Freehold, leasehold or a company: what actually holds up in Thailand

In 1990, a thirty-year lease was signed in Phuket, together with two thirty-year renewals paid in advance. In 2023, Thailand's Supreme Court struck the renewals down: they circumvented Section 540 of the Civil and Commercial Code and amounted to a disguised ninety-year lease. Decision 4655/2566, circulated by international law firms from 10 March 2025, orders the lessee to pay THB 30,000 (€780) a month until the premises are vacated and orders the buildings demolished. It is the hardest fact in the Thai property market, and it governs everything else.

Why a prepaid lease renewal is worth nothing

The so-called "30+30+30" structure is the commercial backbone of a large part of the Thai villa market: a thirty-year lease sold with the promise, in the same contract, of two thirty-year extensions, often paid upfront and presented as equivalent to freehold ownership. It has run into a formidably brief text. Section 540 provides that immovable property may not be leased for a term exceeding thirty years, and that a renewal may not itself exceed thirty years. Decision 4655/2566 draws the consequence: an automatic extension, on the same terms and at the same rent, is void, because it rebuilds by contract what the law prohibits.

Two things that brochures conflate need to be separated.

The first is the lease. Registered at the Land Office, it is entered on the title deed and constitutes a real right: it runs with the land and binds the new owner if the land is sold. The Supreme Court did not touch it.

The second is the promise of renewal. It is not a right entered on the title — the Land Office does not register a term longer than thirty years — but a contractual undertaking by the lessor of the day. That undertaking was held void, and what is void binds no one: neither the original lessor nor any later buyer of the land. The registered thirty-year lease is enforceable against the new owner of the land; the promise of renewal, held void, is not.

For anyone buying today into the twenty-second year of a lease signed in 2004, the consequence is stark: they are buying eight years of certain rights and a hope. The law firm Addleshaw Goddard, in its briefing of 10 March 2025, recommends careful legal review of any leasehold transfer that carries long renewal clauses.

That leaves the superficies right, a separate real right over the building that can be registered at the Land Office. The claim that it survives the end of the lease is a practitioner's opinion, not a verified rule.

The 49% quota is counted in square metres, not apartments

The Condominium Act B.E. 2522 allows a foreigner to own an apartment freehold, registered in their personal name at the Land Office. It is the only route by which a private French buyer gains a perpetual, transferable right over Thai property.

The limit is well known: 49%. How it works is much less so. Section 19/2 caps cumulative foreign ownership at "forty-nine percent of the spaces of the whole units in such particular condominium" — 49% of the floor area of all the units, building by building. The quota is an envelope of square metres, not a count of apartments.

The gap between the two readings is not theoretical. In a development where the larger unit types were sold first to foreign buyers, there may be several units still available in number but not enough residual floor area to cover the unit you want. A developer who says "there is still quota" is then right in units and wrong in floor area. The statement is sincere and the transaction impossible.

The document to ask for is therefore not a percentage quoted by a salesperson but the building's foreign-quota statement, in square metres: total unit floor area, floor area already held by foreigners, residual floor area, and the position of the unit in question. If the development has several buildings, the statement is drawn up building by building, since the law reasons by building.

This is what we track. Of the 7,865 developments we follow in Thailand, two fields in our database answer the question upstream: `foreign_quota_available`, which indicates whether foreign-quota capacity is open, and `ownership_type_available`, which specifies the tenure options offered — freehold under the quota, leasehold, or both.

A Thai company to hold land: what is the real risk?

A foreigner cannot own land freehold in their personal name. A villa on its own land is therefore sold either on a lease or through a Thai company that holds the land, with the foreigner owning up to 49% of the shares.

The structure is legal in itself. It stops being legal as soon as the Thai shareholders are nominees — holders of shares with no real capital contribution. The exposure is then twofold.

It is criminal. Section 36 of the Foreign Business Act punishes nominee arrangements — according to the reading given by Thai law firms — with up to three years' imprisonment and a fine of THB 100,000 to 1,000,000 (€2,610 to €26,060), applicable to the Thai nominee as well as to the foreigner behind the arrangement, with a daily fine of THB 10,000 to 50,000 (€261 to €1,300) for a continuing offence.

It is also a matter of the asset itself, and this is the most underestimated risk. Section 96 of the Land Code empowers the Director-General of the Department of Lands to order the sale of land acquired in a third party's name to circumvent the restrictions on foreigners; Section 94 sets out a forced disposal within a period of one hundred and eighty days to one year. The asset is not frozen: it is sold.

