The yellow house book and the pink ID card: since 2020 a duty, not a perk, and the house master holds the pen

Most English-language advice treats the yellow house book as something a foreigner may choose to apply for, and then lists what it unlocks: a bank account, a driving licence, Thai prices. The law describes something else. Since 7 January 2020, a foreigner given permission to stay for six months or more has been under a duty to apply to be entered in a house register within thirty days, and to hold the identity card that follows. The duty is yours; the signature that makes it possible belongs to whoever heads the household. And the benefits list, checked against the rules of the agencies supposed to honour it, turns out to be mostly those agencies’ own choices.

Which laws you are actually under

The yellow book sits in civil registration, not in immigration, and the difference decides almost everything below. Six instruments make it up.

• Civil Registration Act B.E. 2534, Royal Gazette volume 108, part 203, special issue, page 97, 22 November 1991, amended by two numbered Acts: Act No. 2 B.E. 2551 (volume 125, part 38 Kor, page 13, 25 February 2008) and by Act No. 3 B.E. 2562 (volume 136, part 49 Kor, page 33, 14 April 2019, in force the next day). The second amendment rewrote the rules on moving, created the identity-card duties for non-Thais, and replaced the fines. We checked the Ministry of Interior registration bureau’s own list of the Act’s amendments and the Royal Gazette index through September 2026: there is no Act No. 4.
• Ministerial Regulation prescribing the duties of non-Thais in civil registration B.E. 2562, volume 137, part 1 Kor, page 13, 7 January 2020. This is the instrument that made registration compulsory for longer stays. It has been amended once, in September 2020, and only to change the disaster fee waiver.
• Ministerial Regulation on fees for late notifications B.E. 2562, volume 137, part 1 Kor, page 18, published the same day.
• Central Registration Office regulation on civil registration B.E. 2535, as amended eight times up to No. 9 in 2025, most relevantly by No. 5 (2008), No. 6 (2018) and No. 7 (2019). This is the registrar’s working manual: which form is which, who may be added, how moves are handled, what the identity number means.
• Central Registration Office regulation on identity cards for non-Thais B.E. 2562, volume 136, special part 158 Ngor, page 26, 21 June 2019, in force from 15 May 2019, amended once in January 2020.
• Ministry of Interior announcement under section 38, volume 125, special part 174 Ngor, page 16, 11 November 2008, which lists the non-Thais who go into the Tor Ror 13 register.

None of these instruments describes a book as yellow or a card as pink. The regulations identify the registers by form number, and the card regulation leaves its design and colour to the Central Registrar. The colours are real, and everyone uses them, but they are not law.

What the yellow book is, in the law’s own words

Section 4 of the Act defines a house register as the register of each house showing its house number and a list of every person living in it. A house is a building used as a dwelling and occupied by a house master — and section 35 adds that in a row of shophouses or a condominium, every room or unit gets its own house number and counts as a house. A house master is “the person who heads the occupation of the house as owner, tenant or in any other capacity”, and if there is none, or they are absent or dead, whoever is looking after the house at the time.

From there the Act splits the population. Section 36 has the registrar keep a house register for every house “for Thai nationals and for non-Thais who have residence in the kingdom”. That is Tor Ror 14, the one Thais know as the blue book. Section 38, as rewritten in 2008, has the registrar keep a separate house register for non-Thais permitted to stay temporarily, for non-Thais granted special case-by-case leniency under the immigration law, as the Minister announces, and for their children born in Thailand. That is Tor Ror 13. Section 38 ends with a sentence that matters later: when a person in it ceases to be permitted to stay, the registrar shall remove the entry promptly.

The book has a history the English-language guides never mention. The 1991 text of section 38 created one register for people who had “entered unlawfully or entered temporarily”, together. The registrar’s regulation carried the same pairing for decades, and the identity-number rules still do. The 2019 rewrite of the regulation’s clause 44 now describes Tor Ror 13 more politely — non-Thais permitted to stay temporarily, and those granted special leniency as the Minister lists them — but its list of forms, which that rewrite did not touch, still describes Tor Ror 13 as a house register “for persons who entered lawfully but stay temporarily, or who entered unlawfully”. Even the move form is different: Tor Ror 6 for people in the blue book, Tor Ror 7 for people in the yellow one.

Who else shares the register is set by the Minister’s 2008 announcement under section 38. Its list for Tor Ror 13 has four lines: people who have renounced, lost or been deprived of Thai nationality and do not yet hold an alien certificate; non-Thais permitted to stay temporarily; non-Thais granted special leniency who cannot be returned to their country of origin or whose stay a Cabinet resolution has regularised; and the children of all three born in Thailand without Thai nationality. A retiree on a one-year extension, a former Thai national and a long-settled special-leniency case can all be in the same kind of book.

