Thailand cuts visa-free stays to 30 days from 15 September, India stays on the list

Thailand will cut the visa-free tourist stay from 60 days to 30 days from 15 September 2026. The Ministry of Interior published the new list in the Royal Gazette on 31 August. The change takes effect 15 days after publication. Indian passport holders remain on the visa-exempt list. They do not move to Visa on Arrival.

That last point matters because an earlier cabinet track in May had pointed toward a harder landing for India: a 15-day Visa on Arrival. The gazetted text did not follow that draft. The Thai Embassy in New Delhi has told travellers that Indians stay visa-free for tourism, now for 30 days. Anyone who wants longer has to apply for the matching e-visa or another lawful route before or after arrival, according to the rules that apply to that visa class.

Who is on the 30-day list

Sixty countries and territories qualify for visa-exempt tourist entry of up to 30 days. The published list includes India, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bulgaria, Bhutan, Brunei, Canada, most of the European Union states named in the gazette, Fiji, Georgia, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, the Maldives, New Zealand, Oman, the Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Türkiye, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States, among others named in the notice.

Mauritius and Seychelles fall into a shorter 15-day exemption in the new frame. Azerbaijan, Belarus and Serbia are named for Visa on Arrival at authorised checkpoints. Separate bilateral deals that already give 90 days to some South American states and South Korea are not rewritten by this unilateral list.

Land borders, twice a year

Travellers who use the exemption at land checkpoints may do so no more than twice in a calendar year. That cap is aimed at the short-stay pattern on the Malaysian, Cambodian, Lao and Myanmar crossings, where some visitors have used repeated stamps to live in Thailand without a long-stay visa. Air arrivals are not described in the same two-entry language in the summaries circulating this week. Anyone planning a land loop should count the stamps.

Thailand had stretched the exemption to 60 days to pull leisure traffic back after the pandemic years. The 60-day stamp became a selling point for Indian tour desks and for remote workers who treated a tourist stamp as a cheap long stay. The rollback to 30 days is the Interior Ministry closing that gap without pulling India off the free list.

What a traveller should do before 15 September

Arrivals on or after 15 September should expect a 30-day stamp if they come as tourists from a listed country. A trip planned as 45 or 50 days now needs an e-visa, an extension where the immigration rules still allow one, or a shorter itinerary. The Tourism Authority of Thailand has told visitors to read the gazette categories by nationality rather than rely on last year's blog posts.

The TDAC arrival card remains free. Sites that charge for it are a known scam. That warning has been repeated by Thai official channels through 2026 and still applies.

For India the political read is simple. Bangkok kept Indians in the visa-free column after a spring draft that would have dropped them into Visa on Arrival. The price of that keep is half the permitted stay. Tour operators who sold 45-day packages have two weeks to rewrite the calendar.