TM30 in Bangkok: the report the law does not ask you to file

Almost every English-language account of TM30 describes it as something a foreigner has to do within twenty-four hours. The Immigration Act does not say that. It puts the twenty-four-hour duty on the person who took you in, gives you four quite different duties of your own with a different penalty attached, and leaves the famous form out of the regulations entirely. Here is what the Act says, who is actually on the hook, and where the practical traps are.

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

What section 38 actually says

The provision behind TM30 is one long sentence, and every clause in it matters.

“The house master, the owner or possessor of the dwelling, or the manager of the hotel, who takes in an alien permitted to stay in the kingdom temporarily, shall notify the competent official at the immigration office located in the locality in which the house, dwelling or hotel is situated, within twenty-four hours from the time the alien takes up residence. If there is no immigration office located in that locality, the notification shall be made to the police officer at the police station for that locality.” A second paragraph adds that where the house, dwelling or hotel is in the area of Bangkok, the notification is made to the competent official at the Immigration Division. A third says the notification under the first two paragraphs shall be in accordance with the regulation prescribed by the Director-General.

Four things follow immediately, and each of them contradicts something you will read elsewhere.

The duty is not on the foreigner. The Act names four categories of person who can owe it — the house master, the owner of the dwelling, the possessor of the dwelling, the manager of a hotel — and a guest is none of them by virtue of being a guest.

The clock starts when you move in. Not when your flight landed, not when your visa was stamped. The words are “from the time the alien takes up residence”. A traveller who spends two nights at a hotel and then moves into a condominium has triggered the clock twice, at two different addresses, for two different people.

Bangkok is centralised, and that is in the statute. Everywhere else the report goes to the immigration office for the locality, or to the local police station if there is not one. In Bangkok the Act sends it to the Immigration Division instead — in practice, and as the Immigration Bureau’s own published procedure states, to Immigration Division 1 at the Government Complex on Chaeng Watthana Soi 7 in Lak Si.

Only the substance is in the Act. Twenty-four hours, who owes it and where it goes are statutory. Everything else — the form, the channels, the software — is a regulation of the Director-General, which is a much easier thing to change.

Your own duties are elsewhere, on different clocks, with a different fine

The section immediately before it, section 37, is the one that binds you. It applies to an alien permitted to stay in the kingdom temporarily — which is almost every foreigner in Bangkok who is not a permanent resident — and after the prohibition on working without permission it lists four duties.

Section 76 puts a single penalty behind all four: a fine not exceeding 5,000 baht, and a further fine of not more than 200 baht a day until the position is put right. That daily element is the part worth noticing. The house master’s failure under section 38 is a one-off 2,000 baht offence; a foreigner’s failure under section 37 accrues.

Two closing paragraphs of section 37 are easy to miss and change how the section reads. The first says that whether subsections (3) and (4) are disapplied to any case under section 34 — the transit and short-stay category — and on what conditions, is for the Director-General to determine. The Act therefore contemplates that the police-station duties will not always apply, and leaves the switch in departmental hands. The second says that notification under the section may be made by the alien in person or in writing, again as the Director-General’s regulation provides. So the statute itself expects these reports to be made on paper as often as at a counter.

Who is the “possessor of the dwelling”?

This is the question that decides whether TM30 is your problem, and the Act does not answer it in a definition.

Section 38 lists the house master, the owner of the dwelling, and the possessor of the dwelling as alternatives. Possession in Thai law is a matter of holding a thing with the intention of holding it for oneself — it is not the same as owning it, and a tenant plainly holds the place they live in. Read that way, the section does not describe a single person who must file; it describes a set, any of whom the duty can reach.

Two practical consequences follow. Where a landlord, a building juristic person or a serviced-apartment operator is in the picture, there is an obvious person for the duty to fall on, and the Immigration Bureau’s own published procedure is written to them: it is headed as a procedure “for establishments”, and lists hotels licensed under the Hotel Act, guesthouses, mansions, apartments, business premises and ordinary rented houses as the places whose owner or operator files on form TM.30. Where a foreigner owns or holds their own home and there is no such person, the duty has nowhere else to land — which is the reading that makes sense of the online system having a path for an individual as well as for a business.

The form nobody legislated

Here is a small thing that explains a large amount of confusion. The Immigration Act’s forms are prescribed by a ministerial regulation — the Ministerial Regulation prescribing documents under the immigration law and the method of applying for evidence of departure for re-entry and for resumption of residence, of B.E. 2559, made on 26 May of that year and published in the Royal Gazette on 1 December.