The 2020 change: from “may ask” to “shall”

The ministerial regulation of 2008 divided non-Thais into four groups — residents, special-leniency cases, people permitted to stay temporarily, and people without permission — and then put duties on the first two. For the third group, which is where almost every expatriate on a visa sits, clause 6 said only this: if they wish to be registered, they may ask the registrar to do it. The card duty in clause 7 applied to residents and leniency cases alone.

The regulation that replaced it, published on 7 January 2020, keeps the same four groups and changes the third. Clause 4 lists the non-Thais who “shall comply” with being added to a house register, with surveys, with move notifications and with identity cards, and its third line is a non-Thai permitted to stay temporarily “continuously for a period of not less than six months”. Clause 5 gives the deadline: the application is to be made within thirty days from the day of receiving the visa, or the extension of the visa, permitting a stay of six months or more. Clause 8 keeps the old position for everyone below the line: a non-Thai permitted to stay for less than six months may ask the registrar to register them.

Three things follow that the benefit-list guides miss.

• The trigger is the permission, not the address. The thirty days run from the visa or extension, not from moving in. A one-year extension of stay counts. The regulation does not say whether someone already in the register must do anything when the extension is renewed.
• The line is drawn in months. A permission expressed as 180 days sits right on it, and the regulation does not say which side. We will not guess for you.
• The card duty moved with it. The card regulation of 2019 requires every non-Thai aged five to seventy who is in Tor Ror 13 or Tor Ror 14 to hold a card within sixty days of being added — with a single exception, for people permitted to stay temporarily for less than six months continuously.

The regulation’s own note gives its reason in one sentence: to bring the duties and fees into line with the Act as amended in 2019. It does not explain why six months, and we have not found a document that does.

What happens if you do not: a fee, not a fine

This is where the 2019 amendment changes the temperature of the whole subject. Until then, section 48 of the Act punished anyone who failed to comply with a ministerial regulation made under section 5 — the kind of regulation that now sets these duties — with a fine of up to 5,000 baht, and section 47 fined a failure to report a move up to 1,000 baht. Act No. 3, in force from 15 April 2019, repealed section 48 outright, rewrote section 47 as an administrative fine confined to a short list of other failures (not answering a registrar’s summons, the duties around abandoned children, a birth attendant’s or doctor’s duty to certify births and deaths, refusing a registration survey), and replaced section 51 with a different mechanism: a late notification or application may be made once the late fee has been paid. So when the duty for visa holders arrived in January 2020, there was no fine left to attach to it.

The late fee is set by its own ministerial regulation, published the same day as the duty. It covers late additions of a non-Thai to a house register under section 38/1, late card applications and renewals under sections 38/2 and 38/3, and late move notifications under sections 30 and 30/1, among others.

Clause 2 waives the fee in declared disaster areas; for people who cannot walk, are mute, blind in both eyes or of unsound mind; for people in a social-development ministry shelter; for patients whose treatment lasts more than a month; for people lawfully detained; and for other cases the Minister announces. Clause 3 waived it for everything that was already late when the regulation arrived.

The duty is yours; the pen is the house master’s

The standard public-service procedure for this addition — published by the provincial administration department, which owns the process, and reproduced by district and municipal registries — is titled for exactly the case most readers are in: a foreigner who entered Thailand on a passport, whose permission to stay has not yet expired, and who wishes to be added to Tor Ror 13. It says:

• The applicant may be the house master or the person to be added.
• There must be at least two witnesses able to certify the person’s identity.
• The documents are the house master’s copy of the house register for the house concerned; the identity card of the applicant if the applicant is not the person being added; and the passport and the evidence of permission to stay, translated into Thai by a reliable institution.
• The registrar investigates the applicant, the house master and the witnesses on the person’s history “and the house master’s consent” to the addition, and sends a recommendation to the district or local registrar, who decides.
• There is no fee. The published service standard is thirty days; sixty where there is reason to suspect the application is improper, and ninety where the registry has to consult the Central Registration Office.

The consent requirement is not an accident of one procedure. Section 30 of the Act, on moving in, speaks of the registrar entering a person into a house register “with the written consent of the house master”. The 2019 rules on moves within one registry require the destination house master’s written consent and a copy of their identity card. The Act also puts a separate fifteen-day duty on a house master whose house someone moves into with the intention of making it their domicile. We found no provision that lets a registrar add a foreigner to a house over its house master’s refusal. So the practical shape is this: the regulation puts the duty on you, and the person who can make it possible is usually your landlord.

Two details from the definitions soften that. The Act’s house master is whoever heads the occupation “as owner, tenant or in any other capacity” — the word tenant is in the statute. And a foreigner who owns a condominium unit is, on the same definition, the obvious house master of that unit. Who the registry records as house master for a particular address is a matter of its records, and changing it is a procedure we did not trace.

The 2018 amendment added two protections worth knowing. Registrars are to check documents against the central database rather than demanding photocopies, and where the registrar refuses an application to be added because the evidence is insufficient or doubtful, the refusal must be given in writing, with reasons, the right to appeal and the period for appealing. If you are turned away without a letter, ask for one.

