Work permits in Thailand: the law stopped measuring effort and started measuring occupation

The question every foreigner in Bangkok eventually asks — does this count as work? — has a statutory answer, and the answer was rewritten in 2018. The old definition caught using your knowledge for anything, paid or unpaid. The one in force catches engaging in an occupation. Meanwhile the famous list of thirty-nine banned professions no longer exists, the offence has been reframed around what your own permit says, and the penalty that matters is not the fine. Here is the current text, and where the English-language consensus is out of date.

Which law you are actually under

The instrument that governs foreigners working in Thailand is not an Act of parliament. It is an emergency decree — a phra ratcha kamnot, issued by the executive and later approved by the legislature — and it has been amended once, by another emergency decree.

• Emergency Decree on the Management of Foreign Workers’ Employment B.E. 2560, Royal Gazette volume 134, part 65 Kor, page 1, 22 June 2017.
• Emergency Decree on the Management of Foreign Workers’ Employment (No. 2) B.E. 2561, Royal Gazette volume 135, part 19 Kor, page 29, 27 March 2018.

Below it sits the instrument people actually mean when they talk about banned professions:

• Ministry of Labour Notification on Work Prohibited to Foreigners, signed 1 April 2020, Royal Gazette volume 137, special part 92 Ngor, page 14, 21 April 2020, in force sixty days after publication. It was made under section 7, first paragraph of the decree as amended, with the approval of the foreign-worker policy committee given on 11 March 2020.

Three things follow from that hierarchy, and they explain most of the confusion online. The prohibited-work list is a ministerial notification, which means it can be replaced without amending any statute. The permit machinery is in the decree. And the fees, validity periods and applicant qualifications are in ministerial regulations and departmental notifications below both, which is exactly why we print no fee table on this page — see the note at the end.

Two definitions of “work”, ten months apart

This is the heart of it.

Section 5 of the 2017 decree defined the term like this, in the Gazette text:

“Work” means using physical strength or knowledge to engage in an occupation or to do work, whether or not for wages or any other benefit, except work the Minister notifies.

Read that as a foreigner living in Bangkok in 2017 and you will understand the reaction it produced. Using knowledge, for no money, to do work. Helping at a friend’s shop. Translating something. Fixing a laptop. The text did not say those things were offences; it said the definition reached them, and left an exception power with the Minister.

The 2018 decree replaced the definition. The wording in force is:

“Work” means engaging in any occupation, whether or not there is an employer, but does not include the carrying on of business by a person holding a licence under the law on foreign business operation.

Four changes, each of which matters:

• “Physical strength or knowledge” is gone. The measure is no longer what you exert. It is whether what you are doing is an occupation.
• “Whether or not for wages or any other benefit” is gone. The current definition is silent on payment, where the old one deliberately covered unpaid activity.
• “Whether or not there is an employer” is new. Self-employment is inside the definition explicitly — the absence of an employer is not a defence.
• A single exclusion was written in, for a business carried on by a Foreign Business Act licence-holder. It is the only carve-out in the sentence.

And one structural change that is easy to miss: the old definition ended with except work the Minister notifies. The current one has no ministerial exception power inside the definition. Exceptions now live elsewhere — in the categories of person the decree does not apply to, and in the conditional schedules of the prohibited-work notification. The Minister can still say what is forbidden. The Minister can no longer say what is not work.

The 2018 climbdown, in the government’s own words

Thai legislation carries an explanatory note at the end — the het phon nai kan prakat chai, the reason for enactment. The one attached to the 2018 decree is unusually candid, and it is worth reading as a primary document rather than a summary. It records that the 2017 decree:

• imposed many duties on brokers, employers and foreign workers through burdensome procedures and a licensing system beyond necessity, inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution;
• set offences and penalties at rates as severe as the offence of human trafficking, even where the use of foreign labour in breach of the decree was not in the nature of trafficking;
• thereby caused panic, affecting employers in households, in agriculture, among small and medium enterprises, and in trade and industry, to the point of affecting the country’s economy and society.

It then records the sequence that made the amendment urgent: the temporary reprieve under National Council for Peace and Order Head Order 33/2560, dated 4 July 2017, which had suspended the penalties to give employers and workers time to comply, expired on 31 December 2017 — so the same problem was about to return. Hence an emergency decree, in the interest, as the note puts it, of preserving the country’s economic security.

We quote this at length for a reason. When a guide tells you Thai work-permit enforcement is severe and arbitrary, it is usually describing the summer of 2017 without knowing it. The state itself put on the record that it had got the pricing wrong, and then changed it.

