There is no single Thailand work permit minimum salary. There are two separate tables, and which one governs your hire depends on one thing: whether the sponsoring company holds a promotion certificate from the Board of Investment (BOI), the Thai government agency that grants investment privileges to approved projects. Without BOI promotion, the salary floor is set by the employee’s nationality. With it, nationality stops mattering and the floor is set by the position and the employee’s qualifications instead.
Pick the wrong table and the number in your offer letter can be off by tens of thousands of baht a month. That isn’t a rounding error you fix later. It’s a renewal problem you inherit a year after the person has already moved to Thailand.
Key Takeaways▾
- Non-BOI employers follow a nationality-based table: THB 50,000/month for nationals of the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and Japan, down to THB 25,000/month for ASEAN and other African nationals (Immigration Bureau requirement under Police Order No. 327/2557, as reported by Statrys).
- BOI-promoted companies follow a position-based table instead — THB 150,000/month for executives down to THB 35,000/month for IBPO/TISO workstation operators (BOI Announcement No. Por.8/2568, as reported by PKF Thailand).
- The BOI table replaces the nationality table entirely for BOI-promoted employers. It is not an extra layer on top of it.
- There is no minimum salary to obtain the work permit itself. The threshold is checked when the Non-Immigrant B visa is extended, which is what keeps the employee legally working past the first year (Statrys).
- Under the BOI criteria, positions authorised for stays of six months or less are exempt from the minimum salary requirement (PKF Thailand).
Which of the two tables applies to your hire?
Answer one question before you look at any figure: does the company sponsoring this employee hold a BOI promotion certificate?
If the answer is no — which covers most Thai limited companies, branch offices and representative offices — you use the nationality table, and the job title has no bearing on the floor. If yes, you use the BOI table, and the passport has no bearing on it; what matters is the position and whether the employee holds a relevant bachelor’s degree.
The mistake we see most often is treating BOI status as an add-on: clear the nationality figure first, then check whether BOI wants anything extra. That’s backwards. For a BOI-promoted company the BOI figures are the criteria, and for several positions they sit far above what the nationality table would have asked for.
The nationality table: what standard, non-BOI sponsorship requires
For a company without BOI promotion, the minimum monthly salary follows the employee’s nationality. These figures come from the Immigration Bureau requirement under Police Order No. 327/2557 (2014), as reported by Statrys’ Thailand work permit guide (reviewed March 2026):
| Nationality group | Minimum monthly salary |
|---|---|
| USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, Japan | THB 50,000 |
| Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan | THB 45,000 |
| Other Asian countries (excluding Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and ASEAN), Eastern Europe, Russia, South Africa, Central and South America | THB 35,000 |
| ASEAN countries (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam) and other African nations | THB 25,000 |
One warning about what you’ll find elsewhere. An older table dated 2004, with a top tier of THB 60,000, still circulates on a number of websites and in recycled HR templates. It predates the 2014 order and has been superseded. If a figure you’ve been quoted doesn’t appear above, check where it came from before you budget against it.
BOI-promoted companies use a completely different table
If the sponsoring company holds BOI promotion, position and qualification set the minimum. BOI Announcement No. Por.8/2568, issued 5 June 2025, made minimum salary part of the criteria for visas and work permits under BOI, replacing the previous Announcement No. Por.3/2567 — as reported by PKF Thailand:
| Position | Minimum monthly salary |
|---|---|
| Executives (Chairman, President, CEO, CFO, etc.) | THB 150,000 |
| Management (managers, assistants to executives) without a relevant bachelor’s degree | THB 75,000 |
| Management with a relevant bachelor’s degree or higher | THB 50,000 |
| Engineers / IT specialists without a relevant degree | THB 75,000 |
| Engineers / IT specialists with a relevant degree | THB 50,000 |
| Operational / science-technology researcher roles with a degree | THB 50,000 |
| IBPO / TISO workstation operators | THB 35,000 |
Whether these figures apply to you yet depends on your certificate date. For new BOI-certified projects, with certificates issued on or after 5 June 2025, the criteria took effect on 1 October 2025. For existing projects certified before 5 June 2025, they took effect on 1 January 2026 (PKF Thailand).
Notice what the degree column does. The same engineering role costs THB 50,000 a month with a relevant degree and THB 75,000 without one — a THB 300,000 difference in annual payroll between two shortlisted candidates.
The threshold bites at renewal, not when the permit is issued
Here is the part almost every guide buries: there is no minimum salary requirement to obtain the work permit in the first place. The threshold is checked at visa extension and renewal, which in practice is what keeps the employee legally working past the first year (Statrys).
That timing is why underpaying against the table goes unnoticed for so long. Year one looks clean — permit issued, employee working, nobody flagged anything. The problem surfaces at extension, when the salary on file is measured against the requirement. By then you’re renegotiating compensation with someone who has already relocated, signed a lease and enrolled children in school.
Get the number right in the offer, not in the correction.
Check nationality and BOI status before the offer goes out
In our first consultation, the Simple Outsource team reviews the role, the employee’s nationality, your company’s structure and any BOI status — to confirm eligibility, identify the correct visa route and give you an accurate timeline before anything is submitted. All four get checked together, because each one changes which figure the file will be measured against. We manage both tracks: Non-Immigrant B visa applications for standard sponsorship, and work permit applications for BOI-promoted companies.
Plenty of hires don’t need us at all. One employee, a non-BOI company, a nationality with a clear tier and a salary already well above the floor — your own HR team can prepare that file. It stops being straightforward when the company has BOI promotion, when the certificate date sits near an effective date, or when the salary lands close enough to the line that a bonus-versus-base decision changes the outcome. For the wider budget beyond salary, see our breakdown of what a Thailand work permit costs ; for the sequence from visa to permit, start with the full work permit process .
Have a candidate and a number in mind? Send us the role, the nationality and whether the company holds BOI promotion, and we’ll tell you which table applies before you commit to it. Simple Outsource’s work permit and visa service replies within 24 hours, with no obligation.