That regulation goes through the Act clause by clause. TM.1 is the certificate a conveyance master and crew hold under section 13(1). TM.2 and TM.3 are the conveyance and passenger-list forms. TM.5 is the crew-change notification. TM.6 is the arrival and departure card under section 18. TM.7 is the application to extend a temporary stay under section 35. TM.8 is the re-entry permit under section 39. TM.9 is the residence application, TM.10 the proof of Thai nationality, TM.11 and TM.12 the two appeals, TM.13 the departure-for-re-entry evidence, TM.14 the application to resume former residence.

And then it stops. There is no TM.30 in it, and no TM.28 and no TM.47 either. Two later amendments, of January and September 2560, touch only the TM.6 arrival card.

That is not an oversight. Section 38 does not tell the Minister to prescribe a form; its third paragraph tells the Director-General to prescribe the manner of notification by regulation, and section 37’s closing paragraph does the same for the alien’s own reports. So the entire apparatus that expatriates argue about — the form number, the two sheets, the counter, the registered post, the website, the passport-reader integration — sits one level below the Gazette-published law.

Which is exactly why it moves. A new online notification system went live on 15 September 2023, announced in English by immigration offices around the country, with users of the previous platform required to register again from scratch. No amendment to the Act was needed, and none happened. The twenty-four-hour rule, by contrast, has not changed since the Act commenced in 1979 — the transitional provisions in sections 86 and 87 are still there in the text, giving house masters thirty days and long-staying aliens seven to make their first reports under the new law.

How the notification is actually made

The Immigration Bureau’s published procedure gives three routes, and they have survived several redesigns of the website.

In person, or by someone you send. At the accommodation-notification counter — in Bangkok, at the Government Complex on Chaeng Watthana; in the provinces, at the provincial immigration office responsible for the area — during office hours.

By registered post. Fill in and sign the form. Add a self-addressed envelope, 6.5 by 9 inches, with a 10-baht stamp on it, so that the officer’s receipt can be posted back to you. Put both in a registered envelope, keep the registration slip as evidence, and send it to the Alien Accommodation Notification Section, Sub-division 2, Immigration Division 1, at the Government Complex. It is a very 1990s piece of procedure and it is still the published one.

Over the internet. Register for the accommodation-notification service; officials check the registration and approve it; a username and password then arrive at the email address you gave. The Bureau has also built the system to work with passport readers, with drivers and manuals available from the login screen — a detail that tells you who the system was designed for.

On paper, the form is two sheets. The first carries the house master’s details and the address where the foreigner is staying. The second is the list of foreigners, and the Bureau’s instructions for filling it are unusually specific: take the details from the passport rather than from anything the guest wrote down, because “the details of the foreigner, which the foreigner writes before taking up residence, are often incorrect”; type it or write in block letters; separate given, middle and family names clearly; include any letters in the passport number; give the arrival-card number from the TM.6 in the passport; and note that the date of entry means the date of entering the kingdom, while the date of taking up residence goes on the front sheet. When the officer has checked it, they tear off the lower part of the form and give it to the notifier to keep.

The seven-day window

The online system’s own English FAQ contains one line that is more practically useful than anything else in it. Asked why a notification cannot be found after a week, it answers: “According to the policy of Immigration Bureau, the limitation of search cannot be over 7 days of the check-in date, hence, the users will not be able to search any records passed the limited date.”

Whatever the reason for that policy, the consequence for a tenant is simple. The evidence that your landlord filed is retrievable for a week. If you want to hold it — and the whole reason to want it is that you cannot prove a negative later — ask for it inside seven days of moving in, not the month after.

The same FAQ is quietly informative about how the system behaves in other ways: users of the old platform had to register afresh; the verification email comes from an address at eservices.immigration.go.th and lands in junk folders often enough to be the first FAQ entry; an address has to be added to the account profile before any foreigner can be notified at it; a wrong check-out date is fixed by resubmitting, with the officer taking the latest entry; and a 2023 update added required host information and reference documents to every stored address, which is why long-standing accounts suddenly found their saved addresses rejected.

The fines, and where the numbers people quote come from

The Act is brief here. Section 77: whoever fails to comply with section 38 shall be liable to a fine not exceeding 2,000 baht; but if that person is a hotel manager, to a fine of 2,000 to 10,000 baht. Section 76: an alien who fails to comply with section 37(2), (3), (4) or (5) shall be liable to a fine not exceeding 5,000 baht and a further fine of not more than 200 baht a day until compliance.

Those are maxima and, in the hotel case, a range. They are not what anyone pays, and the reason is section 84. That section establishes a compounding committee — the Director-General of the Police or a representative, the Director-General of Public Prosecution or a representative, and the Commander of the Immigration Division or a representative — with power to compound every offence under the Act except a short list of serious ones. The committee may delegate the compounding to inquiry officers or to competent officials, and may lay down whatever criteria and conditions it thinks fit. When the offender has paid the compounded fine, the section says, the case is regarded as terminated under the Criminal Procedure Code.

