Land and Building Tax in Thailand: What Foreign Owners Need to Know

Thailand’s land and building tax is an annual tax charged on land and buildings, calculated on the government appraised value and collected by the local authority in whose area the property sits. It replaced the old house-and-land and local-development taxes, and it applies to a foreign-owned Bangkok condominium exactly as it applies to a Thai-owned one.

It is also, judging by what circulates online, one of the most misreported taxes in Thailand. The confusion is structural: the Act sets rate ceilings, a Royal Decree sets the rates actually charged, and two ministerial notifications decide which category your property falls into. Quote a ceiling as though it were a rate and you overstate a bill by a factor of fifteen. This guide separates those layers and gives the figures in force for the 2026 tax year.

• What the Land and Building Tax Is, and When It Began
• The 2026 Rates, Band by Band
• What a Foreign Condo Owner Actually Pays
• Deadlines, Penalties, and the 2026 Extension
• The Bangkok Agricultural-Rate Proposal, and What It Does Not Change
• Renting Out Your Condo: The Rule That Actually Matters
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What the Land and Building Tax Is, and When It Began

The Land and Building Tax Act B.E. 2562 came into force on 13 March 2019, but collection under it did not begin until 1 January 2020. Both dates are correct for different things, which is why sources appear to disagree: the statute was in force from March 2019, while the first tax year assessed under it was 2020. If you bought before 2020 and remember paying nothing, that is why.

The tax is annual and it attaches to whoever owns or possesses the property on 1 January of the tax year. Sell in February and you remain the person assessed for that year. There is no filing obligation on the owner in the way income tax works: the local authority values the property, issues an assessment, and you pay against it.

Which authority matters more than most guides admit. This is a local tax. For a Bangkok condominium it is administered by the district office covering the building; elsewhere it is the municipality or the sub-district administrative organisation. The Revenue Department, which handles income tax, withholding tax and specific business tax on property transactions, has no role in it. If you are looking for this bill in a Revenue Department portal you will not find it.

The tax base is the government appraised value of the land and buildings, set by the Treasury Department, not the price you paid and not a market valuation. The appraisal round in force for 2026 runs from 2023 to 2026. It is worth resisting the widely repeated claim that appraised values sit far below market: that gap is real and large for prime land, but valuation specialists report that for ordinary condominium units the appraised and transacted figures are fairly close — which means condo owners get less benefit from the gap than large landowners do. Do not assume a discount; work from the actual assessment. Note that this tax is entirely separate from the transaction taxes you meet when buying or selling, which we cover in all the taxes involved with property transactions in Thailand.

The 2026 Rates, Band by Band

Here is the distinction that most of the confusion comes from. Section 37 of the Act sets maximum rates: 0.15 percent for agricultural use, 0.3 percent for residential, and 1.2 percent for other uses. Nobody pays those. They are ceilings that cap what a local authority may charge. The rates actually charged are set by Royal Decree, and the decree in force was issued on 13 December 2021 and applies from the 2022 tax year onward with no expiry date. It has not been amended since.

Agricultural use, individual owners. The first 50 million baht of appraised value is exempt. Above that: 0.01 percent from 50 to 125 million, 0.03 percent from 125 to 150 million, 0.05 percent from 150 to 550 million, 0.07 percent from 550 million to 1.05 billion, and 0.10 percent above 1.05 billion.

Residential, principal home, where you own both the land and the building and your name is in the household registration. The first 50 million baht is exempt, then 0.03 percent from 50 to 75 million, 0.05 percent from 75 to 100 million, and 0.10 percent above 100 million.

Residential, principal home, where you own only the building. The exempt slice is 10 million baht, then 0.02 percent from 10 to 50 million, rising through the same 0.03, 0.05 and 0.10 percent bands.

Residential that is not your registered principal home — a second property, an investment unit, a condo you let out. There is no exempt slice. The rate is 0.02 percent from the first baht up to 50 million, then 0.03 percent to 75 million, 0.05 percent to 100 million, and 0.10 percent above that. This is the schedule most foreign condo owners are assessed under, and 0.02 percent is the number to remember.

Commercial and other uses. 0.30 percent up to 50 million, 0.40 percent to 200 million, 0.50 percent to 1 billion, 0.60 percent to 5 billion, and 0.70 percent above that.

