Thai income tax 2026: what a 1 baht deduction actually saves you

The question people actually ask about tax is not "what are the brackets" but "if I put 100,000 THB into a fund or a policy, what do I get back?" — and the answer is not the same for everyone. Someone on 30,000 THB a month and someone on 100,000 THB a month can buy the identical deduction and save amounts that differ by more than ten times.

This article answers both: how the calculation really works, the full tax year 2569 deduction checklist, and a table that says plainly how many baht each deducted baht returns at your salary. If you would rather not do the arithmetic, put your own numbers into our personal income tax calculator.

Which tax year? This article covers tax year 2569 — income earned between 1 January and 31 December 2026, filed in early 2570. Figures as of September 2026.

How Thai income tax works — only three steps

Photo: Unknown — CC CC0 (rawpixel)

Most people find tax frightening because they assume it is complicated. There are only three steps, and the one people get wrong is the second.

1. Add up the year's income — salary, bonus, commission, freelance fees, rent, interest.
2. Subtract expenses, then subtract allowances — these are two different things. Expenses are deducted automatically according to the income category; allowances are entitlements you must actually qualify for.
3. Run what is left through the progressive brackets.

For a salaried employee (category 40(1)), step two means deducting 50% of income capped at 100,000 THB, then the 60,000 THB personal allowance, then social security as actually paid.

Tax brackets for tax year 2569

The rates have not changed for several years, and the crucial point is that each rate applies only to the slice above that threshold — not to the whole amount. This is the single most common misunderstanding about Thai tax.

If your net income is 400,000 THB you do not pay 10% of 400,000 (40,000 THB). You pay nothing on the first 150,000, 7,500 THB on the 150,001–300,000 band, and 10,000 THB on the remaining 100,000 — 17,500 THB in total, less than half the figure people fear.

The real threshold: you start paying tax at 320,500 THB a year

The familiar "the first 150,000 THB is exempt" refers to net income, not salary, which is why so many people believe they owe tax when they do not.

Work backwards. A salaried employee using only the automatic deductions can always subtract:

• expenses of 50%, capped at 100,000 THB
• the personal allowance of 60,000 THB
• social security of up to 10,500 THB

That is 170,500 THB. So net income first touches 150,000 THB when gross income reaches 150,000 + 170,500 = 320,500 THB, or about 26,700 THB a month.

⚠️ Owing no tax is not the same as not having to file. The filing threshold and the tax threshold are different rules. A single person with salary income above 120,000 THB a year must file, even if the calculation comes to zero — and filing is the only way to get back tax that was withheld at source during the year.

What one baht of deduction is actually worth

This is the part most tax articles skip, and it is the part that can genuinely make the decision for you.

Your saving equals the deduction multiplied by your top marginal rate — not the deduction itself. Anyone who believes that buying 100,000 THB of RMF means getting 100,000 THB back is heading for a disappointment.

The table below was produced with the same calculator engine this site runs, assuming salary income only, the automatic deductions, and then a further 100,000 THB of deduction added (RMF, life insurance or Thai ESG all behave identically here).

Three things follow from this table, and each one changes a decision.

1. Below roughly 26,700 THB a month, buying deductions returns zero. There is no tax to reduce in the first place. If someone is selling you insurance or a fund "to save tax" at this salary, the tax argument simply does not apply — buy it only if the product itself is worth having. That money is far better spent building an emergency fund first.

2. Between 30,000 and 40,000 THB a month the tax return is thin. Committing 100,000 THB to save 1,975–5,475 THB means locking up a large sum for years (RMF until age 55, Thai ESG for five years) for a one-off tax return of 2–5% — not 2–5% per year.

3. The higher your bracket, the more a deduction is worth. At 250,000 THB a month you get 30 THB back for every 100 THB deducted, an instant 30% discount. This is why tax planning is meaningfully more rewarding for high earners than for middle earners.

Note the odd figures at 40,000 and 100,000 THB — savings of 5,475 and 21,475 rather than round numbers. At those salaries a 100,000 THB deduction straddles two bands (10% and 5%, or 25% and 20%), so the first baht deducted is worth more than the last.

The full tax year 2569 deduction checklist

Photo: Unknown — CC0 (rawpixel)

Deductions fall into four groups. The first is free with your circumstances; the rest you have to buy.

