TM30 Thailand: Who Files the Report and When.

What TM30 Thailand reporting is

TM30 Thailand reporting is the notice an immigration office receives when a foreign national moves into somewhere to sleep. The duty sits with whoever controls the accommodation, not with the foreigner staying there. The Immigration Bureau's TM30 portal sets the rule out under section 38 of the 1979 Immigration Act: house owners, heads of household, landlords and managers of hotels who accommodate a foreign national on a temporary basis, staying in the kingdom legally, have to notify the local immigration authorities within 24 hours of that person's arrival.

The name comes from the paperwork. TM.30 is the printed form, and the online system built to replace most of the paper is still called TM30.

None of this is new law. The Bangkok Post reported in August 2019 that the announcement of 28 March 2019, the one that caused so much confusion among foreign residents, was an enforcement push on an existing regulation rather than a new rule. What changed was reach: a requirement registered hotels had followed for years began to be applied to condominiums, apartments and private houses.

Who has to file the TM30, and who does not

Section 38 names four categories: house owners, heads of household, landlords, and managers of hotels. Samut Prakan Immigration's page on notification of residence describes how that works in practice. The notification is made by the manager of a hotel licensed under the Hotel Act, and by owners of guesthouses, mansions, apartments and rented houses, using form TM.30.

The foreigner is not on the list. A guest in a hotel files nothing, because the hotel files. A tenant in a condominium depends on the owner or the managing agent. A foreigner who owns the home they live in is a possessor of that residence, one of the categories the form title names. Head of household means the person registered as head of that address in the house registration record, who may not be the legal owner.

Whether a tenant may file in place of an absent landlord is genuinely unsettled. The Bureau's online system is built around the person who controls the property, and no official page states either that a tenant may file for an owner who will not, or that they may not. Offices take their own view.

The visa the foreigner holds mostly makes no difference. Someone who meets the Thailand retirement visa requirements is reported the same way as a two week tourist, and so is anyone on one of the long term visa options in Thailand. The one carve out sits in the words of section 38, which reach a foreign national accommodated on a temporary basis. A permanent resident holding a Certificate of Residence is not staying temporarily, and the Bangkok Post explainer above states that permanent residents are not reported.

The 24 hour deadline and how it is counted

The clock starts when the foreigner arrives at the address, not when they clear immigration at the border. That matters for anyone entering overland in the evening who reaches their accommodation the following morning. The 2019 Bangkok Post explainer reads the rule that way, noting that reporting can run from arrival at the accommodation even where that falls more than 24 hours after the border crossing.

The form keeps the two dates apart on purpose. Samut Prakan Immigration's instructions state that the arrival date means the date of arrival in Thailand, while the date of accommodation goes on the front page of the notification sheet. Putting one where the other belongs is a common reason a form comes back across the counter.

Weekends and public holidays are the obvious friction, since immigration counters close. Filing online sidesteps counter hours.

Where to file: the four official channels

Notification goes to the immigration office with jurisdiction over the property. Where the province or locality has no immigration office, it goes to the local police station. In Bangkok it goes to the Immigration Bureau. Samut Prakan Immigration lists four permitted ways to make it inside the 24 hours.

Anything outside those four is not an official channel.

The TM.30 form: where to download it and how to fill it in

The official form sits on Bangkok Immigration's form download page as item 14, under its legal title: notification form for house-master, owner or the possessor of the residence where alien has stayed.

It downloads as a Word .doc file, not a PDF. That catches people out, because familiar forms on the same download list, the TM.7 extension application and the TM.47 ninety day notification directly below it, are PDFs. The list carries no PDF version of the TM.30, and search results promising one lead to third-party copies of unknown vintage.

Samut Prakan Immigration's instructions for completing it are specific:

• Copy every field from the foreign national's passport rather than from the arrival card, because arriving passengers often enter the wrong data on the card.
• Type the form, or handwrite it in clear block letters.
• Leave a space between first name, middle name and surname.
• Where a letter appears before or after the passport number, include the letter.
• Enter the arrival date as the date of arrival in Thailand, and put the date of accommodation on the front page.

One instruction there has aged. The form asks for the arrival card number, the TM.6, which used to be stapled into the passport. Since 1 May 2025 the Thailand Digital Arrival Card has replaced that paper embarkation card, as the Royal Thai Consulate-General in New York announced, so recent arrivals hold a digital confirmation instead of a card to copy from. How that submission works is set out in the Thailand Digital Arrival Card guide.

Once the officer has checked the sheet, they accept the notification and hand back the lower part of the form. That slip has to be kept for later checking.

Filing the TM30 online, step by step

The Immigration Bureau runs the online system for owners of establishments, hotels, guesthouses, mansions, apartments and rental houses. A single account can notify stays at more than one address, which is why building managers and companies housing foreign staff use it rather than the counter.

Register. The account is created once and produces a user code. Anyone who used the previous system has to register again on the current one, because old credentials do not carry across.

Add the address. Address records need host information, address details and supporting documents, and they do not go live immediately. The portal recognises four states, and a record marked Pending is one an immigration officer is still reviewing. Only an Approved address can receive notifications.

Notify the stay. The portal's notification guide lists nine pieces of information: address, check-in date, check-out date, passport number, the foreigner's names, nationality, gender, date of birth and telephone number. Entering the check-out date makes the system calculate the length of stay.

