Four Ministry of Interior notices appeared in the Royal Gazette on 31 August 2026, in Volume 143, Special Issue 207 Ngor. The first repeals the special 60-day visa exemption scheme that had been in place since July 2024. The other three set out what replaces it: a 30-day exemption list, a 15-day exemption list, and a much shorter Visa on Arrival list.
This is the step that had been missing since May. The Cabinet approved the rollback in principle on 19 May 2026 and the Cabinet revised the details in July, but neither of those acts changes the law. Publication in the Gazette does. The notices were signed on 26 August by Anutin Charnvirakul and published five days later.
15 September 2026. The operative clause in each notice states that it takes effect once fifteen days have elapsed from the date of publication in the Royal Gazette. Publication was 31 August 2026, so the current rules govern arrivals through 14 September and the new rules apply to arrivals from 15 September onward.
There is no phased rollout, no airport-by-airport transition and no grace period beyond that date. The cutoff is your date of arrival, not your date of booking, not your date of departure from home.
Yes, if you land on or before 14 September 2026. This is the part most coverage is burying, and it is the only part that is actionable right now.
A traveller entering before the commencement date is assessed under the rules in force on their arrival date. If you hold a passport that currently receives 60 days visa-free and you clear immigration on 14 September, you get stamped for 60 days. That stamp runs to mid-November. Nobody shortens it on 15 September, and nobody recalls it.
If Thailand is somewhere in your plans for the next few months and the dates are flexible, moving your arrival forward by a week or two is worth roughly a month of legal stay. That is a real arbitrage window and it closes on 14 September.
Nothing. The change is not retroactive. If you are currently in Thailand on a 60-day visa-exempt stamp, your permitted stay is whatever date is written in your passport, and it stays that way.
Your 30-day extension at immigration is also unaffected for that stamp. If you entered on a 60-day exemption and extend once for 1,900 THB, you still reach a 90-day total. It is only your next entry, on or after 15 September, that drops to the 30-day baseline.
Notice 128703 lists 60 countries and territories. That number matters because most coverage this week is still repeating 93, which was the size of the old 2024 list, or 59, which came from an inconsistency in the government's own July communications. The Gazette list runs from item 1 to item 60.
The 30-day list includes Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bhutan, Brunei, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkiye, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Two smaller changes sit alongside it. Mauritius and Seychelles drop to a 15-day exemption. Visa on Arrival is cut back to just three nationalities: Azerbaijan, Belarus and Serbia. India was moved off Visa on Arrival and onto the 30-day exemption list, and the Maldives, which earlier drafts had placed in the 15-day group, ended up in the 30-day group.
The two-entries-per-year cap on visa-exempt land crossings is written back into the text. You may enter Thailand visa-free through a land border checkpoint no more than twice per calendar year.
The notice names four exceptions: Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Singapore. Nationals of those countries are not subject to the land border cap. The text also leaves room for further treaty-based exceptions.
This applies to land checkpoints specifically. It does not create a general two-entry annual limit on arriving by air. That said, immigration has been flagging high-frequency air arrivals for secondary questioning for well over a year, so the practical ceiling on back-to-back exempt entries by air is lower than the written rule suggests.
| Scenario | Arriving through 14 Sep 2026 | Arriving from 15 Sep 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Visa-free entry | 60 days on arrival | 30 days on arrival |
| Extension at immigration | +30 days (1,900 THB) | +30 days (1,900 THB) |
| Single trip maximum | 90 days | 60 days |
| Countries covered | 93 (2024 scheme) | 60 (30-day list) |
| Land border visa-exempt entries | Restricted in practice | 2 per calendar year, written into the notice |
| Visa on Arrival | 31 countries | 3 countries |
| DTV visa | 180 days per entry, 5-year validity | Unchanged |
The official framing is the one country, one entry category principle. The 2024 scheme had created overlaps where a single nationality could hold a 60-day exemption and Visa on Arrival eligibility at once, and the Department of Consular Affairs wanted that cleaned up, with eligibility assessed against economic, security and reciprocity factors.
The unofficial read is the one everybody in Bangkok already knows. A large number of foreigners converted back-to-back 60-day exemptions into a de facto long-stay arrangement, working remotely without work authorisation. That was never what the scheme was for. Reciprocity is the other half of it: many countries on the old 60-day list do not extend anything close to the same treatment to Thai passport holders.
For anyone using Thailand as a primary base, yes, and this change makes it close to the only sensible answer. The DTV gives 180 days per entry on a five-year visa. The alternative is a 30-day stamp, a 1,900 THB extension, and a flight out every two months.
The bar is real: 500,000 THB in verifiable funds plus supporting documentation, and from 31 August 2026 you also have to apply in a country where you are a national or a permanent resident and supply a criminal record certificate (the full DTV rule change is here). That is a meaningfully harder application than it was six months ago. It is still far less friction than restructuring your life around 60-day trips.
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