Group 1: yourself and your family (nothing to pay)

These are the free entitlements people most often forget, especially the parent allowance. Each parent is worth 30,000 THB, which in the 20% band is 6,000 THB of tax gone for no outlay at all. The conditions: the parent must be 60 or over, have annual income under 30,000 THB, and only one child may claim a given parent — siblings have to agree who takes it.

Group 2: insurance

⚠️ The trap here is that health insurance does not have its own separate 25,000 THB ceiling — it sits under the same 100,000 THB combined cap as life insurance. If your life policies already fill 100,000 THB, additional health cover deducts nothing at all. For choosing cover, see our health insurance guide.

Parents' health insurance, on the other hand, does have its own 15,000 THB ceiling, and it applies even if the parent earns more than 30,000 THB — a different test from the parent allowance in group 1.

Group 3: retirement investments

This is the most valuable detail in the table. The 500,000 THB ceiling is shared across every retirement vehicle. If your employer's provident fund already takes 200,000 THB, you have room for only 300,000 THB of RMF — not 500,000.

Thai ESG sits outside that ceiling, which makes it the one deduction that genuinely adds headroom for anyone already at 500,000, and it only requires a five-year hold rather than waiting until age 55. From 2569, new money into Thai ESGX shares the Thai ESG allowance. For a comparison of both, see our SSF and RMF guide, and for employer schemes the provident fund guide.

⚠️ SSF is no longer deductible. Tax year 2567 was the last year for the SSF deduction; new purchases from 2568 onwards cannot be claimed. Units already bought can still be held under the original terms.

Group 4: property, donations and annual measures

• Home loan interest, as paid, up to 100,000 THB — interest only, not principal, and on a ceiling separate from everything above. For joint-borrower rules and current lending criteria see our home loan guide.
• Rooftop solar on your own home, up to 200,000 THB — a new measure, covered in the next section.
• General donations, as paid, up to 10% of income after allowances.
• Donations to education, sport, state hospitals and the Equitable Education Fund deduct at twice the amount given, still within the 10% ceiling.
• Political party donations, up to 10,000 THB.
• Social enterprise investment, up to 100,000 THB.

⚠️ From 1 January 2569 donations must go through the e-Donation system. Paper receipts are no longer accepted for deduction, so scan the e-Donation QR code when you donate at a temple or foundation — otherwise the entire claim is lost.

Three things that changed for tax year 2569

Photo: User:Diliff — CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

1. Social security deduction rises to 10,500 THB from 9,000

The Royal Gazette raised the wage ceiling used to calculate social security contributions from 15,000 to 17,500 THB a month, effective 1 January 2569. The maximum contribution is therefore 875 THB a month, or 10,500 THB a year, all of it deductible.

The practical effect is small but positive: the extra 1,500 THB of deduction saves roughly 75 THB in the 5% band and 375 THB in the 25% band, against 1,500 THB more paid in contributions. On tax alone that is a loss — but several social security benefits are calculated from the same wage base and rise with it.

2. There is no Easy E-Receipt — and here is what that costs

Tax year 2568 had Easy E-Receipt 2.0, which allowed up to 50,000 THB of deduction on purchases carrying an e-Tax Invoice — 30,000 THB general plus 20,000 THB for OTOP and community enterprise goods — between 16 January and 28 February 2568.

For tax year 2569 there is no such measure. It requires a fresh cabinet resolution every year, and a caretaker government cannot approve measures that reduce state tax revenue.

What that absence is worth depends on your bracket:

If a new government revives it, expect an announcement early in the year with a very short buying window — previous rounds ran about six weeks — so watch the Revenue Department in January.

3. Rooftop solar is deductible up to 200,000 THB

A measure enacted on 2 March 2569 lets individuals deduct the equipment and installation cost of a rooftop solar system on their own home, as actually paid, up to 200,000 THB.

The main conditions:

• system size no larger than 10 kW
• the property must be your own residence on a type 1 electricity meter
• claimable once only, in the tax year the grid connection is completed
• available from 3 March 2569 to 31 December 2571

This is the largest deduction an ordinary household can reach outside retirement funds, and it has its own ceiling. Someone on 100,000 THB a month claiming the full 200,000 saves roughly 40,000–50,000 THB in tax, which moves the payback point of the system considerably. Work out whether it pays for you in our rooftop solar article.

