Household payroll: your obligations as an employer

The employer you already are

Thai labour protection law reaches domestic employment. Domestic workers are entitled to at least one day off per week, paid sick leave, traditional holidays and annual leave, timely payment of wages, and protection from unlawful deduction; and the severance provisions of the labour law apply when employment ends without cause. Some provisions differ in detail for household work compared with commercial employment, but the safe and honourable operating assumption is that the core of the labour law applies to your household, because in every respect that matters in a dispute, it does. The obligations divide into four practical files: social security, severance, the customary payments that function as obligations, and work permits where staff are not Thai.

Social security registration

Employers are required to register employees with the Social Security Office and remit monthly contributions, employer and employee shares together, each calculated as a small percentage of wages up to a salary cap, so the combined monthly cost is capped at a modest few hundred baht per share. In exchange the employee receives state healthcare, sickness, maternity, disability and pension coverage, which for Thai staff is a meaningful benefit, not a formality. Registration is done at the Social Security Office with your identification and the employee's, and monthly remittance can be delegated to any small accounting firm for a trivial fee. Enforcement against households has historically been light, which is precisely why compliance distinguishes serious employers; and in any dispute, an unregistered employment is the first fact raised against you. Register within the first month of hiring, keep the receipts, and the file runs itself.

Severance: the accruing liability

Severance is the obligation wealthy households most often discover late. Under the labour law, an employee dismissed without serious cause is entitled to severance pay scaled by length of service, on a ladder that begins after 120 days of employment and rises with the years, reaching a maximum measured in hundreds of days of wages for service beyond twenty years. Resignation forfeits severance; dismissal for genuinely serious cause, properly documented, can too; but ordinary endings, including a family leaving Thailand, are severance events. Two disciplines follow. First, treat severance as an accruing liability, roughly one month's wage per year of service as a mental model, and fund it notionally so a decade of loyal service does not present as a surprise invoice on departure. Second, document performance issues contemporaneously if they exist, because severance disputes are decided on paper, and households rarely have any.

The 13th month and other customs

Alongside the legal obligations sits a layer of custom with near-obligatory force. The thirteenth-month payment, a full extra month's salary at the December year end, is the standard of the quality household market; it is not legally mandated for domestic staff, but omitting it marks an employer as either uninformed or ungenerous, and staff plan their years around it. Songkran and New Year gratuities, meals and accommodation for live-in staff, and contributions toward significant family events in an employee's life, weddings, funerals, a child's school fees, are the softer conventions of good households. Budget the customary layer as roughly one to one and a half additional months per year and pay it without being asked; in a market that runs on referral and reputation, as our staffing briefing describes, the households known to honour the customs recruit and retain the best people at surprisingly little premium.

Foreign staff and work permits

Employing non-Thai staff moves you into immigration law. Migrant workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, who make up a large share of the domestic workforce, must hold valid status under the migrant-worker registration schemes, with the employment registered to you; employing an undocumented worker exposes the employer to meaningful fines and the worker to worse, and the schemes' windows and renewals shift year to year, so the file needs an owner. Staff of other nationalities, a Filipino nanny being the common case, require a non-immigrant visa and a work permit tied to the employing household, a process with real documentary weight that is routine when run properly and impossible to regularise retroactively when not. If an agency supplied the worker, verify the papers yourself rather than accepting assurance; the employment sits with your household, and so does the liability.

Never hold an employee's passport or identity documents, whatever is suggested as customary. Beyond being wrong in itself, document retention is treated as an indicator of forced labour and converts a payroll file into something far more serious.

Keeping it clean

The whole apparatus reduces to a one-page monthly routine: written contracts in both languages, salaries paid by bank transfer on a fixed date, social security remitted, an overtime and bonus ledger kept to the baht, leave tracked, and copies of permits and registrations in one folder with their renewal dates diarised. An accounting firm will run the mechanics for a few thousand baht a month, and for our families we administer the entire file, contracts, registrations, permits, payroll and the severance accrual, as part of running the household. The return on cleanliness is asymmetric: it costs a few hours to establish, and it means that the only staffing disputes that ever become genuinely expensive, the ones built on missing papers and cash payments no one recorded, are structurally unavailable in your household. Employers who are generous by custom and precise by paperwork have, in our experience, no staffing disputes at all.

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.