One foreigner at a time goes through the online form. Several at once go through an Excel file in the Bureau's template, downloaded from the system, which suits a hotel checking in a group. A file that does not match the template is rejected and has to be imported again once corrected.

After a notification is saved the record can be searched, and a printed copy can be exported to hand to an immigration officer. Exporting straight away is worth the minute it takes, for a reason covered below.

What the TM30 costs

Immigration publishes no fee for the notification itself. The fee schedule provincial offices reproduce comes from ministerial order 27 of 2003, issued under the 1979 Immigration Act, and runs from residence certificates through re-entry permits to the 1,900 baht extension of stay. Samut Prakan Immigration's fee list carries no line for a notification of residence, and neither does the TM30 portal.

Free of charge and free of cost are different things, though.

• Registered mail carries postage, paid by the sender.
• An agent or a law firm charges a commercial fee for handling the filing. Those fees are not published officially and vary by provider.
• A late filing attracts a fine, which is a penalty rather than a fee.

When the report has to be made again

This is the question readers ask most often and the one official sources answer least clearly. The clearest statement on an immigration office site is a single line in Samut Prakan Immigration's frequently asked questions: homeowners must inform Immigration within 24 hours when a foreigner stays at their house, this is done using form TM30, and it only needs to be done the first time. That is one office's published position.

No national Immigration Bureau page in English sets out when a fresh TM30 falls due after a trip abroad, a change of address or a new tenant. The online system is built around individual stays rather than a one-off registration: every notification carries a check-in and a check-out date, and where a check-out date is entered wrongly the fix is to submit the information again, with the officer treating the latest entry as the live one.

Offices differ as a result. Some treat one filing per address as sufficient, in line with the Samut Prakan wording. Others expect a new notification after each re-entry. A lawyer or an agent who works with a particular office regularly can check what it expects, which is worth doing before an extension application depends on the answer.

Fines and what happens when nobody files

The Immigration Bureau's English TM30 pages set out the duty and say nothing about the penalty. The figures in circulation come from individual immigration offices, and they do not all agree.

Samut Prakan Immigration states in its FAQ that homeowners face a fine of not exceeding 2,000 baht, while hotel managers could be fined 4,000 to 8,000 baht. Other sources reproduce wider ranges for hotels. Treating any one figure as the settled national penalty overstates what the official pages say: homeowner exposure is capped low, hotel exposure is higher, and the amount depends on the office. Enforcement varies too, with some offices assessing a fine at the counter when a late filing is presented and others accepting it and moving on.

The second consequence tends to cost more. A missing TM30 usually surfaces when the foreigner next deals with immigration, and the documents an office asks to see are set locally. No national page lists the notification of residence as a condition of an extension of stay, so this is a question to put to the responsible office rather than assume, and it is one reason people look for visa extension help in Thailand earlier than they expected to.

Where TM30 filings go wrong

The Immigration Bureau's own TM30 support answers read as a catalogue of the failure points, most of them avoidable, and the Samut Prakan form instructions add two more.

• The address is still Pending. A new address sits under officer review before it can be used, and the Bureau's answer is to contact the local immigration office where it was submitted.
• The record has aged out. Notifications can only be searched within 7 days of the check-in date. After that the record cannot be retrieved, so the exported copy is the only proof left.
• The account is from the old system. Users of the previous system have to register again on the current one.
• Data was copied from the arrival card. Samut Prakan's instruction to work from the passport exists because arrival cards are often filled in incorrectly.
• The passport number lost its letter. The same instructions put a prefix or suffix letter in the field with the digits.
• The village number field contains letters. The system accepts numbers only there and rejects the record with an invalid data message.
• The sub-district is missing from the list. That one needs the Bureau helpdesk to add it before the address can be saved.

How the TM30 fits with the 90 day report and the TM.28

Three forms are routinely mixed up, and they carry three different duties.

The 90 day report is the one most often confused with the TM30, and the two share little beyond the words notification of residence. The TM.47 is the foreigner's own obligation, and the 90 day report in Thailand covers it in full. Bangkok Immigration's 90 days notification page allows filing in person, through an authorised person, by registered mail through Thailand Post or online, and states that a late notification is made in person with a 2,000 baht fine collected. It also says plainly that notifying residence beyond 90 days is not a visa extension, and that leaving Thailand restarts the day count from the date of re-entry. The returned lower part of the TM.47 has to be kept, exactly as with the TM.30.

When a lawyer or visa agent is worth it

Most TM30 filings need nobody. A hotel does it as routine, and an owner with an approved address already in the system files in a few minutes.

The cases where professional help earns its fee look different: an owner abroad or unwilling to file, a building manager who has never registered, unfiled reports found a week before an extension appointment, or a company housing foreign staff across several addresses.

Immigration lawyers in Thailand deal with the office rather than the portal, which is what a stuck address record or a disputed fine calls for. Firms offering visa and immigration services in Thailand often bundle the residence notification with the work it attaches to, and Thailand visa application support usually includes confirming it is in place before anything is filed. A business owner working through a work permit for a company owner meets the TM30 as one line on a longer compliance list.

Landlords have their own reason to pay attention. The duty is theirs by statute, and one who will not file leaves a tenant with no clean way to fix the problem, which sits alongside the deposit and condition questions covered in what a landlord owes a tenant on a Thai rental.