What the permit fences, after 2018

The prohibition on the worker’s side is section 8, and it was rewritten too. Compare:

• 2017: a foreigner is prohibited from doing work prescribed in a notification issued under section 7 paragraph one, or from working without a work permit.
• In force now: a foreigner is prohibited from working without a work permit, or working outside what they have the right to do, in contravention of this decree.

The banned-list limb disappeared from the offence and was replaced by working outside what you have the right to do. Section 9 does the same thing on the employer’s side: nobody shall take a foreigner to work without a permit, or let a foreigner work outside what they have the right to do.

This is a genuine shift in what the enforcement question is. It used to be: is this job on a list? It is now: is this inside the four corners of this person’s permit? The prohibited-work notification still exists and still matters — it decides what can ever be inside a permit — but the offence is framed around the permit.

Which is why the 2018 amendment also added a reporting duty that reads like administrative housekeeping and is actually the boundary-drawing mechanism. Section 64/2: a permit holder must notify the registrar of their employer, the employer’s place of work, and the principal nature of the work done, within fifteen days of starting, and must notify every time they change employer.

Fifteen days, and every change. If the offence is working outside your entitlement, the register of what you told them you do is the document that defines the outside.

The same amendment added section 64/1 on who may hold a permit at all: an applicant must have the qualifications and must not have the disqualifying characteristics prescribed by ministerial regulation, and must not have been punished under section 101 unless at least two years have passed. Where a health check is required for issuing the permit, the foreigner or their employer must have it done at a licensed medical establishment. We name the ministerial regulation as the source of the qualifications rather than listing them, because we have not read the current version of it.

The 2018 decree also cleared away provisions wholesale. In the consolidated text, sections 10, 12 and 15 now read simply “repealed”, and sections 65 and 66 were repealed outright. If you are reading a source that discusses those sections as live law, it predates March 2018.

The twenty-seven, and the end of “thirty-nine occupations”

If you search for jobs foreigners cannot do in Thailand, you will be told there are thirty-nine of them. That number comes from a superseded instrument and it should be retired.

The current instrument is the 2020 notification, and its shape is different in kind: four schedules with four different conditions, rather than one list with one rule. Clause 2 makes schedule one absolute. Clauses 3, 4 and 5 make schedules two, three and four conditional. Clause 6 adds a rule about licensed professions. That is the whole notification — six clauses and four annexes.

Schedule one is the one to read closely, because it applies absolutely, in every locality in the Kingdom, with no employer-based or treaty-based exception. Clause 2 also extends it to any work for which a law requires the practitioner to hold Thai nationality — so schedule one is a list of twenty-seven items plus an open-ended pointer at the rest of the statute book.

Several of these repay a second reading.

Item (2) is the most quotable provision in Thai labour law. A foreigner may not drive a car, a van or a bicycle rickshaw for work in Thailand — but may pilot an international airliner, and may drive a forklift. The forklift exception is in the text, by name.

Item (26) is the one that makes every office worker in Bangkok pause. Clerical and secretarial work is prohibited absolutely, with no exception written in. We are printing the text, not an enforcement practice: what a registrar accepts as the job title on a permit, and how a job that involves administration is described, is not something a published instrument answers, and we will not guess at it.

Item (27) is drawn with real precision. Legal services are closed, but arbitration is open — and the second limb opens it only where the governing law of the dispute is not Thai law. That is a deliberate policy about international arbitration seated in Bangkok, expressed in fifteen words.

Item (19)’s exception is the shape of the whole notification. Broker and agent work is closed domestically and open in international trade and investment. So is accountancy in schedule two, in its own way. The pattern is not hostility to foreigners; it is a fence around work that serves the domestic market.

The other three schedules

The remaining annexes are prohibitions with a door in them, and the door is different each time.

• Schedule two — prohibited everywhere, on condition that a foreigner may do it as provided by an international agreement or an obligation to which Thailand is bound under the provisions of the law. Accountancy heads this schedule: controlling, auditing, performing or providing accounting services, with its own written exceptions for occasional internal audit work and for work under an international agreement or obligation. This is the schedule that carries the mutual-recognition arrangements.
• Schedule three — prohibited everywhere, on condition that a foreigner may do that skilled or semi-skilled work only where there is an employer. The condition is not the type of work; it is the existence of an employer. Self-employment is what is being closed off.
• Schedule four — prohibited everywhere, on condition that a foreigner may do it only where there is an employer and the foreigner was permitted to enter the Kingdom under the immigration law pursuant to a memorandum of agreement or understanding between the Thai government and a foreign government. Intake conditions are set by notification of the Director-General of the Department of Employment. This is the schedule that governs the enormous migrant workforce arriving under the bilateral memoranda, and it has nothing to do with the office worker on a company permit.

