Inheritance Tax in Thailand: Thresholds, Rates and Filing.

How inheritance tax in Thailand works

Inheritance tax in Thailand falls on the person who receives an inheritance rather than on the estate itself. It applies only at the top of the range: each recipient is taxed on what they receive from one deceased person above 100 million baht, after deducting the debts that come with the inheritance, whether it arrives all at once or in stages. Below that line nothing is owed and nothing is filed.

The Revenue Department states the trigger on its page defining the tax: the charge arises when the deceased dies and the heir receives, and it is measured per recipient per estate. Four instruments govern it. The Civil and Commercial Code, Book 6, Sections 1599 to 1755, decides who inherits. The Inheritance Tax Act B.E. 2558 creates the tax. The Revenue Code Amendment Act (No. 40) B.E. 2558 handles lifetime gifts. A Royal Decree of B.E. 2559 sets the rules for paying by instalments. English texts of the Act, the Royal Decree and the ministerial regulations sit on the department's English inheritance tax page.

An estate passes either to statutory heirs (descendants, parents, full siblings, half siblings, grandparents, uncles and aunts, in the order the Code sets) or to the people named in a will. Heirs take the debts with the assets, and their liability for those debts is capped at the value of what they received.

Who pays inheritance tax in Thailand, and on which assets

Three things decide scope: who the recipient is, what residence they hold, and where the assets sit.

A juristic person counts as Thai if it is registered in Thailand, or established under Thai law, or more than 50 percent of its paid up registered capital is held by Thai nationals at the moment the right to the inheritance arises, or more than half of the people with authority to manage it are Thai nationals. The Revenue Department sets all of this out on its page on who is liable.

Residence in the Kingdom is narrower than it sounds. It means a permanent residence permit granted under the immigration law, not a long stay visa and not an annual extension of stay. The Immigration Bureau opens applications for it once a year under a Ministry of Interior notification, with a quota of 100 people per nationality and 50 for stateless applicants. Someone who has lived in Thailand for twenty years on retirement extensions does not hold it unless they applied and were granted it, and that single distinction decides whether their assets abroad are inside the Thai net.

Five classes of asset are taxable, and the list is closed:

• Immovable property.
• Securities under the law on securities and the stock exchange.
• Deposits or similar money held in Thailand that the deceased had the right to withdraw or claim from a financial institution or from whoever held it.
• Vehicles with a registration record.
• Financial assets added later by Royal Decree.

Anything outside those classes does not enter the calculation. The same page on taxable assets sets the valuation rules, and they carry more weight than people expect: Thai immovable property at the official appraised value used for registration fees under the Land Code, less any encumbrance; shares listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand at the closing price on the day the inheritance is received; unlisted shares at book value for the accounting period before ownership passed; a registered car or motorcycle at the average of the highest and lowest official appraisal used for stamp duty on a transfer; and foreign currency at the Bank of Thailand's average buying rate.

Rates, the 100 million baht threshold and a worked example

An ascendant is a parent, grandparent or great grandparent. A descendant is a child, grandchild or great grandchild. Everyone else, including a sibling, a niece and a friend named in a will, pays at the higher rate.

The calculation runs in one order, set out on the department's rates and calculation page: total value received, less the debts inherited with it, less the exempt 100 million baht, with the rate applied to what is left. A worked example, for an only child inheriting from a parent:

The 100 million baht sits with each recipient, not with the estate. Three children each receiving 90 million baht from the same parent are all below the line, and none of them files. The same 270 million baht going to one child produces a taxable 170 million baht.

The exemptions the Revenue Department publishes are narrow. Its exemption page lists inheritance the deceased intended for religious, educational or public benefit use, state agencies and juristic persons with those purposes, and people or international organisations covered by Thailand's obligations to the United Nations, by international law, by treaty or by reciprocity. That page says nothing about a surviving spouse because the spouse sits outside the tax altogether. Section 3(2) of the Act states that the Act does not apply to an inheritance received from a deceased person by that person's spouse, so a widow or widower inheriting the whole estate has no inheritance tax to pay on it, whatever it is worth.

Filing form Phor.Mor.60 within 150 days

Form Phor.Mor.60 is the inheritance tax return. It is printed from the Revenue Department's website, and the return and the payment are both due within 150 days of receiving the inheritance that creates the liability, at any area revenue branch office or at another place the Director-General designates. The department's filing and payment page carries the rule.

The clock runs from receipt, not from the death. An estate that takes a year to distribute pushes the deadline out with it, so the date the assets actually change hands is the one to record.

Three variations matter:

• Where the person liable dies before the deadline without having filed, the estate administrator files and pays within 150 days of being appointed.
• Where no administrator is appointed within 180 days, the heirs entitled to the estate file within 150 days of that 180-day period ending.
• Where there are several heirs, they agree on one of them to be the taxpayer. If they cannot agree, any heir can petition the court to appoint an estate administrator.

