Thailand Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

WHAT A PAYROLL ENGINE GETS WRONG IN THAILAND. 1. THE 15,000 BAHT CEILING AND THE 750 BAHT MAXIMUM ARE OBSOLETE AS OF 1 JANUARY 2026, AND THEY ARE THE MOST WIDELY-CACHED NUMBERS IN THAI PAYROLL. The ceiling had stood at 15,000 baht since 2002 — over two decades — so it is baked into essentially every Thai payroll reference, template and training course published before 2026. The Ministerial Regulation gazetted on 12 December 2025 raised it to 17,500 baht with effect from 1 January 2026, lifting the maximum monthly contribution from 750 to 875 baht on each side. Any engine carrying 15,000 is under-deducting 125 baht a month per employee and under-remitting the same again from the employer. 2. THE FUTURE STEPS ARE ALREADY LAW AND CAN BE MODELLED TODAY. The same Regulation sets a three-phase escalator: 17,500 baht (max 875) from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2028; 20,000 baht (max 1,000) from 1 January 2029 to 31 December 2031; 23,000 baht (max 1,150) from 1 January 2032. These are enacted, not proposed. Build them into the schedule now rather than treating each as a future surprise. 3. THE FLOOR DID NOT MOVE AND IS ROUTINELY FORGOTTEN. 1,650 baht a month, unchanged. An employee earning below that contributes as if on 1,650, so the minimum contribution is 82.50 baht each side. Thailand has both a floor and a ceiling, and the floor is far below the statutory minimum wage, so it bites only for part-time and irregular work — which is exactly where engines stop checking. 4. THE CEILING IS A CAP, NOT AN EXEMPTION. Above 17,500 baht the employee does not fall out of the scheme; the contribution simply freezes at 875 baht. Thai social security is therefore extremely regressive in effect at high incomes, and a high earner's deduction is a rounding error on their pay — which makes a missing or wrong cap hard to spot in aggregate payroll totals. 5. THERE IS A THIRD CONTRIBUTOR AND IT IS NOT THE EMPLOYER. The government contributes 2.75% of the same wage base alongside the employee's 5% and the employer's 5%. The fund receives 12.75%, but employer cost is 5%. Never add the government share to the employer figure; it is the reason Thai fund-level statistics and payroll-level figures do not reconcile. 6. THE 5% IS THREE BENEFIT ACCOUNTS, NOT ONE. 1.5% sickness, maternity, invalidity and death; 3% old-age pension and child allowance; 0.5% unemployment. Employee and employer contribute on the identical split. The composition matters because benefit entitlement is tested per account, and because rate changes in Thailand have historically been made to individual accounts rather than to the headline 5%. 7. THE WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION FUND IS A SEPARATE SCHEME WITH A SEPARATE CEILING AND IS USUALLY MISSING ENTIRELY. Employer-only, 0.2% to 1.0% of annual wages depending on business risk, capped at 240,000 baht per employee per YEAR. It is assessed annually on the Kor Tor 20 return rather than deducted monthly, so it never appears on a payslip and is easy to omit from cost-of-employment models. From the fifth year an experience-rating multiplier adjusts the employer's rate on its own claims record. 8. TWO CEILINGS, TWO PERIODS, TWO INSTRUMENTS. Social Security Fund: 17,500 baht per MONTH, set by Ministerial Regulation under the Social Security Act. Workmen's Compensation Fund: 240,000 baht per YEAR, set under the Workmen's Compensation Act. Their monthly equivalents are close (17,500 against 20,000), which makes them easy to conflate, but they cap different schemes on different cycles and move independently. 9. THE EMPLOYER MUST DEDUCT AT THE MOMENT OF PAYMENT. Section 47 requires the employee's share to be withheld when wages are paid; an employer that fails to deduct cannot recover later and bears the cost itself. Contributions are remitted to the Social Security Office by the 15th of the following month. 10. EMPLOYEE CONTRIBUTIONS ARE PRE-TAX. Social Security Fund contributions are deductible against Thai personal income tax, so PIT is computed on pay after the deduction. 11. FOREIGN EMPLOYEES ARE IN SCOPE. A foreign national working legally for a Thai employer under section 33 is a compulsory insured person on the same terms as a Thai national. There is no expatriate carve-out, though some employees seconded under a totalisation arrangement may be treated differently. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: NONE. The Social Security Fund and the Workmen's Compensation Fund are both national, administered by the Social Security Office, with identical rates, floors and ceilings in every province. There is no provincial payroll levy. The only rate differentiation is by INDUSTRY RISK (the Workmen's Compensation tariff) and by EMPLOYER CLAIMS RECORD (the experience-rating multiplier), never by location. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON, DELIBERATELY. WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION FUND EMPLOYER RATE AS A SINGLE FIGURE — rate_employer stays null. The tariff is risk-rated by type of business across a 0.2%–1.0% range, and the range is served in the branch notes, but I did not open the ministerial notification containing the full business-type table and will not guess at individual rows. THE EXPERIENCE-RATING MULTIPLIER — not modelled. It is applied to an individual employer from its fifth contribution year on its own claims history and cannot be derived from public data. SECTION 39 AND SECTION 40 RATES — not served. Those cover voluntarily-insured former employees and informal-sector workers respectively, at flat cash amounts rather than percentages. They are outside the scope of an ordinary private-sector employee record. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE. The second and third steps of the wage-base escalator are enacted in the Ministerial Regulation gazetted on 12 December 2025: the ceiling rises to 20,000 baht on 1 January 2029 and to 23,000 baht on 1 January 2032, with maximum contributions of 1,000 and 1,150 baht respectively. Nothing further is scheduled. Watch items: (1) the 5% rate itself is fixed by Royal Decree under section 46 and can be changed without primary legislation — Thailand has previously cut it temporarily in response to economic shocks, so a Royal Decree check is warranted after any major fiscal announcement; (2) the Workmen's Compensation tariff and its 240,000 baht cap are set by ministerial instrument and are re-makeable at any time. SOURCING CAVEATS, STATED PLAINLY. The scheme architecture, the 5% rate, the three-account split, the government's 2.75% and the employer's withholding duty are long-standing provisions of the Social Security Act B.E. 2533 and its Royal Decrees. THE CENTRAL NEW FACT IN THIS RECORD — the 17,500 baht ceiling, the 1,650 baht floor, the three-phase escalator and the 12 December 2025 Royal Gazette publication date — is confirmed from multiple independent Thai reports of the Gazette publication which quote the operative words of the Ministerial Regulation consistently (「ไม่ต่ำกว่าเดือนละ 1,650 บาท และไม่เกินเดือนละ 17,500 บาท」) and agree on every figure and date, but I DID NOT OPEN THE ROYAL GAZETTE TEXT ITSELF: the Social Security Office's own site was not serving its rate page at the time of writing. The Regulation's number within the Gazette is therefore not cited. The Workmen's Compensation Fund's 0.2%–1.0% range and 240,000 baht annual cap are the established figures under the Workmen's Compensation Act B.E. 2537 as amended, taken from consistent professional sources rather than from the ministerial notification. Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/th/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/th/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/th/social-contributions

Other Thailand series: Policy interest rate · Statutory default interest (ดอกเบี้ยผิดนัด) · Value added tax (standard rate) · VAT registration threshold · Minimum wage · Public holidays · Consumer price index / inflation · Corporate income tax (standard rate) · Withholding tax rates · Personal income tax (progressive bands)

The same figure elsewhere: Türkiye · United Arab Emirates · Uzbekistan · Vietnam · Bahrain · all 28