Thailand entry requirements

Probably not. If you hold a passport from one of 54 countries — which covers the UK, EU, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan — you enter visa-exempt for 30 days, with no application and no fee. That is the rule since 15 September 2026, when the old 60-day exemption was revoked. You can extend once for another 30 days at an immigration office for ฿1,900. If your passport is not on the exemption list, or was on the old visa-on-arrival list (now cut to about four countries), you need a tourist visa through the Thai e-visa system before you fly — about $40 and 5–10 working days. Check the Ministry of Foreign Affairs list for your nationality rather than a blog, including this one.

30 days per entry, extended once for 30 more, so 60 days in practice on a single trip. There is also a cap of two visa-exempt entries per calendar year, introduced with the September 2026 changes, which ends the old practice of chaining border runs. If you need longer than 60 days in a year, the honest answer is a proper visa: the 60-day tourist visa (TR) extends to 90, and the Destination Thailand Visa (DTV) gives 180 days with a 180-day extension for remote workers and long-stay visitors. Trying to stay by leaving and re-entering is now the most common way people get refused entry.

The Thailand Digital Arrival Card is the online replacement for the paper arrival card, mandatory since 1 May 2025 for every non-Thai national arriving by air, land or sea, whatever visa you hold. It is free on the official Immigration Bureau site, tdac.immigration.go.th, and takes three to five minutes with your passport and hotel address to hand. It must be filed within three days before your arrival — the window opens roughly 72 hours out and closes when you land. Several commercial sites charge $14–80 to file the same free form, and they rank above the official one; a fee is the warning sign. The TDAC is not a visa and does not affect your permitted stay.

Six months of validity beyond your arrival date is the requirement, and the airline enforces it more consistently than Thai immigration does — you can be denied boarding at the departure airport even though the rule is a Thai one. There is also a blank-page requirement, which matters if you are collecting stamps across several countries. If you are renewing, do it before you book: a new passport number after you have filed the TDAC means filing it again, since every field has to match the document you present at the desk.

Both are stated requirements, and enforcement is uneven. An onward or return ticket is checked most often on one-way tickets, at land borders, and by airlines flying from ports with a lot of one-way traffic. The funds requirement is ฿10,000 per person or ฿20,000 per family, in any currency equivalent; it is rarely counted at the desk but it is the rule and immigration can ask. The practical advice is to have a return ticket booked and a bank app on your phone. Nobody has ever been asked to show cash on one of our tours, but people do get asked at Poipet.

Yes, once, for 30 days, at ฿1,900. You apply at the immigration office that covers where you are staying — in Bangkok that is Chaeng Watthana, which is a long way out of the centre; in Phuket it is on Phuket Road; in Chiang Mai it is on the airport road. You need form TM7, a 4×6 cm photo, copies of your passport data page and entry stamp, and the fee in cash. Go in the last week of your permitted stay, not months early, and go in the morning: the queue is the whole experience. The extension is at the discretion of the officer, though in practice for a straightforward tourist stay it is routine.