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What If I Overstay My Thai Visa by Less Than 90 Days?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing overstay in the Kingdom and a question that often crops up with respect to people who are overstaying in the Kingdom is "There is this 90-day threshold. What happens if I don't go over the 90-day threshold?" 

We will put this up on the screen here. This was created by Immigration. It was created in order to provide, if nothing else, sort of primmer with respect to overstay and automatic blacklisting that is triggered by certain time thresholds of overstay with respect to how long somebody will subsequently be blacklisted after they have overstayed a certain period of time. So, for example, if you note on-screen here, 90 days is the minimum threshold for an automatic blacklisting. Let me also be clear. We are talking about those who surrender themselves, what we would call in the American Immigration system, voluntarily depart from Thailand. We are talking about folks are voluntarily departing. We are not talking about people who are arrested in the Kingdom on overstay. Those folks are covered by different subsections of the regulations and their blacklisting is mandated at higher levels automatically. If you are arrested in the Kingdom of Thailand and you are already in overstay, even a 1-day overstay can result in a 5 - year blacklisting. This is a different thing. This is somebody who is, basically as a practical matter, presenting themselves at the airport, surrendering to the fact that they have been in overstay and their overstay has been less than 90 days, well what is the consequence of that?  Well, if you have overstayed in Thailand by a few days, if you have overstayed in Thailand by even a month and a half or even 89 days, technically speaking the mechanism to enforce a 1 year blacklisting has not been triggered. That being stated, Immigration Officers take a dim view of those who overstay by any length of time in the Kingdom. A couple of days, if you inadvertently forget to leave the country to do a border run or something, I don't think that that something that is really a major cause for concern but skirting the boundaries, you know doing 88 days of overstay and then trying to walk right back into the country, that can be a problematic fact pattern because I could see many Immigration Officers utilizing their discretion to go ahead and deny entry to someone in that set of circumstances. 

So moving forward, the thing to take away from this video, if you are overstaying in Thailand get back into status, get out of the Kingdom, get back into status if for no other reason than it is a problem if you get arrested in the Kingdom, you could end up with a prolonged blacklisting. 

The other thing to take away from this video is all overstays are a bad idea. So something to think about. Take that for what it is. All overstays in the Kingdom are a bad idea notwithstanding the fact that one particular overstay might not necessarily trigger an automatic blacklisting, it is still not a great idea to overstay at all.