Debt Recovery in Thailand 2026: Prescription, Court Fees, Enforcement and Contract Design

Key points

• Foreign court judgments cannot be enforced in Thailand. Thailand is not party to any treaty on the reciprocal recognition and enforcement of judgments. A creditor must bring fresh proceedings in Thailand, where the foreign judgment serves only as evidence.
• Arbitral awards are a different matter. Under the Arbitration Act B.E. 2545 (2002), qualifying foreign arbitral awards may be recognised and enforced by the Thai courts — which makes the dispute resolution clause the single most consequential term in your contract.
• A trap for parties from non-Convention jurisdictions. A handful of jurisdictions — Taiwan among them — are not party to the New York Convention, and awards seated there may face difficulty in enforcement in Thailand.
• Prescription periods vary widely: ten years for general claims; two years for a trader’s claim for goods delivered or work done; five years for interest, rent and other periodic payments; one year in tort.
• The court will not dismiss on prescription of its own motion. Under section 193/29 of the Civil and Commercial Code, prescription must be raised by the defendant as a defence.
• Court fees are 2% of the amount claimed, capped at THB 200,000 for claims up to THB 50 million, with a further 0.1% on the excess.
• The Civil Procedure Code amendment in force from 10 September 2025 cut the execution officer’s fee on a sale from 3% to 2% and abolished the fees previously charged where assets were seized or attached but never sold.
• Enforcement must be applied for within ten years of the date of the judgment or order (CPC s. 274) — not from the date it becomes final.

Any foreign business operating in Thailand will, sooner or later, face a counterparty that does not pay. Customers delay settlement, partners default, investment disputes arise — this happens in every market.

But in Thailand one feature departs sharply from what most foreign creditors assume, and it determines the outcome of everything that follows:

A judgment from your home court cannot be enforced in Thailand.

That means: even with a final judgment in your favour at home, if the debtor’s assets are in Thailand, that judgment cannot be used directly to attach their bank accounts or real property. You must litigate again, in Thailand, from the beginning.

This article sets out the full process of civil litigation and debt recovery in Thailand — the prescription periods, the costs, the enforcement stage — and a more important question: how the contract should have been drafted, before the dispute arose, so that you can actually collect.

1. The decisive point: foreign judgments are not directly enforceable

This is the most important section of this article.

Thailand is not a party to any treaty providing for the reciprocal recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. A foreign court judgment therefore has no direct enforceability in Thailand.

What happens in practice

The creditor must commence fresh proceedings in Thailand, submitting the foreign judgment as evidence.

The leading authority is still Supreme Court Judgment No. 585/2461 (1918): a foreign judgment carries weight in Thailand only if it was given by a court of competent jurisdiction and is final and conclusive between the parties. In practice the question is whether the judgment can still be challenged where it was rendered — whether an appeal is pending or remains available.

Default judgments call for particular care. In that case the court declined to give effect to a judgment obtained in the defendant’s absence, because the creditor had not shown that, under the procedure of the court that gave it, the judgment could no longer be challenged. A foreign default judgment will not be treated as final unless its finality under the foreign procedure is proved.

What this means for foreign creditors

• A case you won at home must be fought again from the start in Thailand
• The foreign judgment is one item of evidence among many, and does not guarantee that the Thai court will reach the same conclusion
• Time and cost are effectively doubled

So suing at home is generally not an effective strategy against a debtor whose assets are in Thailand.

2. Prescription: two years, five or ten?

Sections 193/9 to 193/35 of the Civil and Commercial Code (CCC) govern prescription, and the periods differ sharply according to the nature of the claim.

Section 193/34 deserves particular attention

A claim for the price of goods is, as a rule, subject to only two years — not the ten years many assume.

The section contains an important proviso: where the goods or services were supplied for the debtor’s own business, the two-year period does not apply. Claims falling within that exception are subject to a five-year period under section 193/33(5).

This distinction matters considerably: sales to an end consumer will ordinarily attract the two-year period, while sales to an enterprise for use in its business — which describes most B2B transactions — attract five years.