Then clause 6, which is short and catches people out: where the work is of a kind for which another law requires the practitioner to hold a licence or a certificate, a foreigner may apply for a work permit only once that licence or certificate has been obtained. The professional licence comes first and the work permit second, in that order, and no amount of goodwill at the labour office reverses it.

The penalty that is not the fine

Section 101, as replaced in 2018, is the provision everyone half-quotes. Here is all of it, in order.

A foreigner who contravenes section 8 is liable to a fine of 5,000 to 50,000 baht. There is no term of imprisonment. Then the sentence that the summaries cut: and once the fine has been paid, that foreigner shall be sent out of the Kingdom without delay — except for foreigners falling under sections 63 or 63/1.

So payment is not the end of the matter. Payment is the trigger for removal.

The section carries one express exemption and one alternative route:

• The removal rule does not apply to a foreigner who is an injured person or a witness in a case under the law on preventing and suppressing human trafficking. A trafficking victim is not deported for having worked.
• Where the accused foreigner consents to travel out of the Kingdom, the investigating officer may settle the case by compounding — repriap thiap prap — under criteria, methods and conditions set by a joint committee, then notify the Department of Employment; and once the foreigner has left, the case is deemed terminated under the Criminal Procedure Code.

That joint committee is specified in the decree: chaired by a representative of the Office of the Attorney-General, with a representative of the Royal Thai Police as member, and a representative of the Department of Employment as member and secretary. Its criteria must take into account the severity of the offence, repeat offending, and the prevention of repeat offending, and must be published in the Royal Gazette. We have not read the published criteria, so we describe the mechanism and print no tariff.

And then the layer that costs the most and appears in almost no guide. Section 64/1 provides that a person applying for a work permit must not have been punished under section 101 unless at least two years have passed since serving the penalty, before the date of the application.

The employer’s side, including one humane sentence

Section 102, as replaced in 2018: anyone who takes a foreigner to work in contravention of section 9 is liable to a fine of 10,000 to 100,000 baht per foreigner employed. On a repeat offence: imprisonment not exceeding one year, or a fine of 50,000 to 200,000 baht per foreigner, or both — and the offender is prohibited from employing any foreigner for three years from the date the judgment becomes final.

Per head, and then a trading ban. For a business with a dozen undocumented workers, the arithmetic is the point of the provision.

The third paragraph is worth quoting for its own sake: a person living in the same household as the person who took the foreigner to work shall not be regarded as an offender as a principal, an instigator or a supporter. Domestic employment was one of the sectors the 2018 explanatory note named, and this is the sentence that stops a whole family being charged over a housekeeper.

The neighbouring penalties, for scale: failure to comply with section 13 carries a fine not exceeding 20,000 baht; contravening section 25, up to six months or 100,000 baht or both; contravening section 26 paragraph one, one to three years or 200,000 to 600,000 baht or both. The heavy numbers in this decree are aimed at the labour-supply business, not at the worker.

The twenty per cent rule nobody mentions

Section 11, as amended, is an unusual piece of drafting and almost nobody writes about it.

For the purpose of preserving Thai nationals’ opportunities in occupations and professions, the Department of Employment must advertise for Thai jobseekers and keep a register of applicants, and must publish current data in an easily accessible form, daily.

Then the operative rule: where someone wishes to employ a foreigner in a category of work for which Thai jobseekers are registered with the Department for the same category and the same locality, and the number of such registered jobseekers is five or more, that employer may employ foreigners to no more than twenty per cent — unless a special fee is paid. The rates come from a ministerial regulation; failing to comply with the second paragraph costs an additional amount equal to one times the fee due. Foreigners permitted to work under section 63/1 are excluded from the count.

And then the limiting sentence: the work to which this section applies is to be prescribed by Royal Decree. So the mechanism is fully drafted and its reach is set by a separate instrument. We did not find that Royal Decree, and we are not going to tell you the section is dormant on the strength of not finding something — only that the trigger list comes from a Royal Decree, and that anyone relying on the twenty per cent figure should establish that their work is on it.

What actually goes wrong

Somebody is still answering the 2017 question. The most common error in English-language advice about Thailand is to reason from the old definition — knowledge, paid or unpaid — and conclude that any activity at all requires a permit. The definition in force says occupation. Reasoning from a repealed sentence produces advice that is wrong in both directions.

