Sending things home from Bangkok: the bill is decided by density, not weight

Everyone arrives at this problem with the same mental model — the post office is the cheap one, the couriers are the fast expensive ones, and sea freight is what you use if you can wait. That model will cost you money, because the line that actually decides your bill is not drawn between those companies. It is drawn through the middle of Thailand Post’s own product range: some of its services charge you for the size of the box and some charge you only for what is in it, and the split is the opposite way round from what anybody expects.

The one calculation worth doing

Carriers charge for space as well as for mass, because an aircraft or a container fills up before it weighs out. The industry converts space into a notional weight and bills the higher of the two. Thailand Post publishes the formula in plain English on two of its service pages: length × width × height in centimetres, divided by 5,000. Fractions of a kilogram round up.

Run it once, on the box you actually intend to send, before you decide anything else. A 60 × 40 × 40 cm carton — an unremarkable size for bedding, clothes or kitchen things — is 96,000 cubic centimetres, which is a volumetric weight of 19.2 kg. If the carton weighs 8 kg on the scale, a service that applies the rule will bill you for 19.2 kg and a service that does not will bill you for 8. That ratio, not the brand on the counter, is the whole game.

Now the part that makes this page worth writing. Thailand Post states, on the service pages themselves, that dimensional weight is not applied to EMS World, that dimensional and volumetric are not applied to ePacket, that the small packet service is not charged on volumetric, and that International Parcel by air is calculated from the actual weight of the item. It then states, on the same site, that International Parcel by surface and Courier Post both take actual or volumetric weight, whichever is higher, at the 5,000 divisor.

So the dividing line runs straight through the post office. The slow, economy, sea-and-land option — the one you would pick precisely because you are trying to save money on a big light box — is the one that charges you for the air inside it. The fast air services do not. For a duvet, a rattan lamp, a wardrobe of clothes, the cheap-sounding route is the expensive one, and no amount of comparing “post versus courier” will surface that, because the split is not on that axis at all.

Courier Post deserves its own sentence, because it explains the pattern. It is a Thailand Post product that runs on DHL’s network — the post office’s own pages offer collection from DHL service points and identify the tie-up with DHL Express International (Thailand). That is why the one post-office product priced like a courier is also the one that applies the courier’s volumetric rule. It is not a coincidence in the pricing; it is the same underlying network.

What each option actually is

A few practical notes that are easy to miss. The customs form for EMS is the CN23, and Thailand Post asks for it in capital English letters and Arabic numerals only, with the contents marked on the top left of the address side as one of business paper, sample, merchandise or gift. Surface parcel is the only postal mode that will take things barred from aircraft, which is the real argument for it — not price. Courier Post will not deliver to a P.O. box, allows at most two battery-containing devices per parcel with the devices powered off and loose batteries and power banks refused outright, and — a genuinely odd line, but it is in their published terms — will not carry products of one named phone brand at all.

One gap we have to be honest about: Thailand Post publishes a weight ceiling for EMS World but no maximum dimensions. Since “EMS ignores volumetric” is the single most useful tip on this page, the obvious next question is how big a box you can push through it, and we could not answer that from their own material. Ask at the counter before you pack.

When to stop shipping and start packing a suitcase

For a lot of departing residents the honest answer is that the cheapest freight is the aeroplane you are already on. Thai Airways publishes its excess baggage tables, and the shape of them is worth understanding even if you fly someone else, because the structure is common.

Under the piece concept — effective for tickets issued on or after 25 November 2025, for travel on or after 2 March 2026 — a prepaid first or second extra piece from Thailand is USD 225 to Europe and USD 255 to the United States or Canada. A third piece is roughly double. Each extra piece is capped at 158 cm total dimensions and 23 kg in economy. Excess must be assessed and paid before boarding, and it is non-refundable.

