What is the LTR Work From Thailand Professional visa?
A ten-year Thai visa issued in two five-year blocks, for people employed remotely by a large foreign company. You can stay as little or as long as you like within the issuance period, and you can bring a spouse and children under 20. It is a family-friendly programme.
Applicants tend to fall into two camps. The full-career remote professional, usually 30 to 50, employed by a large global company in a role that is fully remote by design or left over from the pandemic.
And the semi-retiree, usually 50 to 60, two or three decades at the same company, in a director or senior manager role where relationships are half the job. Not ready to retire, but ready to do the last few years from somewhere warmer.
Why does your employer decide whether you qualify?
This is the biggest filter, and where most otherwise-qualified applicants are cut. The Board of Investment requires your employer to be listed on a public stock exchange, or to have at least USD 50 million in cumulative revenue across the past three years, or to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of one that is.
No other employer counts. Consider a sales director working remotely for a privately held telehealth company with USD 18 million of revenue in 2025, 12 million in 2024 and 9 million in 2023. That is 39 million cumulative — short of the threshold, and the company is not listed.
The application is refused, and the refusal has nothing to do with the applicant, who may qualify in every other respect. The employer is simply not big enough for this category.
Someone at a publicly listed employer clears the test the moment they upload a stock ticker screenshot. Check your employer before you check anything else.
What income do you need, and over what period?
Either a two-year average of at least USD 80,000 a year, or a two-year average between USD 40,000 and 79,999 plus one additional qualification. Both the word average and the two-year window matter: a strong recent year does not rescue a weak one on its own.
Earn 75,000 in 2024 and 95,000 in 2025 and your average is 85,000, which clears the threshold. Earn 60,000 and 85,000 and your average is 72,500, which does not.
The additional qualifications under the second option are a master's degree or higher, ownership of qualifying intellectual property such as a patent or trademark, or evidence of having raised at least USD 1 million in a Series A round.
In practice it is almost always the master's degree.
What documentation trips applicants up?
Two documents, and both must be right. The employment contract has to be directly between you and the qualifying employer — not through your own consulting company, not through an Employer of Record, not as a contractor or freelancer, and not through a subsidiary that is not wholly owned.
The contract must clearly state your position, your income and your start date.
The employment letter is the trickier one. Most applicants have good relationships with their managers, so they ask for confirmation and get a friendly email covering the points. They screenshot it and submit it. That does not work.
It must be a formal letter on company letterhead, signed by authorised personnel, dated within the past two months, stating your position, your start date, explicit permission to work remotely from Thailand, and explicit confirmation that you will not conduct business activities or provide services on behalf of the employer inside Thailand.
That last point is the one most often missed. It is the sentence separating a remote worker who happens to live in Thailand, which this visa allows, from someone doing local Thai business, which it does not. Without it the letter is incomplete however well formatted the rest is.