Thailand Long-Term Resident (LTR) Visa: Who Qualifies?

The asset test asks for at least USD 1 million in appraised worldwide assets as at the date of your application. Domestic and foreign assets both count, but they count as evidenced and appraised, not as estimated.

The second test is the one that decides most applications. You need at least USD 500,000 invested in Thailand, held in your own name, and the current rules expect that investment to exist before you apply rather than to be promised afterwards.

BOI works from appraised value and documentary evidence. The published criteria set the threshold; the required-documents guide for the category sets out what will actually be accepted as proof, and it is the more useful document once you are serious. Property, bank holdings, investments and business or share ownership are the categories most applicants build a case around.

Two questions come up constantly and are not settled in the announcement itself: how jointly owned assets are treated, and how tightly appraisals must be dated. Both are worth confirming with BOI or through the current required-documents guide before you assemble a file around an assumption.

BOI's wording is pensions and fixed personal income. State and occupational pensions are the clearest fit. Other regular unearned income — rent, dividends, interest — should be checked against the current required-documents guidance rather than assumed, because what matters is not only where the money comes from but how reliably you can evidence it as fixed.

This is the category most people arrive looking for, and the one where expectations and criteria diverge most sharply. It is not the DTV with better benefits. It is a programme built around established overseas employers, and it asks two entirely separate questions.

In practice, the employer test decides the outcome. A well-paid engineer at a listed technology company clears it without thinking. The same engineer, earning the same money as a contractor through their own limited company, does not — and neither does an employee of a genuinely successful thirty-person agency.

Everything in this category flows from the organisation you work for. BOI publishes a list of targeted industries — digital, medical, automation and robotics, aviation, biotechnology, logistics and others — alongside a set of specialised expertise areas such as research and development and higher-education teaching. Employment with a qualifying Thai organisation in one of those areas is the entry condition.

The income test is USD 80,000 a year averaged over two years, or USD 40,000 with a master's degree or higher in science and technology or documented field expertise. Employees of public universities, public research agencies and other public bodies are exempt from the income requirement altogether, which is a meaningful opening for academics.

Plan on the basis that you will need to demonstrate your position again rather than simply confirm an address. For pensioners and global citizens this is usually straightforward. For remote professionals it depends on a job and an employer that may both have changed in five years, which is worth thinking about before you treat LTR as ten years of certainty.

Fees can differ depending on where the visa is issued, so confirm the current official instructions for the mission or channel you will use. Set against Thailand Privilege, where the entry-level membership runs to several hundred thousand baht, the LTR fee is modest. The cost of LTR is the qualification, not the paperwork.

If you comfortably qualify for Work-from-Thailand LTR, compare it seriously before defaulting to the DTV. The harder qualification buys a much cleaner long-term immigration structure, and for a high earner the tax treatment alone can outweigh everything else. If you do not qualify, the DTV is not a consolation prize — it is the route that was designed for you.

The specialist LTR infrastructure sits at the Thailand Investment and Expat Services Centre, which BOI operates in Bangkok — currently on the sixth floor of the One Bangkok development. Visa issuance, the digital work permit and LTR-specific support are handled through that centre and the programme's online channels rather than at a provincial immigration office.

For most holders this is a minor point, because it comes up rarely. But it is worth planning for: an issuance appointment means a trip to Bangkok, and Hua Hin's own immigration office is not where LTR questions get resolved.