Set that against the older weight-concept table, still published on the same page, where the same journey to Europe is priced per kilogram at USD 70. A prepaid 23 kg piece at USD 225 works out around USD 9.80 a kilo — roughly seven times cheaper than the per-kilo table for the identical route. Which regime applies to you depends on whether your fare’s allowance is piece-based or weight-based, and on whether you buy in advance or at the desk. That is why there is no single true answer to “what does excess baggage cost”, and why anyone who quotes you one number is quoting the wrong one.

The real constraint on this route is not money. It is the cage: 158 cm and 23 kg per piece. Anything that fits inside it usually wants to fly with you. Anything that does not — a floor lamp, a bicycle, a piece of furniture — is where shipping starts to make sense, and where the volumetric calculation above decides which shipping.

Household volumes: when sea freight is actually the answer

Sea freight through an international mover is a different product from a parcel, priced by the cubic metre rather than by the kilogram, and it does not become sensible until you have a household rather than a few boxes. The one Bangkok mover that publishes a floor sets it at 4.3 cubic metres, or 150 cubic feet, which they describe as roughly twenty to twenty-five standard cartons. Below that you are in parcel territory. Only one company publishes such a minimum, so treat it as a marker rather than an industry standard.

The vocabulary matters when you read a quotation. A full container load gives you sole use of a container even if you do not fill it; groupage, or less-than-container load, means your goods are crated or palletised and share a container with commercial cargo, and you pay for the space you occupy. A 20-foot container runs to about 30 cubic metres and a 40-foot to about 60, which one mover maps to a two-to-three-bedroom and a three-to-four-bedroom home respectively. Groupage is slower by design, because the container has to fill before it sails.

Two timing traps. First, a transit time quoted by a mover is port to port — the days the ship is at sea — and the door-to-door figure can only ever be an estimate, because it includes collection, consolidation, two customs clearances and final delivery. One international mover puts groupage at approximately twelve weeks door to door, though that figure comes from their guidance for a different origin country and we cite it as an order of magnitude, not a Bangkok number. Second, real-time tracking of the kind you get with a parcel generally does not exist; you get vessel details instead.

And one that costs money rather than time: if you pack the cartons yourself they are marked PBO, packed by owner, on the manifest, and the mover’s own guidance is that this increases the likelihood of a customs inspection. Owner-packed cartons are also where insurance cover tends to thin out. We could not obtain a single mover’s published per-kilogram liability limit from their own terms, so we are not going to characterise their cover at all — ask for the actual policy wording, not the brochure.

The paperwork to leave is lighter than you think

Thailand is not the difficult end of this transaction. The industry customs guide for Thailand lists, for used household goods and personal effects belonging to foreign or Thai nationals, a total of two documents: a copy of the shipper’s passport and a packing list. It records expressly that the visa page is not required and that export can be done on any type of visa, irrespective of employment status. Export clearance is put at one to three working days. VAT of 7 per cent applies to invoices issued in Thailand.

That lightness is real, but it does not mean there is no declaration. The Customs Department’s position is that all goods being exported are subject to customs control and must be reported, and that goods may not be loaded for export unless entered in the customs system with approval given, normally through the electronic export system. That is what the one-to-three days is. A postal item is declared on its CN23 instead, and baggage you carry yourself needs no export entry at all.

Worth knowing about the sources: both of the Customs Department’s English pages that everyone cites for this — export procedure, and prohibitions and restrictions — carry the stamp “Last update: February 19, 2016”. They remain the official statement in English. They have also not been touched in a decade, which is a reason to confirm anything that matters rather than to assume the page is current.

The Buddha question, settled from the Act

This is the one part of sending things home from Thailand that is genuinely governed by Thai law rather than by a carrier’s policy, and it is also the part that English-language guidance gets most consistently wrong.

