How long does Thailand BOI approval take, from filing to certificate?

01The official eight steps, from filing to certificate

Owners often ask how long BOI takes. The honest answer is not one number but a chain. BOI sets out the route from application to certificate as eight steps, each with its own stated time limit. What decides the total is usually not BOI reviewing slowly — it is which link on the applicant's side has nobody watching it.

• Preparation and study of the project.
• Filing the application online through the e-Investment portal.
• Booking the interview with the reviewing officer.
• Project evaluation.
• Notice of the outcome — issued within 7 days of the resolution date, and only collected in person or sent by post.
• Confirming acceptance of the promotion — returned within 1 month of receiving the notice.
• Applying for the certificate — documents complete within 6 months of accepting the resolution, and BOI issues within 10 working days of receiving the complete set.
• Collecting the original promotion certificate.

02How long the evaluation takes: three bands by investment size

The core time limit is step four, the project evaluation. It is graded by investment size and counted from the day a complete set of documents is submitted:

• Up to THB 200 million — evaluated by a working group: 40 working days.
• THB 200 million to THB 2 billion — evaluated by a sub-committee: 60 working days. Chinese-invested manufacturing projects of a few hundred million baht usually land in this band.
• Above THB 2 billion — two levels of review, sub-committee and then the Board: 90 working days.

"Complete" is the condition that matters. The clock only starts on the day the file is complete. One request for supplementary material and it simply starts later. When you work back from a target certificate date, stack all of it in — evaluation working days, interview scheduling, the 7-day notice, the 1-month acceptance and the 10 working days to issue. The band figure on its own is not the answer.

03The three steps that most often cause delay

The same three points are where time is most often lost, and all three sit on the applicant's side.

• Supplementary documents. Financial figures, production process descriptions, machinery lists — supporting files get revised again and again, before and after filing, and that is the most common source of delay. If the reviewer asks for something and nobody answers, the evaluation stops moving.
• You have to book the interview yourself. In practice this is the easiest trap to fall into. The alternative interview dates entered at filing are a registration of preference, not a confirmed slot. Once the application is accepted, no interview date is sent out on its own; the applicant has to log in to the booking system and book it. More than ten days after acceptance with still no interview date is common rather than exceptional, and waiting for a notice that is not coming only wastes time.
• Nobody owns the acceptance reply. Once the approval letter arrives, acceptance of the promotion must be returned within one month. Inside many companies this step has no named owner — the good news gets passed around and the reply is left undone. Missing that month is an entirely avoidable failure.

04How to keep the schedule in your own hands

Work backwards. From the certificate date you want, set the latest workable date for evaluation, interview, filing, and the signing and sealing of the authorisation documents. Then keep a plain "who owes whom" list — which documents are stuck inside the company, which are stuck at the review stage — and update the bottleneck every week. In practice, what holds a project up is usually the applicant's own signatures, seals and missing figures, not BOI.

One qualification: the time limits above apply to ordinary applications. Other promotion measures and industry categories may be handled differently, and the official rules in force govern. Which band your project should be scheduled from, and which documents are likely to draw a request for more, depends on the investment size, the industry category you are applying under, and the state of your company documents — that has to be checked item by item. It is worth having our advisers run the timeline once against your feasibility figures, financial statements and company registration documents before you commit a date to anyone outside the company.