Outbound transfers — education and family support abroad
If you've read our guide on why Thai banks are freezing foreigners' accounts, you'd be forgiven for assuming outbound transfers are getting harder too. They're not — sending money abroad for a child's education or to support family overseas actually got easier in the same window that inbound rules tightened.
Two separate Bank of Thailand changes landed within weeks of each other, and they point in opposite directions:
For a reader paying tuition or supporting family abroad, that second change is the one that matters, and it's good news worth leading with — it's easy to read the inbound-tightening headlines and wrongly assume everything got harder.
Your bank's own website might not reflect this yet
We checked SCB's own live outward-SWIFT transfer page and found it still states the older USD 50,000 threshold — bank websites often lag behind regulatory changes like this one. Our advice either way: bring your supporting documentation (tuition invoice, proof of relationship for a family-support transfer) regardless of which threshold your bank's page currently shows. It costs you nothing if it turns out not to be needed, and saves a counter delay if the branch is still working from the old rule.
Generally, no — and it's worth being clear about why. Thai gift tax is a receiving-side concept: it applies to a Thailand-tax-resident recipient of a gift, not to someone sending money out. Paying your own child's tuition directly to a foreign university isn't a gift to a Thai tax resident in the first place, so the usual ฿10m/฿20m gift-tax thresholds don't come into play.
Where this gets genuinely unclear is the edge cases: an adult child who is themselves a Thai tax resident receiving the money before forwarding it, or education funds that get mixed into a family member's regular account in Thailand rather than going straight to the institution. Neither of those is a simple case, and we'd rather say so plainly than guess — get a short consultation with a Thai tax adviser if your situation looks like either one.
This is the one genuinely new finding on this page, and it changes the practical answer for a lot of readers. Many US, UK, and Australian universities now require or strongly prefer payment through a dedicated student-payment platform — most commonly Flywire or Convera — rather than a direct bank wire. Confirmed via Flywire's own help-center documentation: it accepts payment from Thailand via PromptPay and domestic THB bank transfers, generating a virtual Thai bank account unique to each payment. PromptPay payments through it are capped at ฿2,000,000 per transaction, and all funds for a given payment need to come from a single source account.
Why this is the better default for tuition specifically
A payment through Flywire or Convera locks the exchange rate at the time of payment, is automatically reconciled against the student's ID, and sidesteps the single most common failure mode we found in forum research: a direct wire arriving at the university's bank without the right reference code attached, then sitting unmatched at the bursar's office for weeks while nobody can tell whose payment it is. If your university offers one of these platforms, use it for recurring tuition and fee payments rather than wiring directly.
For a very large one-off payment — a full year prepaid in advance, tuition plus a year's housing — a direct bank SWIFT wire or a large-transfer specialist like OFX or Xe is a reasonable alternative, since the new USD 200,000 documentation-free threshold now comfortably covers most one-off payments at this scale.
One reused caveat worth repeating here: Wise's 2026 Thailand relicensing caps outward transfers from Thailand-registered accounts at ฿800,000 per day — relevant if you're trying to push a large one-time tuition-plus-housing payment through Wise in a single transfer. See our Wise review for the full detail.
Compared to inbound topics like retirement-visa funding, ASEAN NOW and r/Thailand discussion of sending money abroad for education or family support is noticeably thinner — which is itself a useful data point: this is a less friction-heavy transfer than the inbound, visa-linked ones elsewhere on this site. The one pattern that does recur isn't Thai-side regulatory friction at all; it's payments getting lost or unmatched at the receiving institution's end, the reference-code problem described above. Our practical advice follows that pattern: focus on getting the payment correctly reconciled on arrival, not on anticipating regulatory obstacles on the Thailand side that, for this specific scenario, mostly aren't there.
If instead you're sending smaller, regular amounts to support family rather than paying institutional fees, our family transfers guide covers that more frequent, lower-friction pattern — this page is really about the larger, often institutional payment.
If you're researching Thai citizenship or residency alongside a move that involves a child's schooling, our companion site has a dedicated guide to international schools in Thailand — the reverse-direction version of this question, for paying Thai school fees from abroad rather than sending money the other way.