Section 22 of the Act on Ancient Monuments, Antiques, Objects of Art and National Museums B.E. 2504 requires a licence from the Director-General of the Fine Arts Department to export or take out of the Kingdom any antique or object of art, whether registered or not. That much is quoted everywhere. The third paragraph of the same section is quoted almost nowhere:

On the face of the statute, a souvenir statue made this year and never registered is outside the licence requirement altogether. But there is a catch, and it is the useful part: the exemption is evidentiary, not practical. No customs officer and no carrier is going to adjudicate the age of your Buddha at a packing counter. Thailand Post’s own Courier Post terms require senders of Buddha images, religious objects and objects of art to present a Fine Arts Department permit before sending, and the international moving trade asks for one as a matter of course. What you comply with at the counter is a carrier’s risk policy. What governs in law is section 22. Those are different things, and knowing which one you are arguing with saves a lot of frustration.

Now the two numbers that circulate and should not. There is no 12 cm rule. No size threshold of any kind appears in the Act, in the schedule of fees annexed to it, or in the Fine Arts Department’s own published service manual. The department’s actual size bands are administrative fee tiers at 50 cm and 100 cm, with a separate tier for fragments under 5 cm — nothing resembling a permission threshold. The Thai freight trade, for what it is worth, quotes a different figure again. We can only note, without offering it as an explanation, that the department’s manual requires each application to carry colour photographs of the object measuring 9 × 12.5 cm.

There is no five-statue limit either. No cap on the number of pieces appears in the Act, the schedule or the manual. The only “five” anybody can trace to the process is a documentation tier — which official’s certification you attach for smaller consignments — and that comes from an academic description of administrative practice, not from a rule.

What the process does involve, from the department’s own English manual: an application on form Sor Kor 6, a stated working duration of eight days, filing either online through the department’s national single window or in person at the Office of National Museums on Si Ayutthaya Road in Dusit, and regional filing at seven national museums including Chiang Mai, Songkhla and Phuket. You must bring the object itself along with the form. Two colour photographs per piece are required, with a concession allowing one or two photographs to cover a group of identical items. The statutory fee ceilings are 2,000 baht per piece for something the department judges to be of the Ayutthaya period or earlier and 1,000 baht for later work; the manual’s own banded fees run down to double figures for small fragments.

What you may not send

Some of this is Thai law and some of it is the carrier refusing; both stop the box, but only one of them can prosecute you.

Prohibited outright by Thai customs, in either direction

Narcotics including marijuana, hemp, opium, cocaine, morphine and heroin. Obscene and pornographic material. Goods bearing the Thai national flag. Counterfeit currency, bonds or coins, and fake royal or official seals. Goods infringing intellectual property rights, and counterfeit trademark goods.

Permitted only with a permit

Antiques and objects of art, registered or not, from the Fine Arts Department — as above. Wooden products, from the Royal Forest Department; Thailand Post names this on its own terms alongside the Buddha rule, and Siamese rosewood has been on CITES Appendix II since the Bangkok conference in March 2013. Wildlife, plants, seeds, fish and aquatic fauna, from the relevant conservation, agriculture or fisheries department. Weapons, ammunition, explosives, fireworks, and real or replica firearms, from the Ministry of Interior.

Ivory needs a line of its own because people assume a finished object is fine. Under the Elephant Ivory Tusks Act B.E. 2558, nobody may import, export or possess ivory for transit without the Director-General’s permission, and the Act’s definition of elephant ivory expressly includes products made from tusks. The penalty runs to three years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to six million baht, or both. DHL separately refuses ivory under its own conditions of carriage, so the parcel would not move even if you had misread the Act.

Medication, which catches people on the way out

The rule most travellers associate with arriving applies to leaving as well. Thailand’s FDA operates a permit for personal medications containing narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances, applied for online at least fifteen days before your departure date, with processing around three working days. For narcotic drugs in schedules II and III the personal-use quantity must not exceed a ninety-day supply as prescribed. For psychotropic substances in schedules II, III and IV, up to a thirty-day supply travels on a physician’s certificate or prescription with no permit, while a thirty-one to ninety-day supply needs the permit. If you are leaving Thailand with a long prescription, that fifteen-day lead time is the thing to diarise.