But the boundary is not always clear in an individual case, and turns on findings of fact. The safer practice is to work to the two-year period in every case, rather than betting that a transaction falls within the five-year exception.

A procedural feature worth knowing

Under section 193/29, the court may not dismiss a claim on prescription grounds of its own motion — prescription must be raised by the defendant as a defence.

In practice this means a time-barred claim is not automatically unrecoverable; if the debtor does not plead prescription, the court will hear the case. But this is not a strategy to rely on, because a represented defendant in Thailand will almost invariably plead it.

Interruption

Prescription is interrupted (s. 193/14) by: acknowledgement of the debt by the debtor (by a written acknowledgement, part payment, payment of interest, the giving of security or any other unequivocal act), commencement of proceedings, submission to arbitration, or lodging a claim in bankruptcy proceedings. Once prescription is interrupted, the time already elapsed is disregarded and a fresh period, equal to the original, begins to run when the cause of interruption ends (s. 193/15).

Practical point: where a claim is approaching the limit, obtaining written acknowledgement or part payment is the least expensive means of interruption. This must be done before the claim becomes time-barred — if prescription has already run, a written acknowledgement does not interrupt it, but gives rise to a claim with a period of only two years from the date of acknowledgement (s. 193/28 para. 2 read with s. 193/35).

3. Court fees and timelines

Fees

The caps for mortgage claims and arbitral awards apply to the first THB 50 million; the excess attracts a further 0.1%. Service fees are payable in addition. In consumer cases, the consumer is exempt from court fees.

A provision frequently overlooked: a plaintiff with neither a domicile nor a business office in Thailand, and no assets there available for execution, may on the defendant’s application be ordered by the court to provide security for costs (CPC s. 253); the same applies where there is reason to believe the plaintiff would evade payment of costs if it lost. If the security is not provided, the case is struck off. Foreign creditors suing through an offshore entity should factor this into their funding.

Timelines

A practical rule of thumb is one to two years per stage: first instance to judgment, appeal, further appeal (which requires leave of the Supreme Court, CPC s. 247), enforcement. Labour cases are heard by a specialist court and are usually faster than ordinary civil matters.

4. After judgment: enforcement is the real difficulty

A judgment in your favour does not, by itself, recover money. Enforcement is a separate stage, requiring its own application.

The process

On reading the judgment the court issues an enforcement order (CPC s. 272) requiring the debtor to comply within a set period — usually 15 to 30 days. Where the debtor fails to comply, the creditor may apply for a writ of execution, carried out by the Legal Execution Department. An appeal does not stay execution unless the court orders a stay (CPC s. 231).

The ten-year enforcement window

Enforcement must be applied for within ten years of the date of the judgment or order (CPC s. 274) — not from the date it becomes final. Where the case went on appeal, the Legal Execution Department’s guidance, citing a plenary Supreme Court ruling (No. 1073/2558), treats the period as running from the judgment of the last court to rule in the case. Within that period the creditor must complete the required steps: obtaining a writ of execution, notifying the execution officer, and requesting seizure or attachment of specific assets. Obtaining a writ and then taking no further step until the period expires extinguishes the right of enforcement.

This is a strict limit, and is distinct from prescription of the underlying claim — even with a judgment in hand, failure to apply within ten years extinguishes enforceability.

The September 2025 amendment to execution fees

The 33rd Amendment to the Civil Procedure Code (B.E. 2568), in force from 10 September 2025, updated the execution officer fees set out in Table 5 annexed to the Civil Procedure Code.

The amendment reduced several principal execution officer fees and abolished certain fees that were previously payable even where the enforcement process did not actually result in the sale or disposition of assets.

What this means for creditors: previously, a creditor who settled with the debtor after execution had been initiated but before assets were sold still bore certain fees; those fees have now been abolished. This lowers the cost of the strategy of initiating enforcement first and negotiating afterwards.

Commercial debt recovery, distressed asset work, shareholder disputes, construction disputes, and the enforcement of arbitral awards and judgments are all directly affected.