So the figure you hear at a counter is a compounded amount arrived at under criteria set by that committee, not a statutory tariff. This page does not print a number for it, because we have not read the criteria and any figure we gave you would be somebody’s anecdote wearing a citation.

Why a traffic fine stopped being a crime in 2023 and this one did not

In October 2022 Thailand published the Act on Administrative Fines, which invented a category of penalty that is expressly not a criminal one, cannot be recorded as criminal history, has to be set with regard to the offender’s circumstances and economic position, and carries no imprisonment in default. Section 39 converted the fine-only offences under every law in the Act’s first schedule automatically, 365 days after publication — from 25 October 2023.

The Land Traffic Act B.E. 2522 is in that first schedule, which is why an ordinary Thai traffic fine is no longer a criminal penalty at all.

The Immigration Act B.E. 2522 is in the second schedule. That is the list for laws where the responsible agency still had reservations about conversion, and section 40 provides that those offences may be changed into administrative-fine offences only by royal decree. We searched for such a decree covering the Immigration Act and did not find one; we could not search the Gazette exhaustively, so we put it no higher than that. On the material we have, a failure to file under section 38 remains a criminal offence, punishable by a criminal fine, settled by compounding under section 84 — which is precisely the mechanism the 2022 Act was written to replace elsewhere.

What actually goes wrong, and what to do about it

Ask before you sign, not after you move. A landlord who has never heard of the form, or who does not want to appear on an immigration record as accommodating foreigners, is a landlord whose duty you will end up discharging in some awkward way later. The question to put in writing is narrow and answerable: who files the section 38 notification for this unit, and will you send me the receipt? It belongs in the same conversation as the deposit and the utility rate, which we have written about separately.

Treat every move as a new clock. The section 38 duty attaches to taking up residence at a place, so it fires again at every place: the hotel, the friend’s spare room, the new condominium, the same condominium after you changed units. Your own section 37(2) duty fires alongside it whenever the address you gave the officer stops being where you are.

Get the receipt within a week. See above. After seven days the online record is not searchable by the people who filed it.

Keep the paperwork with the passport, not in a drawer. The torn-off strip of the paper TM.30, or a screenshot of the online record, is the only thing that answers “was it filed?” without an argument. Nothing in the Act requires you to hold it — but nothing in the Act requires anyone to prove they filed it either, and the person who suffers from that gap is the one standing at the counter.

Do not conflate the four clocks. The ninety-day report is not TM30, does not replace it, and is your duty rather than your landlord’s. It has its own procedure and its own arithmetic, and we have covered it separately.

Be careful with what you read online. The single most common English-language error about TM30 is to describe it as a duty on the foreigner within twenty-four hours of arriving in Thailand. Both halves of that are wrong on the text: the duty is on the person who took you in, and the clock runs from taking up residence rather than from entering the country.

Questions people actually ask

Do I have to file the TM30 myself?

Not under the Act. Section 38 puts the twenty-four-hour duty on the house master, the owner or possessor of the dwelling, or the hotel manager. The complication is the word “possessor”: where nobody else holds the place, there is nobody else for the duty to reach.

When does the twenty-four hours start?

From the time you take up residence at that address. Not from landing, and not from the visa stamp. Each new address starts a fresh one.

What is the fine?

Section 77: not more than 2,000 baht, or 2,000 to 10,000 for a hotel manager. Your own failures under section 37 are section 76: not more than 5,000 baht plus up to 200 a day until you put it right. What is charged in practice is a compounded figure set under section 84, not the statutory maximum.

Where is it filed in Bangkok?

The Act sends Bangkok notifications to the Immigration Division rather than to a local office; the Bureau’s published procedure names Immigration Division 1 at the Government Complex on Chaeng Watthana Soi 7, Lak Si.

Is there really a postal option?

Yes, and it is still the published procedure: the signed form, plus a self-addressed 6.5 by 9 inch envelope with a 10-baht stamp so the receipt can come back, sent by registered post with the slip kept as evidence.

Why can nobody find my notification?

Because of a stated policy in the system’s own FAQ: a notification cannot be searched more than seven days after the check-in date. Take your proof inside the week.

Why is TM30 not in the list of immigration forms?

Because the ministerial regulation prescribes forms TM.1 to TM.14 for named sections and stops. Section 38 leaves the manner of notification to a regulation of the Director-General instead — which is why the mechanics can be replaced without touching the Act.

Do I report every trip out of Bangkok?

Section 37(4) requires a report to the local police within forty-eight hours if you spend more than twenty-four hours in another province. The Act also lets the Director-General disapply that duty, and the one in 37(3), for cases under section 34 — so the statute anticipates it not always applying. We could not read the instrument that decides when.

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