Sending staff to Thailand: which visa route fits, in three questions

01Ask three questions before you pick a route

"Getting a Thailand visa" is not one task — it is five or six parallel routes. Vendor service lists break it into individual line items and stop there. The hard part was never which item to file; it is working out which route this particular person should be on before any paperwork starts. Get that wrong and a perfectly complete file still goes nowhere.

• 1. How long is the stay? A few days of talks, a few months of project support, or a long-term posting — this alone rules out half the routes.
• 2. Who is the employer? Employed by a Thai local company in a local role, or still employed by an entity outside Thailand while physically present here. The two situations use completely different routes and are not interchangeable.
• 3. Does the company and industry qualify? Whether the company holds BOI promoted status and whether its industry sits on the official list of target sectors decides whether the faster channels are even reachable.

02Five routes, and who each one actually fits

Route one · Business visa, for short meetings and site visits. For coming to negotiate, meet suppliers or inspect a factory — not for employment. Thai law defines "work" very broadly, covering paid and unpaid physical or mental effort alike, so "just attending a meeting" and "helping calibrate a machine while there" are not the same thing in law. Doing any work on this visa requires a work permit first.

Route two · Non-Immigrant Visa B plus a work permit, the standard employment route. The default for anyone employed by a Thai local company. It is renewed every year: the visa and the work permit are tied together, and if either lapses the other stops working too. It also counts against the company's foreign-to-Thai staff ratio — each foreign hire has to be matched against registered capital and Thai headcount. This is the route most Chinese-invested factories actually use.

Route three · The BOI one-stop channel for promoted companies. Only available once the company holds a promotion certificate. Position approval, the visa, arrival processing and extensions each run through a single visa-and-work-permit window with defined timeframes, faster than the standard route. The trade-off: position terms are time-bound, eligibility conditions apply, and from 2025 a minimum Thai-staff ratio and a minimum salary floor for foreign positions were added.

Route four · SMART Visa and the Long-Term Resident Visa (LTR), for high-skill staff and investors. BOI runs two further categories aimed at highly skilled professionals, investors, executives and entrepreneurs in officially designated target industries: SMART Visa and the Long-Term Resident Visa. Both differ from the first three routes in three ways that matter: residence is granted for multiple years rather than renewed annually; neither counts against the company's foreign-to-Thai staff ratio; and the work permit step is simplified or removed — SMART Visa holders do not need a separate work permit, and LTR holders get a digital work permit that skips the usual filing. Family members can be included. The bar is the person and the industry: qualifications and income have to clear the threshold, and the industry has to be on the list.

Route five · DTV, for remote workers. The Destination Thailand Visa targets remote workers, freelancers and consultants — people who work for an employer outside Thailand while physically in the country — and is issued for multiple years. Chinese employers sometimes hear "there's a convenient multi-year visa" and try to route posted staff through it, but being employed by a Thai local company in a local role is not what DTV was designed for. Whether it applies has to be checked against the current official conditions case by case, not assumed from what a competitor did.

03Four things that matter more than the number of years

The first question an owner usually asks about a visa is "how many years does it give us". The real burden comes from four other things:

• Does it need renewing every year? Annual renewal means preparing documents every year and carrying a lapse risk each time; the multi-year routes remove that repetition.
• Does it count against the foreign staff ratio? This is the most underestimated item. What actually blocks many factories is not whether a visa gets approved, but that sending one more person breaches the ratio, or forces the company to hire more Thai staff to compensate. A route that does not count against the ratio turns a staffing constraint back into a plain business choice.
• Does it require a separate work permit? A separate filing means one more expiry date to track, and it is tied to the visa.
• Can family members be included? For anyone on a long-term posting, family arrangements are often the real factor in whether the person stays.

A common misjudgement: treating "how many years" as the only metric. In practice, a multi-year visa that still counts against the ratio, still needs a separate work permit and still requires family members to file separately can carry a higher overall burden on the company than a shorter visa that is exempt from the ratio, needs no separate work permit and covers family in one filing. The four items add up — the number of years by itself is not the answer.

04Sort people into three groups before you plan

Rather than looking up a visa category for each person individually, sort the people you plan to send into groups first — the same group can be planned on the same route with the same document schedule:

• Short visits of a few days (talks, factory inspections, trade shows): the business-visa route, taking care not to do any actual work while in Thailand.
• Project support of a few months (line commissioning, equipment installation): BOI-promoted companies have provision for temporary positions, though the eligibility bar does not relax for a short stay, and sending several people at once carries additional conditions; non-BOI companies still use the standard route.
• Long-term postings (plant manager, technical director, finance head): this group is worth assessing person by person — whether they clear the high-skill threshold, whether the industry is on the list, and how much of the company's ratio is left.

05Before you act

The specific number of years, income and qualification thresholds, the scope of the target-industry list, ratio and capital requirements, and processing timeframes for each channel are all updated by official notice and vary by category; this page sets out the decision structure and does not list specific figures.

The fastest approach in practice is to put the list of staff to be sent, each person's intended length of stay and seniority, and the company's current Thai and foreign headcount on one page, then decide routes for the whole group at once — rather than asking one by one "what visa can he get". We recommend the advisory team work through this list together with the company's promotion status and industry classification, and return a grouped recommendation with a timetable for each group. See also the four-stage process for sending a Chinese employee to work in Thailand and the BOI channel for engineers.