If you are weighing a long stay in Thailand, the Long-Term Resident (LTR) visa is the one most people misread — because its headline number is years, not days. Thailand’s short-stay visas (tourist, the single-entry Non-Immigrant B, the education visa) all grant an initial permission to stay measured in weeks or a few months, and travellers reasonably assume every Thai visa works that way. The LTR does not: it is a 10-year residence visa, administered by the Board of Investment (BOI), aimed at high-income professionals, remote workers, retirees and investors. We re-verified its terms on 2026-06-21 against the BOI’s official LTR portal. Here is what it actually grants and who qualifies.
A 10-year visa, issued 5 years at a time
- The LTR is a 10-year framework. In practice the visa is issued with an initial five-year permission to stay; before that expires your qualifications are re-verified and the visa is renewed for a second five years.
- It grants unlimited multiple re-entry — you can leave and return as often as you like during the authorized period, without separate re-entry permits.
- It comes with a digital work permit (for the working categories) and personal income-tax privileges, and replaces the recurring 90-day in-person reporting with lighter annual reporting.
- Endorsement of your qualifications by the BOI typically takes around 20 working days, after which the visa is issued.
So “how long can I stay on an LTR?” is answered in years, not days. That is the exact point travellers get wrong when they carry over the 90-day figure from a tourist or Non-B stamp.
The four categories — and the thresholds
The LTR is not one visa but four target groups, each with its own financial test:
- Wealthy Global Citizens — substantial assets plus an investment in Thai government bonds, property or direct investment.
- Wealthy Pensioners — retirees aged 50+ with passive income of at least USD 80,000/year (or USD 40,000/year plus a USD 250,000 investment in Thai assets).
- Work-from-Thailand Professionals — remote workers employed by an established company abroad, with the personal-income threshold (around USD 80,000/year over the past two years) and an employer that meets the revenue/public-company criteria.
- Highly-Skilled Professionals — experts working in targeted industries for businesses or institutions in Thailand.
All applicants must also hold health insurance with at least USD 50,000 of coverage, or be enrolled in Thai social security, or maintain a USD 100,000 deposit. The income for the passive-income categories has to be genuinely passive and sustained across the required two-year look-back — a point that trips up otherwise-eligible applicants.
Why applications get refused
Because the LTR is criteria-driven rather than discretionary, refusals usually come down to a threshold not being met or a document not being verifiable. The most common, which we list in full on the visa page:
- The category’s income, asset or investment threshold is not met (or the income is not passive / not sustained over two years).
- The health-insurance or financial-security condition is missing — no USD 50,000 policy, no Thai social security, no USD 100,000 deposit.
- For the working categories, the employer does not meet the revenue or public-company criteria, or qualifications cannot be verified.
- Supporting documents are incomplete or inconsistent, so the BOI endorsement is not granted.
For the verified stay, the category criteria, the document checklist and the full refusal-reason list, see the Thailand LTR visa page and switch it to your nationality. If a decade is more than you need, compare it with the retirement O-A visa (one year, renewable, age 50+) or the Non-Immigrant B business visa.
How we keep this honest
This post accompanies a data correction: our LTR page had been showing a 90-day maximum stay — a machine default carried over from Thailand’s short-stay visas — for what is in fact a 10-year visa. We corrected the stay to its real five-year permission (within the 10-year framework), set the multiple-entry flag, recorded the source and date, and added the verified refusal reasons, all on 2026-06-21, as part of a fresh verification of Thailand’s inbound visa programs against official Thai portals. Our full method is in the Editorial & Data Standards.