Work Permit Cancellation in Thailand: What Happens to Your Non-B Visa.

The sequence, and where the clock starts

Work permit cancellation in Thailand is two filings, made to two different offices, and only one of them is yours to make. Your employer notifies the Department of Employment that you have left the job. You attend an immigration office and have your permission to stay closed off. Both hang off the same date: your last working day.

Immigration Division 1, which covers Bangkok, sets out the immigration half. When a foreigner is out of duty, permission to stay in the Kingdom is terminated immediately, and the notification is made on the date of termination of employment.

That is the ground rule for everything below. The permission you hold is attached to the job you were granted it for, so when the job ends, the reason for the permission ends with it, whatever date is printed in your passport.

Neither filing does the other's work. An employer who files its notification perfectly has not cancelled your permission to stay, and an out of duty stamp in your passport does not discharge the employer's duty.

Work permit cancellation in Thailand: what the employer files

Section 13 of the Emergency Decree on Managing the Work of Aliens (No. 2) B.E. 2561 puts the notification duty on the employer, in both directions. The Department of Employment states the rule directly: an employer must notify it of a new foreign hire's name, nationality and type of work within 15 days of hiring, and when that foreigner leaves the job must notify it within 15 days of the leaving date, stating the reason. Failing to notify carries a fine of not more than 20,000 baht, on the employer.

Where the worker was brought in through the MOU import route by a licensed recruitment company, the window shortens to 7 days and the notification goes to that company as well as to the Department.

The filing has moved online. When the Ministry of Labour launched the e-WorkPermit system in October 2025, employment notifications moved into the same portal as permit applications, and 5 of the Department's 54 service centres nationwide were designated entry and termination centres.

The word "reason" is worth pausing on. Section 13 asks the employer to record why the foreigner left, so a resignation, a dismissal and the end of a fixed term are not the same entry. Where severance or a contested dismissal is in play, the termination letter and the notification are documents a lawyer would read before they are filed. The money side of that is covered in what an employer owes a departing employee, and the duties behind it in employment and labor law in Thailand.

Cancelling your Non-B permission to stay

This is the step people miss, and it is the expensive one.

Immigration treats the end of your duties as the end of the reason you were permitted to stay, and Immigration Division 1 lists what the office needs:

• A letter to the Immigration Bureau notifying that the foreigner is out of duty, stating the date of leaving work clearly, signed by an authorised director of the company or limited partnership. Where no leaving date is given, the office treats the date the letter was issued as the leaving date.
• A copy of the company or limited partnership registration certificate, certified by the registrar within the last 6 months.
• A copy of the identity card or passport of the authorised director, with the signature certifying it a true copy.
• Your passport, so the officer can stamp it out of duty.

It goes to the office that granted your current permission to stay, not to whichever office is nearest. The BOI's One Start One Stop Investment Center records the Immigration Bureau's position that the foreigner has to cancel in person, so an HR team cannot close this out on your behalf.

The letter is the pressure point. It comes from the company, signed by a director whose authority appears on the company certificate. Where the employer has stopped answering, refuses to sign, or has ceased trading, no official page describes an alternative route, because the requirement is written around a company that cooperates. That is a situation for a lawyer rather than for a counter queue.

Dependents follow the main holder. Immigration Division 1 states that the termination applies to those who follow the alien as well, so a spouse and children holding permission based on yours lose theirs on the same day.

How long you can stay after cancellation

Search results are confident about this question. The official record is thinner than they suggest, and the two Thai government pages that speak to it are answering different questions. Neither promises a grace period.

Immigration Division 1 states that permission to stay is terminated immediately when the foreigner is out of duty, with no number of days attached anywhere. Read strictly, the day after your last working day is already overstay unless something further has been granted.

The Department of Employment's Singburi provincial office, answering what to do when changing employer, describes the counter differently. The foreigner contacts Immigration to cancel the previous workplace's visa and asks for a further 7 days of permission to stay in the Kingdom, on the express condition that no overstay fine has already been incurred. The 7 days are something you ask for. They are conditional, they appear in the context of moving to a new employer, and they are not stated as a national entitlement.

Put the two together and what the offices publish is an immediate end to the old permission, plus a short further period an officer may grant on application. Nobody quoting seven days as settled national law is reading it off a Thai government page. Planning around the strict reading costs nothing. Planning around the generous one costs 500 baht a day if it turns out to be wrong.

What each step costs

Government charges come from Ministerial Regulation No. 27 (B.E. 2546), issued under the Immigration Act B.E. 2522. The Immigration Bureau publishes the schedule in full.

Source: Immigration Bureau fee schedule. Checked August 2026.

Two gaps are worth naming rather than filling. No official page publishes a fee for the employer's notification that a foreigner has left the job, or for the cancellation of the work permit itself, and none confirms whether a physical permit book has to be handed back now that the record is held digitally.

Professional fees are the other half of the bill. Firms offering work permit services in Thailand set their own rates for a cancellation, an in-country change of employer or a change of visa type, and no government body publishes a benchmark.

Moving to a new employer without leaving Thailand

The Department of Employment publishes two routes, and they are not equally forgiving.

