Thailand’s blanket 60-day visa exemption is over. The Royal Gazette published a set of Ministry of Interior notifications on 31 August 2026 that replace it with a 30-day tourism-only exemption for a shorter list of countries, following a Cabinet resolution on 14 July 2026, according to the government’s own summary of that Cabinet meeting. The new rules take effect 15 September 2026 — 15 days after Gazette publication, as the notifications themselves specify and as the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s newsroom confirms.
For Phuket, the rule change lands on foreign owners and long-term renters who used the old 60-day exemption, sometimes repeated, in place of a proper long-stay visa: the stay they get per exempt entry is now half as long, so they must switch to a visa category built for longer stays or split their time across more entries. It does not touch ownership, transfer fees, or rental income.
What changed
The exemption that is being replaced allowed passport holders from 93 countries and territories to enter Thailand without a visa and stay up to 60 days; it had been in force since 15 July 2024. Under the new notifications, reported in the Thai government’s own release:
- 59 countries and territories — including all 27 EU member states — get a 30-day exemption for tourism purposes only.
- 2 countries (Mauritius and Seychelles) get a 15-day exemption.
- 3 countries (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Serbia) lose blanket exemption and move to visa-on-arrival.
The Tourism Authority of Thailand’s release and independent Thai and English coverage report 60 countries and territories in the 30-day tier, one more than the breakdown in the government’s own cabinet summary; this article follows the government breakdown and has not reconciled the one-country difference.
A separate change applies to land-border crossings: a visa-exempt entry through a land checkpoint is capped at twice per calendar year, with named exceptions for passport holders of Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Singapore, and for any other nationality the Interior Minister designates. Entries by air or sea carry no such count limit — only the shorter stay applies. Separate bilateral visa-waiver agreements, which grant 90, 30 or 14 days depending on the agreement, continue to apply where a traveller’s nationality has one, according to the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s release; a reader whose country relies on such an agreement rather than the unilateral exemption should check which arrangement now governs their entry.
Confirmed figures and source dates
The Cabinet resolution behind the change is dated 14 July 2026. The Royal Gazette publication date is 31 August 2026. The Tourism Authority of Thailand’s own newsroom, in a release dated 1 September 2026, confirms the 15 September 2026 effective date and the same three-tier structure; its own count for the 30-day tier is 60, one more than the government breakdown this article follows. Thai-language coverage (Thairath, among others) independently corroborates the dates; a flash alert from the immigration and tax advisory firm KPMG, written while the notifications were still pending publication, corroborates the tiered structure.
KPMG’s alert also notes that travellers who enter Thailand before 15 September under the current 60-day terms keep those terms for that stay; the 30-day rule applies to entries from the effective date onward.
Who is affected
Nationals of the countries losing the 60-day allowance — most of Thailand’s major source markets for property buyers and long-stay visitors, including EU countries — are the ones who feel this directly. A visitor on a two-week holiday is unaffected either way. The rule change lands on people who stay longer: owners who fly in for an extended stretch at their own property, and renters and remote workers who used a single long visa-exempt stay, or repeated ones, instead of applying for a category built for longer stays.
The stated government rationale, per the Cabinet summary, is to balance economic stimulus, traveller convenience, international relations and national security; other reporting frames it as closing overlapping entry options so that each nationality has one clear entitlement rather than several.
What it may mean for Phuket property
The source material makes no claim about Phuket specifically. Foreign owners who relied on a single 60-day visa-exempt entry to spend an extended season at their villa or condo will now need to either split that time across more entries or apply for a visa category built for longer stays — the Destination Thailand Visa, the Long-Term Resident visa, or a retirement visa, depending on their circumstances. The same applies to renters occupying Houseviser-listed units on a mid-term basis under the old exemption rather than a proper visa.
None of this touches a completed sale, an asking price, or an asking rent. It is a constraint on how a subset of owners and tenants can legally use the time they already have, and property managers who let to this segment have a shorter default visa-free stay to plan around from 15 September.
What remains unknown
The notifications’ full country list — which nationalities keep 30 days, which get 15, and which lost blanket exemption entirely relative to the old 93-country list — has not been checked here against every one of the 93 previously covered countries; readers whose nationality is not named in this article should confirm their own status against the government’s list before travelling. Whether Phuket immigration offices will offer any extension mechanism for the new 30-day exemption, as they did for the old 60-day one, has not been announced.
Related guides and data
For an owner or long-stay renter rethinking how to hold time in Thailand, the guides below cover the visa categories built for exactly this — from the Destination Thailand Visa to the Long-Term Resident and retirement routes — plus what the old exemption actually allowed.
