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Changes To Thai Retirement Visa Insurance Requirements?
Transcript of the above video:
As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Retirement Visas and the insurance requirements associated therewith. To be clear, we are talking specifically about the O-A Retirement Visa, we are not talking about the O Retirement Visa. As we have discussed in other videos, the O Retirement Visa, which is the most commonly extended type of Retirement Visa here in the Kingdom, that type of visa extension does not necessarily need insurance at all. Meanwhile, the O-A, which is applied for at Embassies and Consulates outside of the Kingdom, and can be extended here in the Kingdom, they do have an insurance requirement and it seems that insurance requirement has changed.
I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is: Thailand's new visas: call for questions. Quoting directly: "The minimum health insurance cover requirement will be reduced from 3 million to 400,000 Baht (effective sometime later this year)”. There's some vagueness associated with this; this is kind of one of those things that they seem to keep talking about but we have yet to see it sort of fully implemented. Again I will be keeping track of this and making videos on this in the coming days and weeks, but long story short it does look like they are reducing the insurance requirement associated with the Retirement Visa.
As we discussed in prior videos, they bumped it way, way up. As I recall it went into effect, I believe it was October of '21, I may be wrong on that but I believe it was October ’21, they really kicked up the insurance requirement at that time. They went to 3 million and then they said you can either have a policy or just money in the bank which can cover that amount. Now it looks like they have lowered that back down to this 400,000 which that's a number for those who have kept track of this over the years, that's the number that was first associated with insurance coverage associated with the Retirement Visa here in Thailand. So it looks like that they are returning to that number.
Again, it's a little vague as to whether and when this is going to take effect so we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as this situation evolves.