A base in Thailand.

Most of the families our office now serves in Thailand did not arrive intending to stay. They came for a week in Phuket, then a fortnight, then a winter, and somewhere in the third or fourth visit the conversation changed shape. It stopped being about which resort and started being about which district, which school, which hospital, whether the grandmother could manage the stairs, and whether the maid who has been with the household for eleven years could come too. That is the moment a holiday becomes a base, and it is worth naming, because almost everything that goes wrong for a family in their first Thai year goes wrong because they were still buying holidays while living a residence.

A base has four load-bearing parts: lawful status that does not expire mid-term, a home that suits how the household actually lives rather than how it photographs, people to run that home, and a school year that anchors the calendar. Miss one and the other three wobble. A family with a beautiful Bang Tao villa and a visa that runs out in February will spend February thinking about visas. A family with ten-year status and a condominium chosen for its view rather than its lift access will discover the flaw the first week the grandparents visit. We build these in order, and we build the status first.

Before anything else: the entry question

Start with what the visa exemption is not. It is not status. It is permission to visit, granted unilaterally by Thailand, revisable by Thailand, and at present it is genuinely in motion. The exemption has been running at up to sixty days per entry. In May 2026 the Thai Cabinet approved a reduction of that period to thirty days, to take effect fifteen days after publication in the Royal Gazette, and at the time of writing the publication date has not been confirmed. There is also a separate bilateral arrangement between Thailand and China covering ordinary passport holders, which has its own period, and the interaction between the two is precisely the kind of detail that a well-meaning group chat gets wrong.

So we will not print a number here and let a reader plan a term around it. Before every trip, and certainly before any long stay, confirm the current entry period with the Royal Thai Embassy or the nearest Royal Thai Consulate General for your city. Do it even if you travelled six weeks ago. Separately, complete the Thailand Digital Arrival Card online in the window before arrival that the Immigration Bureau specifies; airlines increasingly check it at the departure gate, and a family of nine discovering it at check-in in Shanghai is an avoidable morning.

The deeper point is that exemption-hopping is not a residence strategy. Families who run a base on visa runs accumulate a border history that immigration officers can read at a glance, and they build a life on a permission that can be shortened by cabinet decision, as it just has been. Every family we advise past their second season moves onto a proper visa. It costs money and paperwork. It buys the thing the exemption cannot: a year you can plan.

The four visa routes that actually carry a family

Four routes carry almost every Chinese family we place. The Destination Thailand Visa, introduced in 2024, is a multiple-entry visa valid several years, granting a long stay per entry with an extension available at immigration, aimed at remote workers and at people coming for extended soft activity: Muay Thai training, medical treatment, cookery courses, seminars. It is the lightest route and the one most misunderstood; it is a visitor visa with a long clock, not a work permit, and what you may lawfully do while holding it is narrower than the internet suggests.

The Long Term Resident visa, administered by the Board of Investment, is the serious one: ten years in principle, issued in categories that include the wealthy global citizen, the wealthy pensioner, the work-from-Thailand professional and the highly skilled professional, with asset, income and insurance thresholds attached to each, and dependants included. It carries a digital work permit for the categories that need one and a lighter reporting burden. The documentation is heavy and slow, the thresholds are real and are checked, and for a principal with an offshore-held portfolio and clean documentation it remains the best status available in Thailand.

Thailand Privilege, the membership programme formerly known as Thailand Elite, sells a long-stay privilege entry visa in tiers by price and duration, with airport and immigration services attached. It is the route for a family that wants status without an employment or investment story, values the fast lane at Suvarnabhumi more than it minds the fee, and does not want to assemble an LTR file. It is not a work permit and not a path to permanent residence, and it should be bought with that clearly understood.

The Non-Immigrant B, paired with a work permit, is the route where there is a genuine Thai company: a trading arm, a hotel interest, a factory in the eastern seaboard, a restaurant group. It brings company obligations, capital and Thai-employee ratios, and annual renewals, and it is the only one of the four where the visa is a consequence of a business rather than a purchase. Alongside these sit the smaller routes families forget: the guardian visa for a parent accompanying a child enrolled in a Thai school, which solves the mother's status when the father commutes, and the retirement route for principals over fifty with the required deposit or income.