That petition is a court matter rather than a tax matter, and the paperwork is local to the court. At the Bangkok South Civil Court, the published documents for an estate administrator petition are the death certificate and house registration of the deceased, the petitioner's identity papers, a family tree schedule, consent letters from the other heirs, and evidence of the estate assets: title deeds, vehicle registration records, share certificates, bonds and updated bank passbooks. That court states a court fee of 200 baht and runs an estate management centre that takes petitions in person. Other courts publish their own lists, so the court where the petition will be filed is the one to check. Lawyers who handle probate in Thailand do this work routinely.

Paying inheritance tax in instalments

An heir who cannot pay in one go applies for instalments in the same filing, at the same office, inside the same deadline.

The application states the number of years, which cannot exceed five, the number of instalments a year (monthly, quarterly, half yearly or yearly), an equal amount each time, and the security offered. Security must be unencumbered and worth at least the tax due: a bank guarantee from a domestic financial institution, land or buildings or a condominium unit mortgaged to the Revenue Department, or government bonds pledged to it. It has to be in place within 30 days, and the right to pay by instalments ends if it is not.

The right is fragile after that too. Missing a single instalment ends it and makes the whole outstanding balance payable at once with the surcharge. And instalments are refused from the start where the taxable value of the inheritance turns out to have been understated by more than 25 percent, or where items were left off the return or declared falsely. The instalment page sets out both.

Penalties, surcharges and criminal exposure

Penalties come from Sections 18 and 29 of the Inheritance Tax Act, which the Revenue Department restates across two of its summary pages. The doubled penalty that appears on the filing and payment page is the one to read carefully: it belongs to a case involving an estate administrator, and it is not the figure an ordinary heir who files late is facing.

An heir who simply files late sits in the first row: one times the tax. Section 30 lets the Director-General reduce or waive a penalty under published rules that weigh the filer's good faith and the necessity behind the delay, which is the ground a tax lawyer in Thailand argues before a late return goes in.

On top of any penalty sits a surcharge of 1.50 percent per month, or part of a month, of the tax due. It runs from the day the filing deadline passes until the tax is paid in full, and it is capped at the amount of the tax itself.

Then there is a criminal layer, from the department's penalty provisions page:

Where the offender is a company, the managing director, manager or representative carries the penalty, on the basis that they took part in the offence. The last row of that table reaches advisers as well as heirs.

Gift tax and lifetime transfers

The obvious answer to a 100 million baht threshold is to give the money away first. The Revenue Code taxes that too, as personal income tax rather than under the Inheritance Tax Act.

Those thresholds are in Sections 42(26) to 42(28) of the Revenue Code, with the 5 percent election in Sections 48(4/1), 48(6) and 48(7). The 5 percent is a choice: the recipient can instead add the excess to ordinary income and pay at the progressive rates. Where immovable property is transferred without payment, Section 50(6) treats the transferor as the payer of the income and requires them to withhold, at 5 percent of the excess above 20 million baht on a transfer to a legitimate child.

The practical difference is timing. Gift tax runs on the tax year and arrives with the recipient's income tax return. Inheritance tax runs on a 150-day clock from receipt and pays no attention to the calendar year.

What inheritance tax does not cover

Three things sit next to this tax and are regularly mistaken for it.

Getting the estate into the heirs' names. That is a Civil and Commercial Code process with its own documents, its own court appointment and its own cost, and it happens whether or not any tax is due. It is the work estate planning and probate lawyers in Thailand do.

What a foreign heir may keep. Whether a foreigner can hold inherited land or a condominium unit is a Land Code question rather than a tax question, and the answer differs by asset. What a foreign heir can actually keep covers it, and reading a Thai title deed explains the document that answer turns on.

Transferring and selling. Registering the transfer carries its own charges, set out in transfer fees at the Land Office. A later sale is personal income tax rather than inheritance tax: Section 48(4)(a) of the Revenue Code lets a seller of immovable property acquired by inheritance deduct expenses at 50 percent of the income, divided across the years the property was held, with the total under that method capped at 20 percent of the sale price. Selling inherited property as a foreigner covers the rest.

How much inheritance tax Thailand actually collects

The threshold is high enough that very few estates reach it, and the published collection figures show it.

Those figures were reported by the Bangkok Post in February 2025, citing the Revenue Department and a Finance Ministry source. The same report notes that the department held a public hearing in September 2024 on evaluating the law. Everything above describes the rules as they currently stand rather than a settled position.

When an estate needs a tax adviser or a probate lawyer

Most estates in Thailand never touch this tax, because most estates do not put 100 million baht into any single pair of hands. The ones that do tend to share a feature: a valuation that is arguable rather than obvious, heirs in more than one country, or a deadline that started running before anyone realised a return was due.

A tax consultant in Thailand can value the estate and prepare Phor.Mor.60. Inheritance lawyers in Thailand deal with entitlement and with the split between heirs, which is a different question from what the tax comes to. Where an estate sits close to the threshold, the valuation rules decide whether there is a filing at all, and they are the part of this tax that is hardest to settle from the published guidance alone.