Key Takeaways
- Forty occupations are closed or restricted to foreigners: 27 under absolute prohibition, and 13 conditional, split 3 needing a treaty basis, 8 conditional on skill or registration, and 2 open only to CLMV nationals under bilateral labour deals.
- A reserved occupation restricts the role, not the ownership. You can own the company. You cannot personally do the listed job.
- Retail selling, tour guiding, hairdressing and beauty work, and most hands-on craft work are closed to you outright. Management, strategy, business development and finance are not.
- Your work permit names your position and your workplace. Doing anything outside what it names is an offence, even while the permit itself is valid.
In Detail
The current list, and why the count changed
The occupations closed to foreigners were reorganised in 2022 into a new structure that replaced the 1979 list of 39 prohibited jobs.1 If you read something citing 39 restricted occupations, it is describing the old regime. The current structure holds four lists totalling 40 occupations. Three independent sources, an NGO advocacy brief, Khaosod English and Nation Thailand, agree on the same breakdown.12
As of this writing, the list has not been amended since 2022.2
What actually lands on a Singapore services business
Most of List 1 is irrelevant to a services company: wood carving, hand-weaving of cloth, lacquerware making, hand-rolling cigarettes and Thai musical instrument making are not occupations a Singapore owner was ever going to perform. Four categories on the list do recur in the kind of business this guide is written for.
Retail and market trading. Peddling and shop-floor selling are List 1 occupations, absolutely closed to foreigners. Retail selling also appears as a List 4 occupation, meaning the only foreign nationals who can be hired to do it at all are CLMV workers under a bilateral agreement, not a Singaporean.2
Tourism and guiding. Tour guiding and tour operator work are on List 1. If your business is travel, tours or destination services, you can own and run the company, but you cannot personally lead a tour group or hold the guide licence yourself.2
Hairdressing and beauty services. Also List 1. A Singapore owner opening a salon, spa or grooming business can own it outright and manage it, but cannot personally cut hair or perform the treatments.2
Manual and craft occupations. Clerical and secretarial work, and brokerage or agency work, are also List 1, alongside driving a non-cargo motor vehicle and Thai traditional massage. These catch owners who plan to do their own admin, their own driving, or their own front-line client brokering.2
List 2’s conditional professions, accounting, engineering and architecture, are less useful than they look. Most day-to-day work in these fields also needs a Thai professional licence regardless of what this list says, so the list is rarely the binding constraint for a Singapore owner in practice.2
The point that matters: this restricts the role, not the ownership
This is the single most useful thing to understand about the whole list. Nothing in the Foreign Business Act or the reserved-occupations regulation stops a foreigner from owning a business whose staff perform a reserved occupation. A Singapore owner can own 100 percent of a hair salon, a tour company or a retail shop, subject to the ownership rules in the beneficial ownership question. What the owner cannot do is stand behind the chair, lead the tour, or work the till themselves.
The standard structure is for the foreign owner to hold a role the list does not touch, typically Managing Director, General Manager, or another management or executive position. Management and executive roles are not prohibited occupations, and a foreign owner is routinely issued a work permit under that title even in a small company, provided the usual entity, capital and staffing conditions are met.3
Where the business genuinely needs someone doing the reserved, hands-on work, the practical answer is to hire Thai staff for that specific function and keep the foreign hire’s job description in management, technical or strategic territory the list does not cover.4 Put plainly: the salon owner manages the business, sets pricing and standards, and handles supplier and landlord relationships. The Thai-licensed stylists cut the hair.
Why this bites even with a valid work permit
A work permit is not a general licence to work in Thailand. It names a specific position and a specific workplace. Working outside what the permit names is itself an offence, separate from the question of whether you hold a permit at all. An employer who allows an employee to work outside the permitted scope faces a fine of THB 10,000 to 100,000 per worker, rising to imprisonment of up to one year and a fine of THB 50,000 to 200,000 per worker on a repeat offence, plus a three-year bar on employing foreign workers.5 A foreign worker found working outside their permitted scope faces a fine of THB 5,000 to 50,000, deportation, and a two-year bar on obtaining a new permit.6
This is the trap for an owner who holds a legitimate Managing Director work permit and then, on a quiet afternoon, personally serves a customer or drives the delivery van. The permit itself is not the problem. The act falls outside what it names.
BOI and LTR routes
Two exemptions change the mechanics without changing the underlying prohibition. A BOI-promoted company applies through BOI’s Section 24 or Section 25 process, which grants work permits tied to specific approved positions such as Expert, Manager or Advisor within the promoted activity. This sidesteps the general Department of Employment ratio and capital tests, but it does not put a reserved occupation back on the table. It is BOI promotion’s route, applied here.7
The Long-Term Resident visa, covered in company types, gives its Wealthy Global Citizen, Wealthy Pensioner and Highly-Skilled Professional holders a streamlined digital work permit. It changes how fast and how cheaply the permit is obtained. It does not change what occupations remain closed to a foreigner.
**The effective date of the 2022 reserved-occupations regulation** is genuinely unsettled. One source gives 3 February 2022, the date of Royal Gazette publication, Volume 139, Special Section 43 Ngor. Another gives 1 April 2022, described as the date the Ministry of Labour issued its notification. We could not pin which is correct, and no primary Gazette text was retrieved to settle it. A plausible reconciliation exists: a 60-day delay between Gazette publication and an instrument taking legal effect is a recognised general mechanism in Thai administrative law, and 3 February plus roughly 60 days lands close to 1 April. That would make both dates true of different things, publication versus effect, rather than contradictory. We present it that way rather than picking one, because we could not confirm the mechanism applies to this specific instrument.2
**Bangkok Post's own explainer on the 40-occupation list** was paywalled on both fetch attempts, so we could not cross-check the 27/3/8/2 breakdown against a mainstream financial-press source. The three sources we did use agree with each other, but none of them is a general-interest outlet.8
Closing Part Three
You now have the shape of the people question. Ownership, ratios, visas and reserved occupations all point at the same design decision: structure your own role as management, strategy, business development or finance, and let Thai staff or Thai-licensed professionals perform anything the law reserves to them. Part Four turns to the other half of running the company: what you will owe, and what you must file.
Before you plan your own day-to-day role
- Does any part of your day-to-day plan for yourself, selling, guiding, styling, driving, brokering, fall on List 1? If so, that part has to go to Thai staff.
- Is your own work permit application titled as a management or executive role, and does the title actually describe what you intend to do?
- Have you told the people around you, family, co-founders, that you cannot fill in on the shop floor yourself, even briefly, even in an emergency?
- If accounting, engineering or architecture is part of your business, have you separately checked the Thai professional licensing requirement, not just this list?
- Would BOI promotion or an LTR visa change your compliance burden here, or only the speed and cost of getting the permit? Check BOI promotion and company types before assuming either one solves the occupation question.
This article is one of twenty-four chapters. The complete guide adds six working tools: a registered-capital worksheet, an annual compliance calendar, an incorporation document checklist, a partner due-diligence checklist, a setup cost and timeline comparison, and a decision tree for choosing your structure.
Sources
8 sources for this article, 1 of them primary. Where we could not verify something, the article says so rather than estimating.
- Winrock International, winrock.org
- Khaosod English, www.khaosodenglish.com
- Acclime Thailand, thailand.acclime.com
- Rainier Siam, rainier-siam.com
- Royal Thai Government, www.thailand.go.th
- Royal Thai Government, www.thailand.go.th
- BOI One Start One Stop (primary), osos.boi.go.th
- Bangkok Post, www.bangkokpost.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.