The greatest obstacle: locating assets

Thailand has no public register of bank accounts, and self-help recovery is not permitted.

This means that even with a final judgment in hand, if you do not know where the debtor’s assets are, the Legal Execution Department has nothing to act on.

Recovery in practice therefore turns on the quality of the asset investigation carried out before proceedings are commenced, rather than on the judgment itself. This differs markedly from practice in many home jurisdictions, and is the step foreign creditors most often underestimate.

Two procedural tools soften the problem. Before judgment, a plaintiff may apply — without notice to the defendant — for interim measures, including pre-judgment seizure or attachment of the defendant’s assets (CPC s. 254; not available in small claims). After judgment, a creditor who has reason to believe the debtor holds more assets than are known, or who does not know where they are, may ask the court to summon the debtor or third parties for examination and to order the production of documents (CPC s. 277). Neither replaces a proper investigation, but both belong in the plan.

5. Arbitration: the only route that crosses borders

If a foreign judgment cannot be enforced in Thailand, how is a cross-border transaction to be protected?

Through arbitration.

Framework and institutions

Arbitration in Thailand is governed by the Arbitration Act B.E. 2545 (2002), together with sections 210 to 222 of the Civil Procedure Code concerning arbitral proceedings.

The principal arbitration and mediation institutions are the Thai Arbitration Institute (TAI) and the Thailand Arbitration Center (THAC).

Foreign arbitral awards can be enforced

Unlike foreign court judgments, a foreign arbitral award meeting the requirements of the applicable convention may be submitted to the Thai courts for recognition and enforcement, at a court fee of 1% of the amount claimed, capped at THB 100,000. The application must be filed within three years of the date on which the award becomes enforceable (Arbitration Act s. 42).

This is the fundamental difference between a judgment and an arbitral award, and the single most important consideration when drafting a contract.

A trap for non-Convention jurisdictions

Parties frequently agree, without much thought, that disputes will be arbitrated “at home.”

For most foreign businesses this is unproblematic, since the great majority of commercial jurisdictions are party to the New York Convention. But a small number are not — Taiwan among them.

An award seated in a non-Convention jurisdiction may encounter difficulty when enforcement is sought in Thailand, because under section 41 of the Arbitration Act a foreign award is enforced only if it falls under a convention, treaty or agreement to which Thailand is a party. There is no known Thai precedent on an award seated in Taiwan, and such an award is not automatically unenforceable — the difficulty is the absence of a clear treaty basis, which is exactly the kind of uncertainty a contract should avoid.

Safer choices are to seat the arbitration in a jurisdiction that is itself a Convention party:

• Thailand (TAI or THAC) — most direct for enforcement in Thailand
• Singapore (SIAC) — neutral, procedurally mature, English-language
• Hong Kong (HKIAC) — as above

This choice must be made correctly at signing. Once a dispute has arisen, the counterparty has no reason whatsoever to agree to vary the arbitration clause.

6. Three things to do before suing

1. Confirm the claim is not time-barred

As set out above, a claim for the price of goods may be subject to only two years. The prescription start date should be confirmed in the first month after payment falls into arrears — not after two years of unsuccessful chasing.

2. Investigate the debtor’s assets

This determines whether recovery is possible at all, and it must be done before proceedings begin.

There are two reasons. Thailand has no public register of bank accounts, making later investigation extremely difficult. And a debtor who learns of proceedings will commonly begin moving assets.

The investigation should cover: company registration records and shareholding structure, land registry records, vehicle registration, known banking relationships, and affiliated entities to which assets might be transferred.

If the investigation shows the debtor has no assets, the question is whether to sue at all — not how. A judgment that cannot be enforced is simply a further expense.

3. Consider whether a criminal route runs in parallel

Some commercial disputes in Thailand carry criminal liability. Where the debtor’s conduct involves fraud or misappropriation, criminal proceedings can create substantial negotiating pressure, and compensation may be claimed within the criminal case.