Vacant or unused land starts at the same 0.30 percent as commercial use, and if the land is left unused for more than three consecutive years the rate rises by a further 0.30 percentage points every three years, up to a maximum of 3 percent. Starting from 0.30 percent, that ceiling is about three decades of continuous vacancy away, so treat 3 percent as a long-run deterrent rather than a near-term risk. Land genuinely under preparation or construction, or restricted by law or litigation, is not treated as vacant.

One more thing worth knowing, because it explains why your bill may have jumped: the tax was reduced by 90 percent of the computed amount for the 2020 and 2021 tax years, charged in full in 2022, reduced by 15 percent for 2023, and charged in full again from 2024 onward. No reduction is in force for 2026 — so if your bill looks like it multiplied since 2021, it did.

What a Foreign Condo Owner Actually Pays

Nothing in the Act distinguishes foreign owners from Thai ones. A foreigner holding a unit in their own name within a building’s 49 percent foreign quota is assessed on the same schedule at the same rates. If you are still working out how that ownership is structured, see buying a condo in Bangkok as a foreigner.

The one place nationality bites indirectly is the principal-residence exemption — and there is a detail here that most English-language guides get wrong. The Act grants two different tiers: 50 million baht where a natural person owns both the land and the building, and 10 million baht where they own the building only. A condominium unit is a building without land — you hold the unit and an undivided share of the common property, not a plot. So the tier that applies to a condo is 10 million baht, not 50 million. Wherever you see 50 million quoted for a condominium, the writer has reached for the wrong paragraph.

Either tier also requires your name to appear in the household registration for that address on 1 January of the tax year. Most foreign residents cannot be entered in the standard Thai household registration book and are instead recorded in the separate register kept for non-Thai residents. Whether that second register satisfies the condition is genuinely unsettled: the Act and its implementing notification are silent on the type of book and say nothing about nationality, no Thai ruling or major law firm commits either way, and in practice it is decided by the district office from register data. We are not going to pretend otherwise in a blog post. If a unit is your home in Thailand and is appraised above 10 million baht, ask your district office and get the answer in writing.

For a unit that is not your registered home the question does not arise at all: there is no exemption, and 0.02 percent applies from the first baht. That is the position most foreign investors are in. In practice, that means:

A condo with an appraised value of 8 million baht, held as an investment: 8,000,000 at 0.02 percent, or 1,600 baht for the year. At 12 million baht: 2,400 baht. At 25 million: 5,000 baht. These are annual figures, and for the great majority of Bangkok units the bill lands in the low thousands of baht — closer to a month of common-area fees than to a tax that changes an investment case.

Larger holdings move into the upper bands. A unit appraised at 60 million baht pays 0.02 percent on the first 50 million (10,000 baht) plus 0.03 percent on the remaining 10 million (3,000 baht), giving 13,000 baht for the year. The bands are marginal, so only the slice above each threshold is charged at the higher rate — a point several published guides get wrong by applying one rate to the whole value.

Deadlines, Penalties, and the 2026 Extension

The Act requires the local authority to notify the assessment by February and the tax to be paid within April. In practice the deadline has been extended by ministerial announcement in every year since the tax began — as far as August for 2020, and to June or July in most years since. For 2026 an announcement gazetted in December 2025 moved it to June, and a further extension to July was announced in April 2026, while Bangkok’s own published notice states June. That divergence is exactly the point: the binding date is whichever your local authority has announced, so confirm it with your district office rather than trusting any national figure, including this one. Instalments are available where the assessment is at least 3,000 baht.

Late payment attracts two distinct charges, and conflating them produces the wildly varying figures you will see quoted. The penalty is 40 percent of the unpaid tax, reduced to 20 percent if you pay within the period stated in the warning notice, and to 10 percent if you pay before that notice is issued at all. Separately, a surcharge of 1 percent per month accrues on the unpaid tax, with any fraction of a month counted as a whole month. If you were granted a payment extension the surcharge is 0.5 percent per month.

