Inbound transfers — 800,000 baht seasoning rule
Our guide to funding a retirement visa covers the question everyone asks before they move here: what does immigration want to see, and does the money need a FET form behind it? This page is for a different, later question — the one that shows up on ASEAN NOW and ask.in.th every few weeks from people who’ve already been living here for a year or two: “Wait, is the seasoning period before my renewal two months or three? And my balance dipped for a few days last month — am I in trouble?”
The confusion is understandable. The rule changed in 2019, a lot of still-circulating guides and forum posts never got updated, and the annual renewal isn’t a separate, gentler rule from the initial deposit — it’s the exact same clock, running again, every single year you stay.
At a glance
There is only one seasoning clock for the 800,000 baht deposit method, and it resets every year: 2 months before you file, 3 months after you’re granted the extension. It applies identically whether this is your first retirement extension or your tenth. The “three months” you’ll still see quoted everywhere is a leftover from the rule as it stood before 1 March 2019.
The most common misreading isn’t about the number of months. It’s the assumption that the seasoning requirement is a one-time hurdle you clear when you first fund the visa, after which the annual renewals are just a formality. They aren’t. Thai Immigration’s financial-requirement order for the retirement extension (filed on a TM.7) ties the seasoning period to the date you file each application, not to when you first arrived on a retirement extension. That means every year, before you walk into the immigration office to renew, the 800,000 baht needs to have been sitting in the account, untouched, for the qualifying period counted backward from that filing date — exactly as it did the first time.
This is why people who’ve been on the deposit method for years still get caught out: they treat the first year’s seasoning as something they “did already” and assume renewal is lighter-touch. It isn’t. If you topped the account back up to 800,000 baht a month before your renewal appointment because you’d spent some of it during the year, you haven’t met the requirement — you’ve started the clock over.
Why you'll see both "two" and "three" months quoted
Before 1 March 2019, the pre-filing seasoning period for the 800,000 baht method was three months. Thai Immigration shortened it to two months before filing from that date onward — but the post-approval period, three months after the extension is granted, never changed. A lot of guides (and a fair number of forum answers) either never updated the pre-filing figure, or conflate the two different three-month periods. Both numbers are real; they just apply to different sides of your filing date.
Corroborated consistently across Thailand-based immigration law firms, translated Immigration Bureau guidance, and long-running ASEAN NOW and ask.in.th threads, the deposit-method timeline for both a first extension and every annual renewal after it runs like this:
Add it up and roughly five months of every twelve are “protected” months where the full 800,000 baht needs to be present and untouched. The remaining seven are lower-risk, but not risk-free — see below.
Where sources still disagree
Not everything here is settled. One widely-read independent retirement guide states the pre-renewal seasoning window is three months, not two, specifically for annual renewals (as distinct from a first-time application) — while the majority of law-firm summaries and forum-moderator consensus we found describe a single 2-month pre-filing window that applies to first extensions and renewals alike. We haven’t found an official Immigration Bureau source that explicitly splits the pre-filing period by first-time versus renewal. Given that disagreement exists even among well-informed sources, the safest practical move is the boring one: fund to 800,000 baht at least three months before your renewal date if you want to be safe under every version of the rule you’ll encounter, and ask your own immigration office directly if you’re cutting it closer than that — local offices are known to apply their own stricter conventions on top of the national rule regardless of what’s technically required.
If you’re using the combination method — a smaller deposit topped up with verified monthly income to reach 800,000 baht combined over the year, the route many American and British retirees have shifted to since their embassies stopped issuing income letters — the seasoning math has two separate parts that get mixed together constantly:
Where does the deposit portion land after its 3-month post-approval window closes? Here the sources genuinely conflict. One Thailand immigration-law firm we checked treats the combination method's floor the same as the pure deposit method — a flat 400,000 baht minimum. Translated Immigration Bureau guidance we found instead describes the post-window floor as 50% of the original deposit amount (a 300,000 baht combination deposit could drop to 150,000 baht, for example) — a materially different number from a flat 400,000 baht once your deposit component is smaller than 800,000 baht. If you're on the combination method, this is exactly the kind of detail worth confirming with your own immigration office or a lawyer before you plan a withdrawal around it, rather than assuming either figure applies by default.
This is the panic-inducing question behind most of the forum threads on this topic, and the honest answer has two different parts depending on when the dip happens.
A dip during one of the protected windows — the 2 months before filing, or the 3 months after approval — breaks continuity outright. The requirement is that the full amount sits there for the whole window, not that it averages out. If it drops below 800,000 baht for even a few days inside that window, the qualifying period generally has to restart from a later date once the balance is restored, which can push your filing date back or put a fresh extension already granted on shaky ground.
A dip after the post-approval window has closed — i.e., the balance falls below the 400,000 baht (or, on the combination method, the disputed 50%) floor before your next year's seasoning cycle begins — is a slightly different story. Experienced forum moderators on ASEAN NOW describe the extension as technically non-compliant from the moment it happens, but note that immigration has no live visibility into your account balance day to day. The real exposure shows up at your next renewal, when officers commonly ask for roughly 12 months of bank statements and can spot the gap retroactively. Reported outcomes at that point range from a straightforward denial, to officers accepting a reasonable explanation, to informal negotiated resolutions that we won’t detail here because they aren’t something to plan around — they're inconsistent, office-dependent, and not a substitute for compliance.
Neither path resets to zero automatically, and neither is something immigration is likely to notice in real time. But “probably won’t get caught until next year” is a bad foundation for a retirement visa, especially if you plan to keep renewing indefinitely. Treat both floors as real, not theoretical.
If your bank account has ever been queried or frozen — something that's become more common as banks tighten anti-mule-account monitoring, covered in our guide to why Thai banks are freezing foreigners' accounts — a clean, continuous seasoning history is also your best evidence that nothing unusual is going on. Ask your bank for a fresh balance letter each time you renew, keep every one of them, and if you're combining a deposit with monthly income, keep the transfer records too; that paper trail is what turns a borderline renewal into an easy one.
For anything genuinely uncertain — a health emergency that forces a withdrawal mid-window, switching methods partway through the year, or a local office applying a stricter rule than the national one — this is exactly the kind of edge case worth a short paid consultation with a Thailand immigration lawyer rather than a forum thread. The seasoning windows are unforgiving of timing mistakes in a way most other parts of the visa process aren't, and getting it wrong costs months, not baht.