Two disciplines apply to all of them. Ninety-day reporting is a duty of the holder, not of the agent, and a missed report is a fine and an awkward file note. And the re-entry permit is the trap that catches new families every year: leave the country on a long-stay visa without one and the permission to stay dies at the airport, whatever the sticker says. Our office sets both as calendar items on the day a visa is issued.

Where the household lives

Bangkok, district by district

Bangkok is not one decision, it is a choice among four or five pockets, and the right one falls out of the school and the office rather than the view. Families who want the fullest urban life take the Sukhumvit spine between Asok and Phrom Phong and out to Thonglor: the Emporium and EmQuartier complex, Benjasiri Park for a grandmother's morning walk, Samitivej Sukhumvit up Soi 49, the Japanese and Korean grocery density that also serves Chinese cooking well, and the Skytrain overhead so that six in the evening is not a forty-minute sit in a car. Sathorn and Silom suit principals whose meetings are financial and who want Lumphini Park at the end of the street. The riverside around ICONSIAM and the old Charoen Krung stretch suits families who want space, a garden, and a resort rhythm inside the city, at the price of a longer run to the international schools.

Then there is the northern and eastern suburban belt that most visiting families never see and many resident families end up in. Bangkok Patana sits in Bang Na, International School Bangkok in Nichada Thani out at Pak Kret, NIST in the centre, Harrow to the north. Families with three children at one school routinely trade the Sukhumvit address for a compound house twenty minutes from the gate, and consider it the best decision of their first year. The rule of thumb we give: choose the school, then draw a thirty-minute morning circle around it, then look for homes only inside the circle.

On ownership, be plain with yourself early. Foreign nationals may own condominium units within the foreign quota of a building and may not own land. The structures used to hold villas, long leases, Thai companies, usufructs, vary in how well they hold up, and this is a matter for a Thai property lawyer instructed by you and not by the seller, with the title checked at the Land Department. Our property guides treat the mechanics fully. The point here is only that most families should rent for their first full year. A year of living in a district teaches you more than a year of viewings.

Phuket

Phuket is the base for a family that wants a house rather than an apartment, water at the end of the garden, and a genuine international school choice on the island. The west coast holds the luxury, from Kamala and Surin through Bang Tao and Layan to the quiet northern beaches, and the villa estates around Laguna and above Kamala have become an established Chinese pocket, with Mandarin-speaking property managers and staff as a normal expectation rather than a favour. British International School Phuket and UWC Thailand anchor the schooling. The honest caveats are the monsoon months on the Andaman side, roughly May to October, when the sea turns and the red flags go up, and the high-season traffic on the single coastal road.

Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai is the base for a family that prioritises air-conditioning bills, school fees, calm and a Chinese community that has been in the north for generations. It is cooler, cheaper, slower, and the schooling is genuinely strong for its size. Its caveat is serious and we state it in its own guide: the burning season, roughly late February into April, when agricultural smoke pushes air quality to levels no family with young children or elderly parents should shrug at. Families who base in Chiang Mai plan around it, usually by being somewhere else.

The household: staff, and how to engage them lawfully

A Thai household at this level typically runs a housekeeper, a nanny where there are small children, a driver, a gardener or pool man for a villa, and sometimes a cook. Bringing your own ayi from China is the request we field most often and the one that needs the most care: a foreign national working in a Thai household requires the correct visa and work permit, domestic categories are restricted, and the answer depends on the current rules and on the employer's structure. Ask the Department of Employment or a Thai labour lawyer before promising anyone a flight. Do not solve it informally. An undocumented household worker is a risk carried by the employer as much as the employee.

Engaging Thai staff properly is straightforward and worth doing properly: a written contract in Thai and English, wages paid by bank transfer so there is a record, social security registration where applicable, clear hours and days off, and an understanding of the statutory severance regime before you hire rather than after you dismiss. Families accustomed to mainland domestic arrangements sometimes underestimate Thai severance entitlements, which scale with length of service. Live-in staff need a proper room and their own bathroom, and the better villa layouts assume this. A good agency will short-list, but the household still interviews, and the household still checks references itself.