The pink card

Section 38/1 of the Act, added in 2019, says that once a non-Thai has been added to a house register the registrar shall issue an identity card, or an interim identity document for a child under five. The details are in the Central Registration Office’s card regulation of 2019.

The two lines readers most often get wrong sit next to each other. The printed ten-year expiry is not the real limit: the card lives and dies with the status underneath it. For a foreigner on a temporary stay, that status is the permission to stay, and section 38 separately tells the registrar to remove the register entry promptly when the permission ends. The card is a record of registration, not a permit of any kind.

One practical detail from the January 2020 amendment: an interested party may ask for a certified extract of the card record in English, in the form the Central Registration Office prescribes, and the 2018 amendment to the registration regulation says the same of civil-registration records generally. The rules allow it; whether a given counter has the English form to hand is another matter.

Reading your thirteen-digit number

Section 16 of the Act has the Central Registrar give every Thai national and every non-Thai living in the kingdom a single identity number, and since 2019 requires the numbering rules to keep Thais and non-Thais separate. The rules are in clause 152 of the registration regulation: one digit for the person category, four for the registration office that issued the number, seven for a sequence within that office and category, and one check digit.

So a yellow-book number starts with 6, and the category is shared, in the regulation’s own words, with people who entered unlawfully. A child born in Thailand to a yellow-book parent gets 7. A foreigner who later obtains permanent residence moves into category 8 — and into Tor Ror 14.

What the yellow book is not

Three separate things are routinely credited to it.

It is not immigration status. Nothing in the Civil Registration Act or its regulations grants, extends or evidences a right to stay; the register follows your permission and, by section 38, is to drop you when the permission ends.

It replaces neither immigration notification. Our page on the TM30 sets out section 38 of the Immigration Act, which puts a twenty-four-hour duty on the house master, the owner or possessor of the dwelling, or the hotel manager who takes in a foreigner. The 90-day report is the foreigner’s own duty under section 37. The registration regulation, as rewritten in 2019, is explicit that its world is separate: in clause 79, when a foreigner permitted to stay temporarily moves, the registrar is to advise them to notify the local police where they are moving to as well.

It is not evidence of any right in property. Section 34, as rewritten in 2019, says that house numbers and the ordinary house registers exist for public order and to protect basic rights, and that no one may cite them to show a right in, or ownership of, land. It is written about the section 36 register; nothing suggests the separate register for non-Thais proves more.

The benefits list, checked against the agencies’ own rules

Almost every English guide to the yellow book is really a list of what it unlocks. The register itself unlocks nothing: it records that a person lives at an address. Anything else is another agency deciding to accept that record. So we went to the rules of the agencies that the lists name most often.

None of this makes the book useless. A current, official record of where you live is exactly what several of these rules ask for in general terms, and a registry-issued document is harder to argue with than a lease. The point is where the decision sits. If a counter refuses your yellow book, it is applying its own rule, and the question to ask is which one.

Moving, leaving and falling into the central register

The 2019 amendment rewrote the moving rules, and they apply to the yellow book as much as the blue one.

• Moving out. When someone moves out to change their domicile, the house master reports it within fifteen days. The person moving may report it themselves if they are fifteen or over, and must say which house they are moving to (s.30).
• The thirty-day trap. If you report a move out and have not moved into another house within thirty days, the registrar puts you in the central house register. An extract from the central register can confirm your particulars but, in the regulation’s words, “cannot be used to confirm the address or status”.
• Moving in. The new house master reports within fifteen days (s.30/1); if the registrar has already entered you on the house master’s written consent, the house master need not report again (s.30).
• Going abroad. The move-out rule in section 30 does not apply to people going abroad to study, to serve in government, or to do business or work temporarily; they may move out if they wish.
• Absent and untraceable. If someone named in a house register has been living elsewhere for more than 180 days and the house master does not know where, section 33 has the house master report it within thirty days, and the registrar moves the name to the central register.
• Permission ends. Section 38 tells the registrar to remove a Tor Ror 13 entry promptly when the person’s permission to stay ends, and the card expires the same day.

Put together: a foreigner who leaves a condo at the end of a lease, travels for a few months and comes back to a new address can end up in the central register without having done anything wrong, and a central-register extract will not prove where they live. Reporting the move into the new place promptly is what keeps the record useful.

How many people this is

Section 45 of the Act requires the Central Registrar to publish the registered population every year. The announcement for 31 December 2025, in the Royal Gazette of 30 March 2026, counts 988,303 people without Thai nationality in the civil-registration records nationwide, against 64,820,708 Thai nationals. In Bangkok the figures are 102,988 without Thai nationality — 57,261 men and 45,727 women — out of 5,422,568, a little under one registered resident in fifty. The announcement does not separate the yellow book from the blue book or the central register, so it cannot tell you how many of those people are foreigners on visas.