The job changed and the register did not. Section 64/2 gives you fifteen days to report the employer, the workplace and the main nature of the work, and requires a fresh notification on every change of employer. If the offence is working outside your entitlement, an out-of-date register is the evidence against you.

The licence was left for later. Clause 6 of the notification is a sequence rule: professional licence first, work permit second. Arriving at the labour office with an application and a promise to get licensed afterwards is the wrong order.

The fine was treated as the price. It is not. Payment starts the removal, and section 64/1 puts a two-year bar on the next permit. A cheap fine with an expensive tail is the worst kind to shrug at.

The employer counted once instead of per head. Section 102 is priced per foreigner employed. An employer thinking in terms of a single 100,000-baht exposure has mis-read the provision.

The thirty-nine list was used as a checklist. It has been superseded since 2020, and the current structure is four schedules with different conditions. A job might be absolutely closed, closed unless a treaty opens it, closed unless there is an employer, or closed unless the worker came in under a memorandum — and those are very different answers.

Nothing was checked against the other two systems. A work permit is a labour-law document. Your right to be in the country is immigration law, and your liability to Thai tax is the Revenue Code. They are separate instruments administered by separate agencies, and being right about one says nothing about the others. Our companion pages cover visa extensions and the 90-day report, overstay fines and re-entry bans, and tax residence and the money you bring in.

The end of the job was not planned for. A permit is tied to an employer, and the employment itself has its own rulebook — notice, severance, the three-day rule for final pay. See severance and final pay in Thailand.

Questions people actually ask

Can I work remotely for a company outside Thailand while I am here?

We are not going to pretend the instruments answer this. The definition in force is “engaging in any occupation, whether or not there is an employer”, with one written exclusion for Foreign Business Act licence-holders. It does not mention where the employer is, where the work product goes, or where the money is paid, and no ministerial regulation or notification we read resolves those questions. What we can tell you is that the pre-2018 definition, which turned on using knowledge whether or not for wages, is no longer the text — so advice built on it is describing repealed law. Anyone whose arrangements depend on the answer needs a Thai lawyer looking at their specific facts, and should ask specifically about the immigration category they hold as well, because the answer may come from there rather than from labour law.

Is a work permit tied to one employer?

The structure of the decree assumes so. Section 64/2 requires you to notify the registrar of your employer and the employer’s workplace and the principal nature of your work within fifteen days of starting, and to notify every time you change employer — a duty that only makes sense if the permit is attached to a stated employer. And section 8 prohibits working outside what you have the right to do, which is the entitlement recorded for you. We have not read the current ministerial regulation on permit conditions, so we describe the duties in the decree rather than the conditions printed on a particular permit.

How much does a work permit cost and how long does it last?

Deliberately not on this page. Fees and validity are set by ministerial regulation and departmental notification, they are revised regularly, and we did not read the current instruments. A stale fee table is worse than no fee table, because it looks authoritative. Ask the Department of Employment or the office handling your application, and ask for the current notification by name.

My job title includes administrative work. Is that item (26)?

Item (26) of schedule one prohibits clerical work or secretarial work, absolutely, with no exception written into it. That is the text. How a permit describes a role that involves some administration, and what a registrar does with such a description, is not answered by any published instrument we read, and we are not going to invent a practice. If your position turns on it, it is a question for a professional who handles work permits and can look at the job description you are proposing.

Can I volunteer, or help a friend’s business, without a permit?

Under the 2017 definition this was the sharpest question in Thailand, because that text said “whether or not for wages or any other benefit”. That wording is gone. The current definition is “engaging in any occupation”, which is not the same test at all. We are not going to convert that into permission for a specific activity, and we note that some categories of person and some kinds of work sit outside the decree entirely under its own provisions. What we will say plainly is that any answer resting on the phrase “whether or not for wages” is quoting a repealed definition.

Does a Thai spouse change anything?

Not in this decree. Nothing in the definition of work, the section 8 prohibition, the schedules or the penalties turns on marriage to a Thai national. Marriage has consequences elsewhere — in immigration categories, in property, in the read-across clause we describe in the guide to divorce and ending a marriage — but it does not create a right to work.

What about BOI, Smart Visa or the LTR route?

They exist, they are real, and they are governed by other statutes and privilege schemes that we have not read for this page. Flagging them rather than describing them is the honest option: if you are being recruited into a promoted company or applying under a long-term-residence category, the work-authorisation route may not be the one on this page at all, and you should ask which instrument your permission comes from.

If I was fined once, is that it forever?

No — the bar in section 64/1 is two years from serving the penalty, not permanent, and the section also allows for a foreigner under section 63 whom the registrar specially permits to work. What the section does not offer is a way to shorten the two years.