The administrative net has tightened. Since January 2026, Thai shareholders in these companies must produce bank statements covering at least three months before shares are paid up; since 1 April 2026, in-person verification at the DBD has been mandatory for any change. Both points come from a single law-firm source.

One narrow route to direct land ownership remains: Section 96 bis of the Land Code allows a foreigner investing more than THB 40 million (€1.04 million) in eligible activities to acquire residential land, up to one rai — 1,600 m² — subject to ministerial approval and on condition that the investment is maintained for three years. It is a statutory window, not an ordinary regime.

Which title deed to accept, and which to refuse?

The title determines what can be registered against the property. For a foreign buyer, whose entire legal position rests on registrations — lease, mortgage, superficies — this comes before price.

Saying "Nor Sor 3 Gor equals Chanote" is an approximation that gets paid for on the day of a boundary dispute. As for Sor Por Kor 4-01, agricultural land allocated by ALRO to Thai farmers, our check on 13 September 2026 did not allow us to document its exact regime from a sufficient source: we keep it outside the scope of an acquisition by a foreigner.

Where the money comes from: the check that tightened in 2026

The Condominium Act does not only grant a right; it imposes a funding chain. The eligibility category that covers almost all French buyers is that of the foreigner who has brought foreign currency into Thailand, and Section 19/3 requires the funds brought in to be no less than the price of the apartment acquired.

The price must therefore be remitted from abroad in foreign currency and converted into baht in Thailand; the receiving bank then issues the Foreign Exchange Transaction Form — the FET, formerly "Tor Tor Sam" — the document the Land Office requires for registration in a foreigner's name. According to the law firms that document this practice, the FET is issued automatically above about USD 50,000; below that, the bank issues a credit advice. No Bank of Thailand regulation could be identified for this threshold: it is a documented banking practice, not a rule.

The corollary is almost systematically overlooked: baht already held in Thailand does not allow registration in a foreign name. Without a foreign-currency remittance chain there is no FET, and without an FET there is no registration — whether the funds come from an old account, a local sale or savings built up locally. The name of the sender of the transfer, the name of the holder of the receiving account and the name of the future owner on the title deed must also match.

A recent layer of scrutiny has been added. Between 15 and 25 May 2026, the Department of Lands sent three "Most Urgent" circulars to all provincial Land Offices. Under Section 74 of the Land Code, they require an examination of the buyer's source of funds, income, occupation and financial situation, triggered in particular above THB 2 million (€52,100) paid in cash or THB 5 million (€130,300) of appraised value, excluding inheritances.

The 99-year lease and the 75% quota: where do things stand, exactly?

As of 13 September 2026, neither the increase of the foreign quota to 75% nor the extension of leases to 99 years has been adopted. The 49% ceiling and the thirty-year lease remain the applicable law.

The timeline is documented. The policy was announced on 22 June 2024. The 99-year lease bill was put out to public consultation on 21 July 2025, under the Paetongtarn Shinawatra government, with a stated goal of enactment within the year. On 29 June 2025, The Nation Thailand reported that the text had been stuck at the Ministry of Interior for more than a year, with the deputy minister saying its urgency needed to be "reassessed". Since the change of government in February 2026, no later step has been documented: no Cabinet decision, no Council of State opinion, no parliamentary reading.

We do not write that the reform has been abandoned — nothing supports that. We write that it has not been adopted and that no legislative progress can be verified. An agency selling a property on the promise of a 99-year lease is selling a term that does not exist in Thai law. The same caution applies to the transfer-fee cut to 0.01% in force until 30 June 2027: reserved for individual buyers of Thai nationality and capped at THB 7 million (€182,400), it leaves a French buyer's transfer fee at 2%.

Freehold, leasehold, company: the table the brochures leave out

The levies, on the other hand, can be quantified. Based on an apartment at THB 15 million (€390,900):

When we model a Bangkok – Phuket trade-off

What you can do now

Ask the developer, in writing, for the foreign-quota statement of the building concerned, expressed in square metres: total unit floor area, floor area already held by foreigners, residual floor area, and the floor area of the target unit. A global percentage given orally, or a count in number of apartments, does not answer the question posed by Section 19/2.

For a leasehold villa, ask for the date the lease was registered at the Land Office and the remaining term in years and months — not the nominal length of the contract. And have a Thai lawyer read any renewal clause: since Decision 4655/2566, its value can no longer be presumed.