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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Permanent Residence in Thailand. I found an article recently that had a lot of information in it quite frankly; it is very useful. There was a recent article from the Bangkok Post bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Grimaces replace smiles for retirees. 

In this article they did basically a Q&A with Immigration Bureau Deputy Commander, Police Major General Achayon Kraithong and quoting directly, "How many foreigners are granted Permanent Residence each year? Is there a quota? Can you provide the number of this group for the past 5 years?" Quoting further, and as I said this was kind of in a Q&A so presumably this is the Deputy Commander answering this with information here. Quoting directly: "The Interior Ministry usually makes an announcement on applications for Permanent Residence from November-December every year. There is a quota --100 per nationality each year." Quoting further: "From 2017-2019, a total of 801 requests were submitted and 769 were granted. (253 out of 265 requests were granted in 2017; 261 out of 272 were granted in 2018; and 255 out of 265 requests were granted in 2019)." Quoting further: "In 2020, 286 requests were submitted and 163 have been granted. Another 118 requests are being processed, while five have been canceled. In 2021, 250 were submitted and the process of considering them is still underway." Yeah 2021 we are not going to see any major movement on that for a while yet. Yeah I thought that was interesting. 

So it seems like yearly about 250 total get filed, maybe a little over that. Probably I bet the average is about 260 a year, maybe 265 depending on the year, it maybe a little more than that, it may be a little less. The numbers being granted: 163, 255, 265, 261; not huge numbers when you look at Thailand compared to other countries. Now a lot of this may have to do with eligibility; there are a lot of folks that may not be eligible. I actually suspect that upcoming years are probably going to be very low numbers because quite frankly there have been so few people coming into Thailand and remaining in Thailand or they got stuck abroad and it created issues with respect to eligibility down the road. That kind of remains to be seen. It is something of speculation on my part but I do think it is interesting for those who are looking at applying for Permanent Residence in Thailand. Something to keep in mind just as a rule of thumb, it is better to start that application process in my opinion, about the first quarter of the year you want to get the application on file because there is a lot of preliminary stuff that goes into getting those applications put together; getting it on file is its own ordeal quite frankly. Then there is an entire process after the thing is filed to go ahead and start walking it through the bureaucracy. So, not a bad idea to start looking at Residence early and often.