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Thailand Work Permits: Corporate Financial Requirements
Transcript of the above video:
In this video today, we're going to be discussing Thai work permits specifically the registered capital requirements with respect to Thai work permits. There's kind of confusion for people who don't understand what we're talking about.
Basically in Thailand, a company that wishes to hire a foreign national and obtain a work permit for that foreign national to work here in Thailand needs to adhere to certain regulatory requirements for registered capital or maintain certain other paid up tax requirements some things like this. So what are we talking about?
First off, let's just talk about straight, normal, single foreigner who is coming into Thailand and wishing to get a work permit. The company that wishes to hire that foreigner needs to have 2 million Baht in registered capital as a registered capital requirement. There are other requirements. For more information on Thai work permits, generally please check out the rest of this channel. There's a ton of stuff about Thai work permits.
But specifically for registered capital requirements or capitalization requirements, the foreign national needs to be represented by 2 million Baht in registered capital in order for a work permit application to be submitted. Now let's take that same foreigner and hypothetically change his situation to "He's now married to, or she for that matter, they are now married to a Thai national." Well under those circumstances, that individual now needs to be paired with 1 million Baht in registered capital in order to obtain a Thai work permit, again specific to the capitalization requirements.
Finally, a person who has Thai permanent residence so-called a Blue Book here in Thailand or record book, permanent residency here in the Kingdom, there is no capitalization requirement. So hire that individual, get that individual work permit, there is no registered capitalization requirement with respect to that individual.
There are some sort of less well-known, not exceptions but differentiations with respect to capitalization requirements or I should say, financial requirements, with respect to Thai work permits. So aside from pairing one off to 2 million, 1 million whatever within the registered company structure, there's also let's say if that doesn't apply in a given situation, a company here in Thailand can hire one foreigner if its total corporate income, taxes paid has been at least 5 million Baht for the previous three fiscal years. So over the course of the three previous years, if the enterprise in question has paid 5 million in about a year, then you can go ahead and do it. You go ahead apply for a work permit. I should say past three years.
So for every amount of paid 5 million Baht, the company can hire one foreigner. Again this is if registered capitalization requirements don't apply. If the enterprise in question has exported and brought into Thailand revenue of 3 million Baht or more in the prior fiscal year to the application year, then it may be possible for that enterprise to go ahead and hire a foreign national here in Thailand and obtain a work permit for them. For every 3 million Baht in additional revenue on that export company, another work permit can be added but it maxes out of three. There's a cap for that type of thing. This requirement seems to be created specifically for so-called export-only companies here in Thailand.
And then finally, if an enterprise has 50 Thai employees, just in general if there are just 50 employees sitting on the books of a given enterprise, then it's possible to hire a foreigner under those circumstances. Again, there's a cap - five foreigners in total. So one to every 50 with five being the max, 250 employees being the pair off.
So something to think about with respect to work permits. There are the generally accepted registered capitalization requirements and then there are these, I won't call them anomalous, but rather less often utilized capitalization or financial requirements which will allow for the application of a work permit on a given company here in Thailand.