Two features of the surcharge are worth knowing because they cap the downside. It is calculated on the tax alone, with the penalty excluded from the base, so it does not compound against the penalty. And it cannot exceed the amount of the tax itself. So on a 10,000-baht bill left unpaid for a year after a warning notice, the exposure is 4,000 baht of penalty plus 1,200 baht of surcharge — 15,200 baht in total, not the compounding spiral sometimes described. Paying before any notice arrives reduces the penalty to 1,000 baht.

The assessment is served on the owner of record, and being abroad does not extinguish the liability. If you do not live in the unit, arrange for someone to check the mail at the property or nominate an address the district office can reach, because the first you hear of a problem is otherwise a notice with a penalty already attached.

The Bangkok Agricultural-Rate Proposal, and What It Does Not Change

In late July 2026 Thai media reported that Bangkok officials were preparing to raise the city’s agricultural land tax rates. The reporting is accurate; the way it has been summarised elsewhere is not, so it is worth being precise about what exists.

What exists is a draft. Reports from 24 July 2026 describe officials drafting revised rates to submit to Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt, after which any change would need to pass the Bangkok Metropolitan Council as a local ordinance. As of the end of July 2026 nothing has been submitted, voted on or enacted, and no rate has changed anywhere in Thailand.

The legal mechanism is the interesting part, and it is the ceiling-versus-rate distinction again. Section 37 lets a local authority charge more than the Royal Decree rate, by local ordinance, provided it stays under the statutory ceiling. Bangkok’s agricultural ceiling is 0.15 percent and the decree rate is 0.01 to 0.10 percent, so there is room. The reported proposal adds 0.02 percentage points across the bands, taking them to roughly 0.03 to 0.12 percent — in the terms Thai reporting used, from about 100 baht per million of value to about 300 baht per million.

The target is a well-known piece of tax planning: owners of very valuable central-Bangkok plots plant a token crop so the land is classified agricultural rather than vacant, moving it from 0.30 percent to near-nothing. Bananas, limes and coconuts are the usual choices. The central government already tightened this once, by setting minimum planting densities that land must meet to count as agricultural — 200 banana plants per rai, 50 lime trees per rai, 20 coconut or mango trees per rai. Those densities have not changed since 2020; a 2025 amendment to the notification altered only eucalyptus and rubber. Bangkok’s proposal is a different lever on the same problem: rather than redefine agricultural use, raise what agricultural use costs.

A separate and much harder proposal is also in circulation — cutting the 50-million-baht agricultural exemption to 20 million. That cannot be done by local ordinance; it would require amending the Act, which means the Cabinet and Parliament. Treat it as a policy discussion, not a plan. It is also worth noting that Bangkok tried something similar in 2022, proposing to move plantation land from 0.1 to 0.15 percent, and no rate change resulted.

For a condominium owner, none of this applies. The proposal concerns agricultural land. It does not touch residential rates, it does not touch condominium units, and it is not in force.

Renting Out Your Condo: The Rule That Actually Matters

A claim doing the rounds is that letting your condo pushes it into the commercial category at 0.30 percent, fifteen times the residential 0.02 percent. The arithmetic is right and the conclusion is mostly wrong, and the difference is worth several thousand baht a year.

The Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Interior notification on residential use, issued on 30 January 2020, excludes from the residential category any land or building providing temporary paid accommodation to travellers — and then expressly carves out lettings charged on a monthly or longer basis, and homestays. So the trigger is not whether you rent, it is the letting period. A condo on a conventional monthly or annual lease remains residential and is taxed at 0.02 percent on the non-principal schedule. A unit turned over nightly, or run as a licensed hotel, falls into other-use at 0.30 percent. That is where the fifteen-fold figure comes from: it is a comparison between two categories that have existed since 2020, not a proposed increase, and it is not connected to the Bangkok agricultural story.

This is a genuine cliff edge rather than a sliding scale, and it is the single most consequential tax decision a landlord makes. It is also a reason short-let strategies carry a cost that headline yield figures rarely include. For the practical side of letting a unit, see our guide to renting out a condo in Bangkok.

One related trap: holding a unit through a Thai company does not by itself move it into the other-use category. Use is determined by how the property is used, not by who owns it. What corporate ownership does cost you is the personal principal-residence exemption, which is available only to a natural person. That is a different mechanism with a different consequence, and structures marketed on tax grounds deserve the scrutiny we set out in Thailand’s nominee crackdown and foreign property ownership.

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