Staying in the country. Cancel the old workplace's permission at Immigration and ask for the further 7 days. File the new work permit application on Form TT.1, with the cancellation of the old permit, before the current permission expires. Take the application receipt back to Immigration to extend the stay, then bring the extended permission back to the officer holding the TT.1 so the new permit can be decided on the date printed on the receipt. The condition on the whole route is that no overstay fine has already been incurred.

Leaving and coming back. Depart Thailand, obtain a Non-Immigrant B visa for the new employer from a Thai embassy, re-enter, then file the TT.1. Slower and more expensive, and it survives contact with a missed deadline.

The in-country route also depends on the new employer being ready to file. A company that cannot yet support a permit cannot rescue your timing, and whether it can turns on its registered capital and Thai staffing, which is set out in how a work permit is issued through a Thai company. Once the new permission is granted, what follows is the ordinary annual renewal handled by visa extension in Thailand.

Changing visa type, or leaving

Not everyone moves to another job. Immigration Division 1 publishes a list of the visa categories it will issue or change to in country, running to 22 headings, among them retirement for the over-50s, support of or dependency on a Thai national, education, and investment of not less than 10 million baht.

What that page does not state is how much permission has to be left on your current stay before a change can be applied for. Threshold figures circulate widely. None appears on a Thai government page that can be read online, so this guide does not repeat one.

If retirement is the destination, the retirement visa route for over-50s covers the financial tests. The long-term visa options open to you sets out what else exists, and Thailand visa services handle the consular side where the answer is to leave and re-enter on a fresh visa.

Tax, social security and the loose ends that outlive the job

Leaving the job does not close your Thai tax year. The Revenue Department requires a personal income tax return and payment by the last day of March following the taxable year, and counts you as resident for tax where you were in Thailand for periods totalling more than 180 days in that calendar year, which decides whether foreign income brought into Thailand is taxable.

A tax clearance certificate is a smaller worry than its reputation. The Revenue Department explains the position: Section 4 quater of the Revenue Code requires a departing foreigner to apply within 15 days before leaving, but a Director-General's notification of 7 May 1991 removed that duty except in three cases. Those are liability for tax or tax arrears before departure, a duty to file and pay on behalf of a foreign company carrying on business in Thailand, and taxable income as a public performer. Most people leaving an ordinary job fall outside all three.

Social security cover can be continued, if it is done quickly. The Social Security Office allows a former Section 33 employee to insure voluntarily under Section 39 where they contributed for at least 12 months and left the job no more than 6 months ago, applying in person on Form SPS 1-20 inside that window. The contribution is 432 baht a month, calculated as 9 percent of a fixed 4,800 baht base, and it keeps six categories of benefit running. Whether a given office will register someone whose permission to stay has already ended is a question to put to that office.

Where cancellations go wrong

Overstay is the common failure, and it is mechanical rather than discretionary. Samut Prakan Immigration sets out the fine and the bans: 500 baht a day, capped at 20,000 baht, payable before you are allowed to leave, and a re-entry ban under the Ministry of Interior's Order 1/2558 that scales with the length of the overstay.

The ban runs from the departure date, so the clock only starts once you actually leave.

Working on after the permit is cancelled is the heavier failure. The Department of Employment restated the penalties in June 2024: under the Emergency Decree on Managing the Work of Aliens B.E. 2560 and its amendments, working without a permit or outside what the permit allows carries a fine of 5,000 to 50,000 baht, removal to your country of origin, and no new work permit until 2 years after the penalty has been served. Lower fines and prison terms still circulate on pages reciting an older version of the law. The full penalty ladder, employer tiers included, is set out in the digital work permit in Thailand.

A third failure is quieter. A re-entry permit preserves a permission to stay that is still alive, so where the permission has already been terminated, there is nothing left for it to preserve.

Where a lawyer actually helps

Most cancellations need nobody. A cooperative employer signs the letter, you attend the right office on your last working day, and the file closes.

The cases that need help are specific.

The employer will not sign. Immigration requires a letter from an authorised director, and no published route exists without one. An immigration lawyer in Thailand can approach the company formally and, where it has closed or the directors have gone, put the position to the office directly rather than leave you at the counter with nothing to hand over.

The dismissal is disputed. The immigration filing and the severance argument run on separate clocks, and the first does not wait for the second. Handling them together avoids winning one and losing the other.

You are already out of status. A single day of overstay closes the in-country change of employer route, which is expressly conditional on no overstay fine having been incurred. What remains depends on how many days have passed and what the office accepts, which needs someone who can look at the passport.

The permission was revoked rather than ended. An appeal under Section 36 exists and carries its own fee of 1,900 baht per person. Whether it is worth bringing turns on the ground the office relied on, which is a question to put to a lawyer before the fee is paid.

The next step is a different visa entirely. Retirement, marriage, study and investment each carry their own evidence, and the live question is whether the change can be applied for before the current permission runs out.

A lawyer can check what your office currently accepts, how many days you actually have, and whether the route you are counting on is still open. None of that is knowable from a general guide.