Hiring household staff in Thailand

The shape of the market

The Thai domestic staffing market runs on three tiers. At the top sit experienced professionals who have run expatriate and wealthy Thai households for years: housekeepers who manage properties rather than merely clean them, cooks comfortable with Western and Thai tables, nannies with genuine childcare training, and drivers who know Bangkok the way pilots know their routes. This tier communicates in workable to fluent English, expects professional treatment, and moves almost entirely through referral. The middle tier is competent and trainable with more variable English; the third is casual and part-time labour. Wealthy foreign households should recruit deliberately from the first tier and pay accordingly; the absolute sums remain modest, and the difference in household quality is large. A significant share of domestic workers in Thailand are also migrants from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, often excellent employees, whose employment carries additional registration and work-permit obligations that sit with you as the employer.

Sourcing channels

Where you look determines what you find. The channels, roughly in order of quality, are these.

• Referral from departing families: the gold standard. When an expatriate family leaves Thailand, their staff seek new households, arrive with a verifiable multi-year track record, and are typically hired within weeks. Schools' parent networks, embassy circles and private-office networks carry these referrals.
• Referral from serving staff: good employees recommend people they are prepared to work beside, which is itself a filter. A trusted housekeeper's candidate for a nanny or maid position starts with an internal reference.
• Specialist agencies: useful for speed and for specific skills, with quality varying widely by agency. Fees are typically around one month's salary, and the better agencies offer replacement guarantees.
• Online platforms and classifieds: the broadest and least filtered channel, workable for junior roles if you are prepared to do the vetting yourself.

The agency versus referral question

New arrivals default to agencies because agencies are findable, and referrals are not, in the first month. The honest comparison: agencies deliver candidates fast, handle first-pass screening and paperwork, and give you recourse if a placement fails, in exchange for a fee and a pool that is, by definition, made up of people not currently retained by referral. Referral networks deliver stronger candidates with verifiable histories and no fee, but they take time and social capital that a newly landed family does not yet have. The practical synthesis most families reach: use a reputable agency for an interim hire if the household must function immediately, while running the referral search properly for the permanent team, and never skip your own vetting merely because an agency says it has vetted. Part of what a private office contributes here is simply being the referral network on day one; we have staffed households for years, and the candidates we put forward come with histories we know personally.

Vetting that actually works

Vetting in Thailand is done properly or not at all; the middle path of glancing at a reference letter is worthless, since letters are easily written and rarely checked. What works is the following, applied consistently: speak directly to at least two previous employers, ideally foreign households, and ask concrete questions about dates, duties, salary and the reason for departure; verify identity documents, and for migrant staff the work permit or registration card, keeping copies; run a criminal-record check, which candidates can obtain from the police and better agencies arrange; use a paid trial period of a few days to a few weeks before committing, which is standard and expected; and for roles with child contact or driving duties, add the specific checks our nanny and driver briefings describe, from safeguarding questions to licence and accident history. None of this is adversarial; professional candidates expect it, and the ones who resist it are answering your question by doing so.

Salary bands and structure

Full-time salaries for quality staff in Bangkok and the main expatriate centres typically run ฿18,000 to ฿40,000 per month per role, with the span explained by experience, English, live-in status and the demands of the household. English-fluent nannies with strong references and drivers for demanding schedules sit at the top of the band and sometimes above it; provincial rates run lower. On top of salary, the customary structure includes a thirteenth-month bonus at year end, Songkran and New Year gratuities, meals and accommodation for live-in staff, and annual leave aligned with Thai holidays. Offering slightly above the going rate for proven quality is the cheapest good decision available in Thailand; the marginal cost is small and the retention effect is large.

Interviewing and the trial period

Interviews for household roles reward concreteness over conversation. Walk the candidate through the actual house and the actual week: which floors, which meals, which school runs, which evenings. Ask how they handled specific situations in previous households, a broken valuable, a sick child, a principal's last-minute dinner for ten, and listen for answers drawn from experience rather than theory. Language should be tested against the real requirement, which for most roles is practical comprehension rather than fluency. Then let the trial period do its work: a paid week or two in the house reveals punctuality, initiative and fit in a way no interview can, and ending an unsuccessful trial is easy and expected, where ending a rushed permanent hire is neither. Staff are also interviewing you; the best candidates weigh the household's tone and stability as carefully as the salary, and a family that runs a respectful, organised trial is quietly advertising itself as an employer worth staying with.

Contracts and your duties as employer

Employ properly from the first day. That means a simple written contract in Thai and English covering duties, salary, hours, leave, confidentiality and notice; registration with the Social Security Office and monthly contributions, a modest capped amount that buys the employee healthcare and benefits and buys you regularity; awareness that Thai labour protection law applies to domestic work, including severance obligations that accrue with service; and clean monthly payment records, ideally by bank transfer. For migrant staff, confirm the work permit or registration is valid and tied to your employment. None of this is onerous, and all of it is covered step by step in our household payroll briefing; the families who skip it save trivial sums and acquire real exposure, because an aggrieved ex-employee with no contract and no social security record has a straightforward claim and the sympathy of every tribunal.

Confidentiality deserves explicit treatment in wealthy households. Staff see everything: visitors, documents, conversations, valuables. A confidentiality clause sets the expectation, but the real protections are vetting, fair treatment and retention; long-serving staff who are well treated are the discreet ones.

Building the team

A typical full household for a family runs a housekeeper, a nanny, a driver and often a cook, assembled over the first two or three months rather than in one hiring week. Hire the housekeeper first; a good one becomes your recruiting partner for the rest. Stagger trial periods so you are never assessing everyone at once, write down the house rules early, from phone use to guest protocols, and review salaries annually without being asked. Households run this way keep staff for five and ten years, and a stable, loyal household is precisely the quiet infrastructure that makes life in Thailand feel effortless. It is also, not incidentally, the part of a relocation families later say mattered most.

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.