What is BOI promotion, and would my business qualify?

Key Takeaways

• BOI promotion lets a foreign owner apply for a Foreign Business Certificate instead of a Foreign Business Licence, which is how a services company reaches 100 percent foreign ownership inside its promoted activity.¹
• The activity code most relevant to a services SME, TISO, is currently 10.1.1. Not 7.7, not 7.15. BOI’s own live FAQ page still shows the old 7.7 as you read this.²
• TISO carries no tax exemption. It sits in Group B: ownership, land and work-permit benefits only, gated by THB 10 million a year in sales and administrative spend, not by a capital figure.³
• The certificate protects only the activity it names. Revenue you earn outside that scope gets no shelter from it, and 2026 brought heavier reporting, not lighter.

In Detail

What BOI promotion actually changes

A BOI-promoted company can apply to the Ministry of Commerce for a Foreign Business Certificate in place of a Foreign Business Licence, for activities that sit in List Two or List Three of the Foreign Business Act.¹ That is the whole mechanism. It does not rewrite the Act. It gives you a different, faster route through it, for the specific activity the Board approves.

List One activities stay closed to majority foreign ownership no matter what BOI approves.¹ For List Two and List Three, a BOI-promoted company generally carries no BOI-imposed ownership cap, so most services, trading, software and creative-production businesses can reach 100 percent foreign ownership within the promoted scope.¹ Do not read that as an unconditional promise. Whether a given activity carries a cap is decided per activity code at application time, not by a general rule that applies to everything BOI touches.

TISO, and why the activity code keeps moving under you

TISO stands for Trade and Investment Support Office. It is the closest fit BOI offers for a regional headquarters, shared-services or back-office operation: monitoring group affiliates, business advisory work, servicing machinery sold to a group, or international business process outsourcing delivered over telecom networks.³ That description is illustrative, not a checklist to build a filing from. Verify the current activity’s exact scope against boi.go.th before you plan around it.

The activity’s number is worth dwelling on, because it demonstrates something about every BOI figure in this chapter. One BOI-published PDF labels the activity “7.15.”⁴ Several law firms instead cite “7.7.” Neither is current. Under the current BOI Investment Promotion Guide, the code is 10.1.1.³ That guide also confirms the older PDF’s numbering scheme, which used codes like 7.6 and 7.8.4 for media and software-park activities, has itself been superseded.⁴

Here is the part that should make you re-check before you file anything: BOI’s own live FAQ page, as of this writing, still answers questions about TISO under the superseded code 7.7.² A government source can be wrong about its own current rules. Every activity code in this chapter has been renumbered at least twice already. Re-verify each one against boi.go.th immediately before you rely on it, not against this guide, and not against BOI’s own FAQ either.

The qualifying bar for TISO is a minimum of THB 10 million a year in sales, general and administrative expenses.³ No separate paid-up capital figure is stated for TISO beyond that spending test.³ If your Thailand operation cannot plausibly spend THB 10 million a year running itself, TISO is not your route in, regardless of what your balance sheet looks like.

Software and digital: 8.1.1 and 8.1.2, with the same warning attached

If your business builds or modifies software rather than running a back office, the relevant codes are 8.1.1 for development and 8.1.2 for modification.³ This is a third numbering generation for the same underlying activity. It ran as separate software, e-commerce and digital-services categories until 2021, was folded into a single code 5.10, then split again into the current 8.1 structure by a later revision. Treat 8.1.1 and 8.1.2 exactly as you treat TISO’s 10.1.1: correct as of this guide’s research date, not guaranteed correct on the day you file, and worth a direct check against boi.go.th first.

Some secondary sources report that this category still carries a requirement to hire Thai IT staff at a combined salary of roughly THB 1.5 million a year, with an 8-year capped CIT exemption attached. We could not confirm either figure against a current primary BOI document, so treat both as reported, not settled.

The general minimum, and why it barely matters for a services business

BOI’s general minimum investment threshold is THB 1 million, excluding land and working capital.¹ For a services SME this is rarely the binding constraint. TISO’s real qualifying bar is the THB 10 million a year SG&A spend described above, which will usually be the harder number to hit. A small feasibility study or debt-to-equity test that applies to a large manufacturing project (BOI requires a full feasibility study above THB 2,000 million excluding land) simply does not come into play at the scale this guide is written for.¹

What the tax incentive is actually worth to you

BOI’s corporate income tax exemption runs in tiers. A1+ and A1 grant 8 to 10 years with no cap on the amount exempted. A2 grants 8 years capped at 100 percent of the investment. A3 grants 5 years at the same 100 percent cap. A4 grants 3 years, same cap. Group B gets no CIT exemption at all.¹

Be honest with yourself about which tier you will actually land in. TISO, the activity code most relevant to this audience, is Group B: non-tax incentives only.³ For most services activities in this profile, the ownership and non-tax package, not a CIT exemption, is the real benefit on offer.¹ A tax exemption you never collect because your activity does not qualify for one is worth nothing, and a great deal of BOI marketing content leads with the tax tiers without saying plainly that a services SME usually does not reach them.

The non-tax package still matters even where no tax break applies

Group B promotion, TISO’s category, still carries a real bundle: permission to own land for the promoted business, permission to bring in foreign experts and skilled workers with facilitated work permits and visas, and permission to remit currency abroad.¹ Outside BOI, majority-foreign companies are generally barred from owning land under the Land Code; a BOI permit under Investment Promotion Act Section 27 is one of the few ways around that.¹

Work permits and visas for staff of a promoted company run through the One Start One Stop Investment Center, which combines BOI, Immigration and the Department of Employment in one place.⁵⁶ More concretely: a BOI-promoted company is exempt from the Department of Employment’s general 4-to-1 Thai-staff-to-foreign-work-permit ratio and its registered-capital test. It follows BOI’s own headcount and quota conditions through a separate approval pathway instead.⁷ That exemption is confirmed by BOI’s own page. The 4-to-1 figure it exempts you from, for the record, has no traceable statutory source anywhere in Thai law; it is administrative practice that non-BOI companies live with regardless.

