Thailand halved your visa-free stay on Tuesday

An Indian passport now gets 30 days in Thailand without a visa instead of 60. The rule took effect on Tuesday, 15 September, and the date that counts is the day you land, not the day you booked.

If you were already inside Thailand on Tuesday, or entered before it, you keep whatever stay the officer wrote in your passport. Everyone arriving from now on gets 30 days. The 60-day exemption Thailand introduced in July 2024 is finished, and not only for us: it has been withdrawn from every nationality that had it.

What was actually approved

The Thai cabinet signed off on a rebuilt entry framework, and five Ministry of Interior announcements were published in the Royal Gazette on 31 August. Thai rules of this kind come into force 15 days after publication, which is how the date landed on 15 September.

The new structure sorts 65 countries and territories into three bands, on a principle the Thai government describes as one country, one entry category.

• Thirty days visa-free for 59 countries and territories, including India, all 27 EU member states, the Maldives, Croatia, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Malta.
• Fifteen days visa-free for Mauritius and Seychelles, and nobody else.
• Visa on arrival for Azerbaijan, Belarus and Serbia, at 2,000 baht for a stay of up to 15 days.

Thailand's government portal gives the reasoning as economic factors, security assessments, international relations and reciprocity, with the stated aims of tightening screening, cutting out overlapping entry categories and moving more travellers onto the e-Visa system. The same statement says India was put in the 30-day band because of trade and investment ties, and because Indian visitors stay around 7.17 days per trip on average.

That last figure is the honest centre of this. Thailand did the arithmetic and decided Indians were not using the second month.

Visa on arrival is gone, and that is the quieter change

Until Tuesday an Indian passport had two doors into Thailand: the 60-day exemption, or visa on arrival bought at the airport counter. The visa-on-arrival list is now three countries long and India is not on it.

Almost nobody used that door, because paying 2,000 baht for a counter stamp made no sense when a free 60-day one was sitting next to it. It matters now for a different reason. The paid fallback was removed in the same week the free allowance was halved, so if 30 days is not enough, the only remaining route is a visa applied for before you fly. There is nothing to buy at the airport.

Whether this touches your trip at all

For most people reading this, it does not. A ten-day Bangkok and Krabi holiday is unaffected. So is three weeks. So is a month, right up to the last day of it.

Four groups should pay attention. Anyone stitching Thailand together with Vietnam or Cambodia over six or seven weeks on one open-jaw ticket. Anyone who goes for the winter and works remotely from Chiang Mai. Anyone with family in Bangkok who used to visit for a long stretch each year. And anyone who has already paid for flights out in November or December on the assumption of 60 days, because the rule changed after a great many of those tickets were sold.

If you are in the last group, check your return date against your arrival date and count. Thirty days means 30, and Thai immigration counts the day you land.

If you need longer, it costs ₹3,000

The Royal Thai Embassy in New Delhi is direct about the alternative: anyone wanting more than 30 days for tourism should apply for an e-Visa at thaievisa.go.th before travelling. Since 1 January 2025 every Thai visa application from India goes through that site, and that is the only official one.

The embassy's own fee table lists a single-entry tourist visa at ₹3,000, valid for three months from issue, good for a 60-day stay. Multiple entry is ₹13,500, valid six months, 60 days per entry. So the second month has not disappeared. It now costs three thousand rupees and some paperwork, where in August it cost nothing.

The other option is extending on the ground. A 30-day exemption entry can be extended by up to 30 more days at an immigration office for 1,900 baht, about ₹5,470 at Thursday's rate of roughly ₹2.88 to the baht. Treat that as a maybe, not a plan. Approval and the length granted sit entirely with the officer at the desk, and paying the fee does not buy the stamp. If you already know you want six weeks, get the e-Visa in Delhi rather than betting your return flight on a counter in Chiang Mai.

The land border rule almost nobody has read

Buried in the same announcements: visa-exempt entries across a land border are now capped at two per calendar year. Nationals of Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Singapore are exempt from the cap. Indians are not. Arrivals by air carry no stated annual limit.

This kills the old border-run habit, and it also catches honest itineraries. If your trip runs Penang to Hat Yai by road, then out to Laos and back in again, you have used your two crossings before the year is half done. Fly the last leg instead.

What overstaying costs now

Worth spelling out, because the shorter window makes the mistake likelier. Overstay is fined at 500 baht a day, roughly ₹1,440, capped at 20,000 baht or about ₹57,600. Leave voluntarily inside 90 days and there is no entry ban. Get caught at a checkpoint rather than walking up to the desk yourself and a ban of up to five years is on the table.

The fine is not really the problem. The overstay stamp stays in the passport, and visa officers in Schengen, the UK, the US and Japan all read it. One careless week in Krabi is an expensive thing to explain at a visa interview four years later.

The background nobody in Bangkok enjoys

This did not happen during a boom. Thailand took 18.51 million foreign visitors between 1 January and 1 August this year, worth 896 billion baht, down 3.19 per cent on the same stretch of 2025. India is the third largest source market behind China and Malaysia, with 1.38 million arrivals over that period.

The Nation reported that seat capacity on India to Thailand routes fell 28.6 per cent year on year, with officials also pointing at coverage of unrest in the southern border provinces as a drag on short-haul demand. Thinner capacity is the part that will show up in your own booking, as fewer cheap seats out of Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru through the winter.

Which produces an odd combination. Thailand is tightening entry while it needs arrivals, and the airlines are flying less of the route. Book earlier than you did last year.

If your trip fits inside 30 days, book it

Nothing here is a reason to skip Thailand. It is a reason to lock the dates and get the tickets in hand.

In Bangkok, the join-tour version of the Grand Palace is the right call over a private guide. You are going to be in a slow-moving crowd whatever you pay, and a fixed meeting point at Tha Chang pier for about ₹1,400 buys you the context without the markup. The river boat is the genuine bargain on this list: ₹371 for a hop-on-hop-off pass that doubles as the only transport in Bangkok that ignores traffic.

North, the Chiang Rai day trip out of Chiang Mai is long and worth it, mostly for the White Temple, which photographs badly and stuns in person. Go early. By eleven the coaches from every hotel in the old town have arrived at once.

South, the Phang Nga Bay kayak day is the one Phuket excursion that still feels like the thing itself rather than a queue for it. It is not cheap at ₹9,517, and it is the item on a Phuket week I would keep if I had to cut everything else.

Before you fly, two free things

The Thailand Digital Arrival Card is still compulsory for almost every non-Thai arriving by air, land or sea, and it must be submitted within the three days before you arrive, counting the arrival day itself. It costs nothing on the official immigration site. Any page asking for a card payment to file it is not the official site, and there are many of them.

Then check your passport pages and your dates one more time against the embassy's own notice rather than a travel agent's summary, including ours. This one moved fast.

What is still unclear

The New Delhi embassy's wording on the 30-day exemption is that it runs from 15 September 2026 "until further announcement". That is not a promise of permanence, and Thailand has now changed this policy twice in roughly two years. If your trip is a long way out, check again before you pay.

Two other loose ends. The extension is discretionary, so reports of what officers actually grant will only emerge over the next few months. And the land border cap is new enough that the practical enforcement at smaller crossings has not been tested in public yet.

Thirty days is still a generous holiday. The change worth reacting to is not the number, it is that the free second month and the paid airport fallback both disappeared in the same week.

The practical response is small. Count your days, get the e-Visa in advance if you need more than 30, fly rather than drive across the border a third time, and book the flights earlier than instinct says while capacity out of India is thin. Everything else about the trip is exactly as good as it was last month.