Refused by the carrier rather than the state

DHL’s published conditions rule out cash, bullion, live animals, ivory, human remains or ashes, loose precious and semi-precious stones, cannabis and its derivatives, and firearms real or replica. Thailand Post’s postal services refuse live animals, narcotics, obscene material, explosives and flammables, banknotes and unwrapped sharp objects, and require you to declare machines, all batteries including devices with non-removable ones, sharp objects, liquids and corrosives at the packing counter. Courier Post adds body parts and ashes, banknotes and coins, uncut or unidentifiable gemstones, gold bullion, gas canisters, animal horn, sand, used machinery, anything bearing the Thai flag pattern, and stand-alone batteries and power banks. Air freight through a mover means batteries out of the shipment entirely, along with aerosols, paints, perfume, nail polish and solvents.

What the compensation actually buys

Declared value is not insurance, and the published limits are lower than most senders imagine. The table above gives the postal figures — note especially that two services pay nothing, and that a 20 kg box of your possessions sent as EMS merchandise is covered to 7,000 baht.

On the express side, DHL’s Thailand conditions of carriage limit liability for an air shipment under the Montreal or Warsaw Convention, or failing that to the lower of market or declared value and 26 Special Drawing Rights per kilogram, which they gloss as about USD 35 per kilogram. That 26 SDR figure is current: the convention limits were revised upward from 22 SDR with effect from 28 December 2024, and the older number is still widely quoted. For cross-border road movement the figure is 8.33 SDR per kilogram. Two conditions matter as much as the number: claims must be submitted in writing within thirty days of the shipment being accepted, and published delivery schedules expressly do not form part of the contract, so delay is not a compensable loss.

A detail on the postal figures worth carrying with you: Thailand Post’s baht compensation amounts are conversions made at a Special Drawing Right rate the post office fixed on 1 January 2022 and has not revisited. They are published, they are what you will be paid, and they are not a live valuation — which also explains why one of their own pages still glosses 1,000 SDR as roughly 40,000 baht while two others use 44,687.

The bill your family gets

Nothing you do in Bangkok pre-clears the box at the other end. Duty and import tax are assessed by the destination country under its rules, and they are charged to the recipient as importer — which is an unpleasant surprise when the recipient is your mother and the box is full of your own belongings.

Most countries do provide relief for a person moving their normal residence, and that is the thing to look up before you ship rather than after. In the European Union it sits in the Council Regulation on reliefs from customs duty, administered nationally, so the operative source is the destination member state’s own customs authority. In the United Kingdom it is Transfer of Residence relief, claimed on form ToR1, and approval has to be obtained before you claim it. The common features across systems are the ones to check: they turn on how long you lived abroad, how long you have owned and used the goods, a deadline for importing them after you move, and restrictions on selling them afterwards.

One confusion to head off, because we have written about the other side of it. Thailand abolished its 1,500-baht duty-free threshold for parcels arriving in Thailand at the start of 2026. That is an import rule and has nothing to do with sending things out. The mirror fact is the one that will cost you: the EU and the UK removed their own low-value reliefs some years ago, so the small gift parcel that used to slip through no longer does.

Quick answers

What is the one number I should work out first?

Length × width × height in centimetres, divided by 5,000. Compare it with the scale reading.

Which services ignore that number?

EMS World, ePacket, small packet, and International Parcel by air. Their own pages say so.

So is surface post the cheap option?

Not for anything bulky. Surface parcel and Courier Post both bill on volume; the air services do not.

Can I just take it as luggage?

Often yes, and often cheapest — but each piece is capped at 158 cm and 23 kg, and excess is non-refundable and must be paid before boarding.

Do I need a permit for a Buddha image?

The Act exempts unregistered objects of art under five years old. The carrier will still want the permit.

Who pays the duty at the other end?

The person receiving it. Check their country’s transfer-of-residence relief before you ship.