Thai Income Tax Brackets 2025/2026: How Much You Actually Pay at Each Income Level

Being "in the 25% bracket" does not mean 25% of your income goes to tax — that's one of the most common misunderstandings about how Thai income tax works. Thailand's personal income tax is progressive, which means each bracket's rate applies only to the slice of income that falls inside it, not to your entire income. The rate for your top slice is your marginal rate. What you actually pay overall, as a share of your income, is your effective rate — and it's never higher than your marginal rate, usually significantly lower.

This article shows both numbers side by side, at real income levels, so the difference is concrete rather than abstract.

Thailand's 2025/2026 Tax Brackets

These brackets apply to taxable income — income after allowances and deductions, not your gross salary (more on that below).

Taxable Income (THB)	Tax Rate
0 – 150,000	0% (exempt)
150,001 – 300,000	5%
300,001 – 500,000	10%
500,001 – 750,000	15%
750,001 – 1,000,000	20%
1,000,001 – 2,000,000	25%
2,000,001 – 5,000,000	30%
Over 5,000,000	35%

This table matches the bracket data used by this site's calculator. Our source for it is Sherrings, a Thailand-focused tax advisory (see Sources below), which reports these thresholds and rates as effective since the 2017 tax year — we treat that as a strong secondary source, not a primary government citation. We could not locate a working, current Thai Revenue Department page to confirm it directly: the Department's own English-language bracket page is outdated and still shows pre-2017 figures, so we don't cite it here.

From Gross Income to Taxable Income

The brackets above don't apply to your salary directly. Taxable income is what's left after:

• Expense deductions — a standard deduction for employment income, or actual/flat-rate deductions for freelance and business income
• Personal and family allowances — for yourself, a spouse, children, and dependent parents
• Other deductions — social security contributions, insurance premiums, retirement fund contributions, and similar items you qualify for

So someone earning ฿1,000,000 gross does not start their bracket calculation at ฿1,000,000 — their taxable income is whatever remains after their own eligible allowances and deductions. How much lower that is depends entirely on individual circumstances (marital status, dependents, insurance premiums, retirement contributions, and so on) — there's no single "typical" reduction. For the specific amounts and eligibility rules, see Thailand Tax Deductions 2026: Full Guide for Expats. Everything below uses taxable income directly, so you can see the bracket mechanics clearly — for your own gross-to-taxable calculation, use the calculator linked at the end of this article.

Worked Example: ฿600,000 Taxable Income

Here's how ฿600,000 of taxable income moves through the brackets:

Bracket	Amount in this bracket	Rate	Tax on this slice
0 – 150,000	150,000	0%	0 THB
150,001 – 300,000	150,000	5%	7,500 THB
300,001 – 500,000	200,000	10%	20,000 THB
500,001 – 600,000	100,000	15%	15,000 THB

Total tax: ฿42,500 Marginal rate: 15% (the rate on the last slice of income) Effective rate: 7.08% (฿42,500 ÷ 600,000)

Notice the gap: this person's marginal rate is 15%, but they're only handing over 7.08% of their taxable income overall — because most of it was taxed at 0%, 5%, and 10% before the 15% rate ever applied.

Marginal Rate vs. Effective Rate: Five Income Levels

The gap between marginal and effective rate grows wider as income rises. Here's the same calculation run at five taxable-income levels:

Taxable income	Estimated tax	Marginal rate	Effective rate
฿400,000	฿17,500	10%	4.38%
฿600,000	฿42,500	15%	7.08%
฿1,000,000	฿115,000	20%	11.50%
฿2,000,000	฿365,000	25%	18.25%
฿5,000,000	฿1,265,000	30%	25.30%

Even at ฿5,000,000 of taxable income — deep into the 30% bracket — the effective rate is only 25.30%, because every bracket below still applies at its own, lower rate. These are estimates based on taxable income alone, using only the brackets above (no other credits or special cases applied). See more worked examples, including the full gross-income-to-tax flow, on the Thailand Income Tax Examples page.

Does Crossing a Bracket Tax Your Whole Income at the Higher Rate?

No — and this is worth showing directly, because it's the source of most "should I turn down this bonus?" anxiety.

Compare ฿999,000 of taxable income to ฿1,001,000 — just ฿2,000 apart, but on opposite sides of the ฿1,000,000 line between the 20% and 25% brackets:

• ฿999,000 taxable income: tax = ฿114,800 (effective rate 11.49%)
• ฿1,001,000 taxable income: tax = ฿115,250 (effective rate 11.51%)

Earning ฿2,000 more costs ฿450 more in tax — not ฿500 (25% of ฿2,000), and nowhere close to pushing the whole ฿1,001,000 into the 25% bracket. That's because only the ฿1,000 above the ฿1,000,000 threshold is taxed at the new 25% rate; the ฿1,000 below it is still taxed at 20%. Crossing into a higher bracket only ever affects the income above the threshold — never the income you'd already earned before it.

Why Your Tax Bracket Isn't Your Tax Rate

Your "tax bracket" is really just a label for the highest-taxed slice of your income — it tells you the rate that applies to the top portion of what you earn, not the rate applied to your income as a whole. In the examples above, someone with ฿2,000,000 of taxable income is "in the 25% bracket," but their real, blended tax burden is 18.25%. That's the number that matters for budgeting what you actually take home, and it's always lower than your bracket rate for anyone above the first bracket.

Calculate Your Own Thai Income Tax

Every example above starts from taxable income, not gross salary — your own taxable income depends on your allowances, deductions, and income type. The Annual Tax Calculator walks through your actual numbers and shows your effective tax rate along with a full bracket-by-bracket breakdown, so you can see exactly which bracket — and which rate — your own income reaches. See How to Use the Thai Tax Calculator for a full walkthrough, or the Methodology page for the full gross-to-tax calculation this article's bracket step fits into.

FAQs

What's the difference between my marginal tax rate and my effective tax rate?

Your marginal rate is the tax rate on your last (highest) slice of taxable income — it's what "your bracket" refers to. Your effective rate is your total tax divided by your total taxable income, blending every bracket rate that applied along the way. Effective rate is always lower than marginal rate for anyone earning above the first bracket, as shown in the table above.

Does getting a raise or bonus push my entire salary into a higher tax bracket?

No. A raise or bonus that crosses into a higher bracket only increases the rate on the portion of income above that threshold — everything you were already earning below it keeps being taxed at the same rates as before. See the ฿999,000 vs. ฿1,001,000 example above for the exact numbers.

Have Thailand's income tax brackets changed for 2026?

As of our last review (September 2026), we haven't found any indication that these brackets have changed — they've applied unchanged since the 2017 tax year, per the secondary source cited below. We don't have a 2026-dated primary government confirmation that no amendment has occurred, so treat this as our best current understanding rather than a guarantee, and check with the Revenue Department or a licensed Thai tax advisor before filing.