewards it and the officers ask the neighbours anyway.

An explicit request for the written order. Sections 27 and 28 work through orders in writing with a stated time to comply. Asking for that specifically is different from asking someone to have a word, and it starts the clock that section 74 hangs off.

A note of what you were told. If the district decides there is no nuisance, that decision is what an Administrative Court would later be reviewing, and the court’s attention in the leading case was on exactly this paper trail: what was inspected, who was asked, what was written back.

Questions people actually ask

What are the legal quiet hours in Bangkok?

There are none. The hour changes the arithmetic instead: sound made between 22:00 and 06:00, or in a place needing quiet, is measured over five minutes and has 3 dB(A) added before comparison, and sound carrying vibration — amplified bass is named — has 5 dB(A) added on top.

How many decibels is too loud?

For a complaint, no absolute figure applies. The disturbance level is the corrected level with the source running minus the background level of the same place, and more than 10 dB(A) of difference is noise disturbance. The 70 dB(A) figure widely quoted is a twenty-four-hour planning average from the 2540 ambient standard.

Who do I complain to?

The local authority holds the power, which in Bangkok means the Governor, exercised through your district office. The building’s juristic office is faster and worth using first; the police can deal with tonight; only the district can issue the order the Act contemplates.

What if they ignore the order?

Up to three months or 25,000 baht under section 74, and the official may abate the nuisance directly and charge the cost to the person responsible. Where the nuisance is serious, section 28 paragraph three allows an order not to use the place at all until it stops.

Can the juristic person fine my neighbour?

Only if the registered regulations provide for it. The statute’s object is the common property; the manager’s express power to sue an owner is limited to unpaid common expenses over six months. Where regulations are silent, changing them takes a general meeting resolution, registered within thirty days.

The noise is a business operating in the building.

Then look at section 17/1 of the Condominium Act, which requires trade areas to have separate access arranged so as not to disturb co-owners’ normal peaceful living and bans trade elsewhere in the building, with a fine of up to 50,000 baht plus 5,000 a day under section 65.

Nobody else is complaining. Does that matter?

Yes. In red case Or. 411/2552 the fact that no neighbour reported being troubled formed part of the reasoning that dismissed the complaint. Corroboration is close to decisive in practice.

What if the district does nothing?

Neglect of a statutory duty is an Administrative Court matter, and that is how the leading case arrived there. Note what the court measured: inspection, enquiry, coordination and a written reply were enough, even though the complainant’s problem continued.

How we made this