Schooling, and the year it locks you into

Schooling is the decision that fixes the family's calendar for a decade, and it should be made before the property, not after. Thailand's established international schools follow British, American or IB pathways, admit on assessment and interview, and the strongest have waiting lists at the popular entry points. Applications for August entry typically move a year ahead. Mandarin provision varies widely: some schools run a genuine first-language Chinese track, others offer Mandarin as an additional language that will not hold a child who reads at grade level in Chinese. If maintaining Chinese literacy matters to the family, and for most of our clients it matters a great deal, ask to see the Chinese department, the curriculum and the exam pathway, not the marketing.

Ask also about the transition question that nobody volunteers: where do the school's graduates actually go, and does the pathway serve a family that may want a mainland university option as well as a British or American one. Ask about EAL support in the first year, about the proportion of any single nationality in the year group, and about the school bus routes, which quietly determine which districts are liveable. Then visit on a normal Tuesday, not an open day.

The rhythm of a season

A base has a shape to its year. November to February is the cool dry season and the best of Thailand: the golf is playable at midday, the sea on the Andaman side is flat, Bangkok is bearable outdoors, and Chinese New Year fills Yaowarat and the hotels alike. March to May is hot, seriously hot, with Songkran in the middle of April closing the city into a water festival that families either love or leave for. June to October is the rains, which are not the constant drizzle newcomers expect but heavy afternoon downpours that clear, and it is the cheapest and emptiest season on the coast. The pattern most of our long-stay families settle into is a long winter in Thailand, a return to China or a cooler destination for the hot months, and a shorter autumn visit.

Anchor the household calendar on four things: the school terms, Chinese New Year and the Qingming and Mid-Autumn dates the family observes, the ninety-day immigration reports, and the annual renewals for insurance, lease, work permits and the car. Our office keeps that calendar for clients because the failure mode is always the same, a report or a renewal falling in a month when everyone happened to be elsewhere.

Money, moved the right way

Everything a family does financially across this border should run through documented, lawful channels: your mainland bank, the annual individual foreign exchange arrangements as they apply to you, a Thai bank account opened properly against your visa, and receipts kept for anything substantial. There is a great deal of folk advice circulating on this subject and we will not add to it. The correct advisers are your bank, your accountant, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange for what is permitted from the China side. Property purchases in particular have a documentation requirement on the Thai side about the foreign source of the funds, which is a reason to move money cleanly and once, rather than in fragments.

Day to day, Thailand is easier than most Chinese families expect. UnionPay is widely accepted, the major mainland mobile wallets work at a large share of Thai merchants through cross-border QR arrangements, and a Thai account with local mobile banking is straightforward once you hold a long-stay visa and an address. Insurance deserves a separate hour: the LTR route requires health cover at a stated level, and in any case a family with elderly parents in Thailand wants a policy that names the Bangkok private hospitals and covers evacuation.

What we tell a family in their first year

• Rent for a full year in the district you think you want, including one hot season and one rainy season, before buying anything.
• Choose the school first, then draw the morning circle, then choose the home inside it.
• Move onto a proper visa by the second season and stop planning a life around an exemption that is currently being changed.
• Register with a private hospital and put the ambulance number, the paediatrician and the cardiologist in the household phone on week one.
• Get a Thai driving licence rather than running indefinitely on an international permit, and insure the car properly.
• Set the ninety-day reports, the re-entry permits and every renewal as calendar items on the day each document is issued.
• Engage staff on written contracts with wages paid by transfer, and take advice before promising to bring anyone from China.

None of this is difficult. It is simply sequential, and the families who find their Thai years easy are the ones who did it in order. The families who find it exhausting almost always bought a house in month two, chose a school in month nine, and spent the intervening period driving across Bangkok at eight in the morning.

Immigration rules, visa categories and entry periods change, sometimes at short notice. Confirm current entry conditions and visa requirements with the Royal Thai Embassy or Consulate General for your city before booking, verify long-stay conditions with the Thai Immigration Bureau, check LTR criteria with the Board of Investment, and take advice from the Department of Employment before engaging any foreign national in your household.

This briefing is general information, not legal, tax or investment advice. Thai rules change frequently and individual cases differ. Verify current requirements with the relevant authorities, including the Immigration Bureau, the Board of Investment, the Land Department, the Department of Business Development and the Revenue Department, and take advice on your own facts before acting.