How the application actually runs

There is no government fee to submit or process a BOI application itself.⁸ What costs money is the work of preparing one: law firms report advisory fees in the very rough range of THB 100,000 to 500,000 depending on complexity. That is a market estimate from firms that sell this service, not an official schedule, so treat it as a planning range rather than a quote.

BOI reviews applications by project size. A project under THB 200 million is decided at working-group level within 40 working days. Between THB 200 million and THB 2 billion it goes to a sub-committee, 60 working days. Above THB 2 billion it goes to the full Board, 90 working days. Realistic elapsed time from first submission to certificate, once document preparation and the mandatory interview are added in, runs 4 to 6 months.

After approval, obligations do not stop at the certificate. BOI Notification Por. 8/2568 sets minimum monthly salary floors for expatriate positions in promoted companies and requires those salaries to be paid through the Thai entity rather than from overseas.⁹ It took effect 1 October 2025 for certificates issued after 5 June 2025, and 1 January 2026 for every other BOI-promoted company.⁹ A separate 70 percent Thai-workforce rule under the same notification applies only to manufacturers with more than 100 employees, so it will not reach most businesses this guide is written for, but the direction is worth noting: BOI compliance has been getting stricter through 2026, not looser.

The January 2026 package refresh

On 15 January 2026, BOI announced a refreshed set of investment promotion measures to replace programs that expired in 2025. Most of the new measures are open for applications from the first working day of 2026 through the last working day of 2027, with some closing earlier.¹⁰¹¹

One specific change inside that refresh is widely reported: an increase to the CIT exemption available to BOI-promoted SMEs for capability-improvement investment. We looked for BOI’s own text confirming the before-and-after figures and could not find it: the English SME policy page on boi.go.th returns a 404, and the Thai-language PDF we did retrieve extracted as unreadable, garbled text. We have left the specific numbers out of this chapter rather than repeat a figure we could not check. See the box below.

The honest downside

Almost nothing written about BOI promotion says this plainly, so we will. The certificate covers the activity named on it. It does not cover your business generally. If you earn revenue outside the promoted scope, whether from a second service line, a side project, or simple scope creep as the business grows, that revenue is not protected by your BOI status and can put you back inside ordinary Foreign Business Act exposure, the exact exposure BOI promotion was supposed to solve.

The compliance side is real and getting heavier. Revocation risk attaches to deviating from the approved activity, missing investment or timeline milestones, and late or missing reporting. Por. 8/2568’s tightened salary and payment rules, described above, took effect through 2025 and 2026, not before. Budget for ongoing reporting and inspection as a permanent cost of holding the certificate, not a one-time approval hurdle.

And a specific gap for this audience: across two separate research passes, we did not find a current BOI activity category sized for a wellness, spa or boutique education business at SME scale. The closest historical matches, hospitals needing a 50-bed minimum, retirement homes, training institutes requiring half their enrolment to be trainees, either need far more scale than a 5-to-50-staff business carries or come from the same superseded activity-list vintage flagged earlier in this chapter. If your business sits in this category, do not assume a BOI route exists for you. Check the live activity list yourself before you plan around one.

What this means for you

BOI promotion is a real answer to the ownership question this part of the guide keeps circling back to, for the activities it actually covers. It is not a shortcut around Thai regulation generally, and it is not free once you count the four to six months of preparation, the advisory fees, and the reporting that follows approval for as long as you hold the certificate. Ask what activity code your business actually matches, at BOI’s current numbering, before you ask what the tax exemption is worth.

Before you price a BOI application

• Have you checked your actual activity against BOI’s current, live activity list on boi.go.th, rather than against this guide, a law firm’s blog, or BOI’s own FAQ page?
• Can your Thailand operation plausibly spend THB 10 million a year in sales and administrative costs, if TISO is your route in? If not, TISO is not available to you regardless of capital.
• Have you confirmed which tier you land in, or accepted that your activity is Group B, non-tax, and priced the decision on ownership and work-permit access alone?
• Have you budgeted for 4 to 6 months of process and advisory fees, and for reporting obligations that continue for as long as you hold the certificate?
• Does every revenue line your business plans to run sit inside the activity you would get approved for? Anything outside it gets no protection from the certificate.
• If you run a wellness, spa or boutique education business, have you confirmed a BOI category actually fits you at your scale, rather than assuming one must exist?

Sources

11 sources for this article, 8 of them primary. Where we could not verify something, the article says so rather than estimating.

1. BOI One Start One Stop (primary), osos.boi.go.th
2. Thailand Board of Investment (primary), www.boi.go.th
3. Thailand Board of Investment (primary), www.boi.go.th
4. Thailand Board of Investment (primary), www.boi.go.th
5. BOI One Start One Stop (primary), osos.boi.go.th
6. Thailand Board of Investment (primary), www.boi.go.th
7. BOI One Start One Stop (primary), osos.boi.go.th
8. Thailand Board of Investment (primary), www.boi.go.th
9. Rajah & Tann Asia, www.rajahtannasia.com
10. Alvarez & Marsal, www.alvarezandmarsal.com
11. Emerhub, emerhub.com

This article is general information about doing business in Thailand and is not legal, tax, or financial advice. Every figure is cited with its source and its date. Thai regulation is changing quickly and rules current at publication may change without notice. Confirm anything you intend to act on with qualified Thai counsel.