⚠️ Our tax calculator does not yet have a dedicated field for the solar deduction, because the measure only took effect mid-year. Work that part out separately using the method in the section above.

Three worked examples

Example 1: salaried, 50,000 THB a month, no special deductions

Example 2: the same person, planning properly

Say they buy 100,000 THB of life insurance and 100,000 THB of RMF, and support two parents for another 60,000 THB — 260,000 THB of extra deduction. Net income falls to 169,500 THB and the tax bill to 975 THB.

That is 19,475 THB saved against 200,000 THB actually spent, since the parent allowance is free — a return of 9.7% on the money committed. And those 200,000 THB are locked into a policy and a fund: not money lost, but not money you can reach either.

Example 3: freelance or trading, 600,000 THB of income

Category 40(8) income — trading, manufacturing, general services — can deduct 60% as a flat rate with no cap, or actual costs if you keep full records. That is very different from an employee capped at 100,000 THB.

• 60% expenses = 360,000 THB, leaving 240,000
• less the 60,000 THB personal allowance, leaving net income of 180,000 THB
• tax = (180,000 − 150,000) × 5% = 1,500 THB

The same gross income as example 1, but almost fourteen times less tax, purely because the expense structure differs. This is why anyone with several income streams should classify each one correctly rather than lumping them together.

Mistakes people make when planning tax

Buying deductions while owing no tax is the number one trap. Check the table in the third section: below about 26,700 THB a month, deductions return nothing.

Assuming the ceilings add up. Life insurance at 100,000 plus health at 25,000 does not give 125,000 THB of deduction — the combined cap is 100,000. The same applies to RMF plus provident fund plus annuity, which share 500,000.

Forgetting the provident fund your employer already deducts. That money has already used part of the 500,000 THB ceiling. Plenty of people buy RMF on top and go over, where the excess is not deductible and breaches the fund's own conditions.

Waiting until December. Fund prices are not lower at year end, and buying through the year gives a better average cost. If that appeals, read about DCA investing.

Donating without the e-Donation QR code. From 1 January 2569 paper receipts do not work, and the whole claim is lost.

Siblings both claiming the same parent. Only one child may claim a given parent; duplicate claims are recovered with penalties.

Not filing because no tax is due. If tax was withheld during the year, not filing means making the state a gift of it.

When and how to file

Income for tax year 2569 — 1 January to 31 December 2026 — is filed in early 2570.

• Paper filing at your area revenue office, until 31 March 2570
• Online filing through the Revenue Department's e-Filing system, until around 8 April 2570; the deadline is usually extended for online filers, so check the published dates

The forms are PND.91 for salary-only filers and PND.90 for anyone with other income categories.

Documents to have ready: the withholding tax certificate (form 50 tawi) from your employer, insurance premium certificates, RMF and Thai ESG purchase certificates, the bank's mortgage interest statement, and your e-Donation records.

Summary

The most useful thing to take from this article is not every ceiling, but your own top marginal rate — the one number that tells you what each deducted baht returns.

• In the 0% band, stop buying deductions for tax reasons; they return nothing.
• In the 5–10% bands, exhaust the free entitlements first — parents, children, social security — before considering funds.
• In the 20% band and above, planning genuinely pays. The 500,000 THB retirement ceiling and the separate 300,000 THB Thai ESG allowance are the two biggest levers.
• New for 2569: 200,000 THB of rooftop solar. Gone for 2569: Easy E-Receipt.

Put your own figures into our personal income tax calculator, which applies tax year 2569 rules including the combined ceilings and each item's conditions.

Sources

• Revenue Department — personal income tax rates and allowances
• Revenue Department — Easy E-Receipt 2.0 Q&A
• Prudential — 2569 tax deduction checklist
• Bangkok Bank — tax-deductible mutual funds: RMF / Thai ESG / Thai ESGX
• TISCO Asset Management — SSF's final year and what happens to units already bought
• FlowAccount — the new 2569 social security ceiling and what employees pay
• KKP Advice Center — what to know before installing solar for the tax deduction
• Sanook Money — is there an Easy E-Receipt for 2569?

Every tax figure in this article was computed with tetono.com's own tax engine under tax year 2569 rules, on the assumptions stated with each table. Figures as of September 2026. Tax law changes — check with the Revenue Department before acting.