What the New 30-Day Thailand Visa Exemption Means for Your Trip
By Sandra Romano
Sep 15, 2026
If you fly into Thailand on a UK, US, Canadian or Australian passport on or after 15 September 2026, your visa-free stay is 30 days. Before that date it was 60.
The 60-day scheme ran from July 2024, and a lot of people booked their winter trips expecting it to still be there. It’s gone. Thailand’s Cabinet approved a new tiered system in July 2026 and published it in the Royal Gazette on 31 August. It took effect on 15 September, just as the November to February high season is being booked.
This shouldn’t put you off Thailand. It does change the math for a long backpacking loop, or for a slow multi-country route that uses Thailand as its base. Below is what changed and what we’d actually do about it.
The short version
The land border cap and the TDAC step are the two rules most likely to catch you out here, not the headline stay-length number itself.
Stay length. 30 days visa-free for about 60 countries and territories, down from 60 days. Tourism only.
Start date. It applies to entries on or after 15 September 2026. If you arrived on or before 14 September, you keep 60 days for that entry.
Extension. You can extend once inside Thailand, by up to 30 days, at the officer’s discretion.
Land borders. Visa-exempt entries over land are now capped at two per calendar year. Air and sea arrivals don’t count toward the cap.
TDAC. The Thailand Digital Arrival Card is still mandatory for everyone, and it’s a separate step from all of the above.
Who does the new rule apply to?
Does your passport fall under it? If it’s from the US, UK, Canada, Australia or most of the EU (France and Germany included), yes. The same goes for Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. That group of about 60 countries and territories now gets 30 days, for tourism purposes only. The old exemption allowed some short-term professional and business activities. The new one doesn’t, so a work trip doesn’t qualify under this exemption anymore.
The other tiers moved as well, and some of them moved a lot. Under the reworked Thailand visa exemption system, Seychelles and Mauritius passport holders have their own 15-day category. They used to be grouped with the larger cohort. Visa on Arrival dropped from 31 eligible nationalities to three (Azerbaijan, Belarus and Serbia), with a 15-day stay and a 2,000 baht fee.
Then there are 21 nationalities, among them Albania, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Morocco and Uruguay, who now need a visa arranged before they travel. You can apply for the e-Visa online. If you’re in this group, we’d deal with the visa before booking anything else, because you no longer have an exemption or on-arrival option to fall back on.
If you entered before 15 September
Anyone who entered Thailand on or before 14 September 2026 keeps the full 60 days for that entry, even if the stay runs past 15 September. The 30-day allowance only applies to entries from 15 September onward.
What counts is the date you came in. If you’re already in Thailand on an old 60-day entry, we’d think twice before a quick trip out and back. The new entry would get 30 days.
The one-time extension
We wouldn’t build a trip around the extension.
On paper it’s simple. You can extend the 30-day exemption once, by up to 30 more days, at an immigration office inside Thailand. You fill in form TM.7 and pay 1,900 baht. That brings the most you can stay under the exemption to 60 days. Under the old scheme you could reach 90.
The problem is how it’s granted. The extension is given “at the officer’s discretion, not as a right,” so it isn’t guaranteed. Say you arrive, love it and decide in week three that you want more time. The extension is a perfectly reasonable thing to try. But if you already know when you book that you want six or seven weeks, relying on it means betting the second half of your trip on one visit to an immigration office.
If you know you want more than 30 days, get a proper tourist visa before you leave. It’s the reliable option, and it’s what we’d do.
Land border crossings now have a limit
Visa-exempt entries at a land border are now limited to two per calendar year per traveler. The limit covers both the 30-day and 15-day categories. Air and sea arrivals don’t count toward it.
Nationals of Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Singapore are exempt and can cross by land as often as they like. Thailand’s Interior Minister can add more countries to that exempt list.
This is the change most likely to catch out people who used to stretch a long stay with repeated border runs. Two land entries a year works out to about two months of visa-exempt time by land across the whole year. For anything longer you need a formal visa category, such as a tourist visa or the DTV. We always thought the border run was a shaky plan, and now there’s a hard limit on it.
An overland loop to the best places to visit in Laos still works fine. Count your crossings before you book the buses, because every time you come back into Thailand by land, you use one of your two.
Guided tip: If one leg of a multi-country trip can be a flight instead of a bus, fly back into Thailand. Air arrivals don’t use up either of your two land entries.
TDAC hasn’t gone anywhere
Did the September update change the arrival card? No. The Thailand Digital Arrival Card wasn’t part of this change, and it’s still mandatory for every non-Thai national entering the country, whatever their visa status. That includes visa-exempt travelers, visa on arrival travelers and full visa holders. Crew don’t need one, and neither do transit passengers who don’t clear immigration.
You submit it online in the three days (72 hours) before you arrive, and the arrival date counts as part of that window. You can’t do it after you land. After a visa overhaul this big, it’s easy to assume the card got folded into something else. It didn’t, and it regularly trips up first-time visitors. We’d treat it as its own fixed pre-flight task, separate from anything to do with the exemption change, since conflating the two is exactly how people miss it.
Guided tip: Set a reminder for two days before your flight. That’s inside the window and leaves you a spare day if something goes wrong with the form.
Planning a longer high-season trip
For any trip over 30 days, the tourist visa is clearly the better plan.
November to February is Thailand’s cool, dry season. It’s also when many travelers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Europe book. If you planned a longer trip around the old 60 days, here’s how we’d rethink it.
If you know before you leave that you want more than 30 days in Thailand, apply for a tourist visa before you fly. That way you aren’t depending on the discretionary extension or on land crossings.
If you’re staying 30 days or less, the exemption covers you. Treat the extension as a backup in case you want to stay longer once you’re there, and don’t count on getting it.
If Thailand is the base for a bigger Southeast Asia trip, plan each stretch in Thailand as its own entry of 30 days or less, and note which ones start at a land border. If Vietnam is on the route, check the best time to visit Vietnam before you decide the order of the legs.
Entry rules are changing in other places too. If Europe comes next, our explainer on Europe’s new Entry/Exit System covers what’s different there.
Planning the thing
The new rule gives you a few more dates to keep track of. Your entry date starts the 30-day clock, and the TDAC window opens three days before you land. If you’re working out a long high-season route through Thailand and beyond, map it out in the Guided trip planner app before you book the flights.
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