But note carefully: fraud and misappropriation are compoundable offences (except public fraud under s. 343), and the complaint period is only three months, running from the date the injured party knows of the offence and of the offender (Criminal Code s. 96). This is an entirely different — and far shorter — period than the civil prescription.

A note on out-of-court collection

Out-of-court collection against individual debtors, including individual guarantors, is regulated by the Debt Collection Act B.E. 2558 (2015). The Act does not limit who may collect: a creditor may collect itself or through a person it authorises. What it regulates is how collection is carried out, and it requires anyone who collects debts for hire as a business to register. A lawyer collecting for his or her own client need not register as a collection business, but remains bound by the Act’s conduct rules. Before instructing a collection agency, confirm that it is registered.

Collection against corporate debtors proceeds under ordinary commercial practice and the Civil Procedure Code: demand letters, negotiation, mediation, and litigation as a last resort.

7. How to draft the contract

Returning to the proposition with which this article began: what determines whether you can collect is the contract signed before the dispute arose.

The following terms deserve priority when contracting with a Thai counterparty.

1. Dispute resolution. Where the counterparty has assets in Thailand, arbitration (Thailand, Singapore or Hong Kong) is generally preferable to a foreign court jurisdiction clause. Do not seat the arbitration in a non-Convention jurisdiction.

2. Governing law. Governing law and seat are distinct and may be agreed separately. But where foreign law governs, its content must be proved in the Thai proceedings, adding time and cost.

3. Security. Guarantors, mortgage, pledge, advance payment guarantees. Secured and unsecured claims are not in the same class when it comes to recovery rates.

4. A mechanism for written acknowledgement of debt. For example, periodic reconciliation with signed confirmation. This serves both to interrupt prescription and to strengthen the evidence.

5. Service address and agent. An agreed service address (a special domicile chosen for a specific act under CCC s. 42) avoids delay caused by difficulties in effecting service.

6. Payment terms and default interest. Default interest expressly agreed can be claimed on judgment, but an excessive rate may be reduced by the court as a penalty (CCC s. 383). Absent agreement, statutory default interest is the s. 7 rate plus 2% per annum (currently 5% per annum in total, s. 224); for instalment debts, default interest runs only on the principal of the defaulted instalment (s. 224/1). Under Thai law, pre-judgment interest runs from the date of default (s. 204) or, in tort, from the time of the wrongful act (s. 206).

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Can a foreign court judgment be enforced in Thailand?

No. Thailand is not party to any treaty for the reciprocal recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments, and a foreign judgment has no direct enforceability. The creditor must commence fresh proceedings in Thailand, submitting the foreign judgment as evidence. Under Supreme Court Judgment No. 585/2461 (1918), a foreign judgment carries weight only if given by a court of competent jurisdiction and final and conclusive between the parties; a foreign default judgment is not treated as final unless its finality under the foreign procedure is proved. Suing at home is therefore generally ineffective where the debtor’s assets are in Thailand.

What is the prescription period for a debt in Thailand?

As a rule, only two years for a claim for the price of goods — not the ten years commonly assumed. Under section 193/34 of the Civil and Commercial Code, claims by traders, industrialists, handicraftsmen, art-craftsmen and artisans for goods delivered, work done and the management of another’s affairs (including disbursements) are subject to two years. The section contains a proviso: where supplied for the debtor’s own business, the two-year period does not apply, and five years applies under section 193/33(5). Most B2B transactions may fall within the five-year exception, but the boundary turns on findings of fact. The safer practice is to work to two years in every case. Other common periods: general claims 10 years, final judgments 10 years, interest and rent 5 years, tort 1 year.

What does civil litigation in Thailand cost, and how long does it take?

Court fees are 2% of the amount claimed, capped at THB 200,000 for claims up to THB 50 million, with a further 0.1% on the excess. Small claims not exceeding THB 300,000 are capped at THB 1,000 in total; non-monetary claims are THB 200 per case. Service fees and legal fees are additional. A plaintiff with no domicile, business office or assets in Thailand may be ordered, on the defendant’s application, to provide security for costs. As to timing, first instance runs approximately 12 to 18 months, an appeal must be filed within one month of judgment being read, and a practical rule of thumb is one to two years per stage: first instance, appeal, further appeal, enforcement.

