Funding a Marriage Visa: The 400,000 Baht Rule Foreigners Get Wrong

The 400,000 baht rule trips up a lot of people — spend an hour on any expat-in-Thailand forum and you’ll find the same three questions about the marriage-visa financial requirement, asked over and over by people who’ve read three different guides and gotten three different answers: does the 400,000 baht have to come from abroad? How long does it actually have to sit there? And once the extension is stamped, can you touch it? The frustrating truth is that the core rule is simpler than people assume, but the details around it genuinely do shift from one immigration office to the next — so the confusion isn’t entirely anyone’s fault.

This is the extension of stay based on marriage to a Thai national — a one-year extension of a Non-Immigrant O visa, filed on the same TM.7 form as the retirement extension, but with its own financial rules that don’t map cleanly onto the 800,000 baht retirement figure most people have already half-memorized.

The three ways to qualify, in plain terms

Immigration gives you three routes to meet the financial requirement for a marriage extension:

• The 400,000 baht deposit method. That amount sits in a Thai bank account in your name (a joint account with your Thai spouse is generally accepted, though single-name accounts avoid any argument) for a minimum seasoning period before you apply.
• The 40,000 baht/month income method. Regular monthly income of at least that amount, historically evidenced with a letter from your home country’s embassy.
• The combination method. A bank deposit plus monthly income that together add up to the same 400,000 baht over a year — on paper, the same logic as the retirement visa’s combination option.

All three exist in the regulations. In practice, which ones are actually workable depends heavily on your nationality and your local office — which is most of what this page is about.

Does the 400,000 baht have to come from abroad?

No — and this is the single most common thing people get wrong, usually because they’re carrying over assumptions from the condo-purchase FET form or from the idea that a foreign visa requirement must involve foreign money. It doesn’t.

The practical upshot: if your spouse can move 400,000 baht into an account in your name from their own Thai savings, that satisfies the requirement exactly as well as money wired in from your home country. What immigration cares about is that the balance is there, in your name, for the required stretch of time before you file.

How long does it have to sit — and this is where it gets office-specific

The commonly cited national standard is a two-month seasoning period before your application date — shorter than the retirement visa’s two-months-before/three-months-after structure, and with no clearly published nationwide requirement to keep the money in place for a fixed period after the extension is granted.

That’s the rule on paper. In practice, expat forum threads on exactly this question turn up real variation between offices:

• Some offices (Phetchaburi/Cha-am, Samut Prakan among them, by reader and practitioner accounts) hold to the straightforward two-month-before rule with no after-grant hold.
• Others (Ratchaburi is a commonly cited example) want three months seasoned before you apply, not two.
• At least one office has reportedly asked applicants to keep the funds in place for a period after the extension is stamped too, despite that not being part of the published national standard — which tells you the safest posture is to ask your own office directly rather than assume the two-month figure applies everywhere.

On withdrawing the money: once your extension is actually stamped in your passport, you can generally withdraw it. Several long-time forum contributors note this plainly — the funds aren’t locked up for the full year the way people sometimes assume. But “generally” is doing real work in that sentence: your file stays open to scrutiny for as long as it’s under consideration, and if your specific office is one that expects the balance to stay intact a little longer, withdrawing the day the stamp goes in is the kind of thing that causes friction at your next renewal if an officer remembers your file. The safe, low-effort version of this: leave the money for a few weeks past the stamp date rather than clearing the account the same afternoon.

The 40,000 baht/month income route — and why it’s gotten harder

The income method was designed for people who’d rather show ongoing income than park a lump sum. The problem is how that income traditionally got verified: a letter from your home country’s embassy in Bangkok confirming your income met the threshold.

That route has largely closed for the two nationalities that used it most. The US Embassy stopped issuing income affidavits on 1 January 2019, stating plainly that the US government has no mechanism to verify individual incomes and couldn’t responsibly certify them. The British Embassy in Bangkok stopped its income-certification letter service around the same period. Both changes affected retirement-visa and marriage-visa applicants alike, and neither has been reversed.

If you’re American or British and were counting on an embassy letter, that option is not reliably available to you now. What still works:

• Thailand-based income. If you hold a Thai work permit and draw a salary here, immigration will generally accept your Thai payroll and tax documentation directly — no embassy letter needed, because the income itself is already documented inside Thailand.
• Twelve months of bank transfer records. Some offices will accept a clean, twelve-month history of at least 40,000 baht arriving monthly into your Thai account in place of a letter, though this is discretionary and not guaranteed to be accepted everywhere.

For most retirees and non-working spouses without a Thai income stream, the practical reality is that the embassy-letter route has quietly become the deposit method by default — not because the income option was formally withdrawn, but because the document that used to prove it is no longer issued.

The combination method: real on paper, inconsistent in practice

Some official summaries of the requirement describe a combination option identical in spirit to the retirement visa’s: a smaller bank deposit plus monthly income that together reach 400,000 baht across the year — for example, 200,000 baht on deposit plus 20,000 baht a month in verified income. It exists in the regulations, and it’s worth asking about if a pure deposit is inconvenient for you.

But it comes with the same weak link as the pure income method: the income leg still needs to be verified somehow, and if that verification runs into the same embassy-letter problem described above, the combination option collapses back to needing the deposit portion covered in full anyway. Some forum accounts from applicants who’ve tried it also suggest not every officer is equally familiar with processing a combination request for a marriage extension specifically — it’s a much more established pattern for retirement extensions, where officers see it constantly. If you want to use it, raise it with your office well before your renewal date, not on the day you file.

How this compares to funding a retirement visa

If you’re also weighing whether to fund your stay through the retirement route instead — or you’re helping a spouse understand why your two visa categories don’t work the same way — the differences are worth having side by side. Our retirement-visa funding guide covers the 800,000 baht deposit, its two-months-before/three-months-after structure, and why the FET form doesn’t apply there either. The short version: the marriage visa’s number is lower, its seasoning period is shorter on paper, and its office-to-office variation is more pronounced — so what worked for a retiree friend at a different immigration office is not a reliable guide to what your office will expect.

Moving the money in cleanly

A few habits make this easier regardless of which method you use:

1. If you are wiring money in from abroad rather than using a domestic transfer from your spouse, send it as one transfer rather than several smaller ones, and make sure the receiving account name matches your passport exactly. Neither of these is an immigration requirement, but both reduce the chance your bank flags the deposit for manual review before you need the funds seasoned.
2. Keep records of the transfer regardless of amount. Even though immigration doesn’t ask where the 400,000 baht came from, your bank might, particularly for a single large inbound transfer landing in an account that doesn’t usually see one — see our guide on why Thai banks are freezing foreigners’ accounts for what that scrutiny looks like and how to avoid it.
3. Get the bank letter fresh. Whichever method you use, the document immigration actually wants is a bank letter confirming the current balance, dated close to your submission date, plus your bank book photocopies — the same as the retirement extension.