How is a judgment actually enforced?

Enforcement is a separate stage requiring its own application. On reading the judgment the court orders the debtor to comply within usually 15 to 30 days; on non-compliance the creditor may apply for a writ of execution, carried out by the Legal Execution Department. Two points require attention: enforcement must be applied for within ten years of the date of the judgment or order (not from finality), failing which the application is dismissed without consideration of the merits; and Thailand has no public register of bank accounts and does not permit self-help, so if the debtor’s assets are unknown the Department has nothing to act on. Recovery in practice therefore turns on the quality of asset investigation carried out before proceedings begin.

What changed in Thai enforcement procedure in 2025?

The 33rd Amendment to the Civil Procedure Code (B.E. 2568), in force from 10 September 2025, updated the execution officer fees in Table 5, reducing several principal fees — the fee on a sale of seized property fell from 3% to 2% — and abolishing the fees previously payable where assets were seized or attached but no sale followed. In practical terms: a creditor who settled after execution had been initiated but before assets were sold previously still bore certain fees; those have now been abolished, lowering the cost of initiating enforcement first and negotiating afterwards. The change directly affects commercial debt recovery, distressed asset work, shareholder and construction disputes, and the enforcement of awards and judgments.

How should the dispute resolution clause be drafted?

Agree arbitration rather than a foreign court jurisdiction clause, because foreign judgments cannot be enforced in Thailand whereas qualifying foreign arbitral awards can be (court fee 1%, capped at THB 100,000; application within three years of the award becoming enforceable). Note, however, that a small number of jurisdictions — Taiwan among them — are not party to the New York Convention, and an award seated there may encounter difficulty in enforcement in Thailand. Safer choices are jurisdictions that are themselves Convention parties: Thailand (TAI or THAC) is most direct for local enforcement, while Singapore (SIAC) and Hong Kong (HKIAC) are neutral and procedurally mature. This choice must be made at signing; once a dispute arises the counterparty has no reason to agree to vary it.

Can a collection agency be instructed to recover the debt?

It depends whether the debtor is an individual or a company. Out-of-court collection against individual debtors is regulated by the Debt Collection Act B.E. 2558 (2015). The Act does not limit who may collect, but anyone collecting debts for hire as a business must be registered — confirm registration before instructing an agency. Collection against corporate debtors proceeds under ordinary commercial practice and the Civil Procedure Code: demand letters, negotiation, mediation, and litigation last. Note also that where the debtor’s conduct involves fraud or misappropriation a criminal route may run in parallel — but these are compoundable offences (except public fraud) with a complaint period of only three months from knowledge of the offence and the offender, far shorter than the civil prescription.

In Thai debt recovery, the outcome rarely turns on litigation technique. It turns on three things: whether the claim is time-barred, whether the assets can be found, and how the contract was drafted.

The first two arise after the dispute; the third arises before it — and the third matters most. A contract with an appropriate arbitration clause and adequate security places a creditor in an entirely different position from one that merely provides for the courts of the creditor’s home country.

Louis Group maintains offices in Taipei and Bangkok , with Thai-qualified lawyers working alongside colleagues in Taiwan. We advise on debt recovery and commercial disputes in Thailand: pre-action prescription assessment and asset investigation, demand and negotiation, civil proceedings and interim measures, arbitration, enforcement, and the parallel assessment of criminal routes. We also review contracts, so that enforceable dispute resolution and security terms are in place at the point of signing.

If your current contracts with Thai counterparties provide for the courts of your home jurisdiction, they are worth reviewing before the next renewal.

Author: Ekkapong Yamkran | Partner, Louis Group Bangkok

This article provides general legal information and is not legal advice on any specific matter. Prescription periods, fees, procedure and judicial approach may differ according to the facts of a case and subsequent amendment. For any actual matter, consult a Thai-qualified lawyer and refer to the current rules of the Thai courts and competent authorities.

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