What It Actually Costs to Overstay a Thai Visa
A one-day overstay is 500 baht and a short conversation. A six-month one is 20,000 baht, deportation, and a re-entry ban that is recognised well beyond Thailand's own borders.
There is no tiered table, no escalating multiplier and no 50,000 baht cliff. Thailand charges 500 baht a day and stops counting at 20,000. What makes an overstay genuinely expensive is the ban that arrives on the other side of roughly 90 days, and the fact that the consequence follows your nationality around the region rather than staying with your passport.
Last verified 15 September 2026.
The published fine schedule
It is one rate, and it is a daily rate, which is the first thing almost everybody gets wrong.
500 baht for every day you are over. Not a flat fee for the first month. Not a tier. The arithmetic is days multiplied by 500.
20,000 baht is the cap, and you hit it on day 40. That is the entire schedule. One day over is 500. Ten days is 5,000. Thirty days is 15,000. Forty days is 20,000, and forty days is also four hundred days, also four years.
There is no grace period. Day one is a real overstay. A flight at 23:50 on your expiry date with a check-in that closes at 21:00 is an overstay of one day and it costs 500 baht, and the officers will tell you that with total cheerfulness.
Children under 15 are not fined. They are still stamped as overstaying. This is a genuine and slightly absurd asymmetry that has caught out a lot of families.
What is not in the fine: detention costs, if you are held, and any replacement flight you miss while standing at the counter. The fine is the cheap part.
The ban, which is the real cost
90 days is the line. Under it, an overstay is an administrative fine and you walk out. Over it, it stops being a fine and becomes a deportation and re-entry ban, with the length set by how far past 90 days you went: one year, three, five, or ten.
Because the cap is 20,000 baht, the fine stops discriminating long before the ban does. A 45-day overstay and a five-year overstay cost you the exact same money. Only one of them follows you to the next border. This is the single most important thing to understand about the system, and it is genuinely counter-intuitive: the price stops rising precisely when the stakes start.
A ban is regional, not national. Thailand shares immigration enforcement through the ASEAN framework, and a Thai blacklist entry has historically been recognised by neighbouring countries. The practical consequences: you will be denied entry to Thailand again, and you may be refused at other ASEAN borders including Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. For someone who crosses the region several times a year, that is the cost that matters and it dwarfs 20,000 baht.
Detention sits above 200 days, not at 90. Thai police do sweep areas popular with budget travellers, and those arrested can be held in the Immigration Detention Center until the fine is paid and a ticket out is arranged. Past roughly 200 days, time served before deportation becomes a real possibility rather than a theoretical one.
What actually happens at the airport
It is handled, and it is routine. This is the most reassuring thing on this page. Immigration at Suvarnabhumi and at the other major international airports processes overstays daily. You are asked how long you have been in the country, the fine is calculated, you pay it at the counter with a card, and you leave.
It takes between 30 minutes and a few hours. The delay is administrative, not punitive.
You can also resolve it before you fly, at an immigration office, and the fine is the same. This is worth doing if you have a flight you cannot afford to miss, and the office is a much quieter place to do it.
The three situations that are genuinely bad
Flying out of a small regional airport without checking. Don Mueang, Krabi, Hat Yai and the provincial airports handle this and it is fine, but the process is less smooth and occasionally involves being held while someone telephones a central office. Suvarnabhumi and Phuket are the smooth ones.
Losing your passport in Thailand. If you cannot produce a passport at the airport you cannot be fined and released, because the system needs the document. A police report and an embassy replacement is the route, and it is slow.
Overstaying on a visa that has run out entirely and needing to fly out of a country other than Thailand. If you have been out of the country without authorisation, exiting through another country is the complicated version and it is a genuinely different conversation with a different country's immigration.
What does not happen
Nobody is arrested for a straightforward overstay. Detention exists in Thai law and it happens in a small number of cases involving something other than an overstay, but a person who overstayed by three weeks and walks up to the immigration desk is fined and deported, not detained.
Nobody follows you home to demand payment. The fine is payable at the border and is not pursued internationally.
If you are overstayed right now
Work out the number before you fly. Count from the date in your arrival stamp, not from the day you think you arrived. Days times 500, capped at 20,000, means you know your number to the baht before you reach the counter. Knowing that is worth more than the anxiety.
Go to an immigration office before you fly if the flight matters. Chiang Mai, Phuket, Hat Yai and Samui all have offices that do this. Same money, no risk of an airport queue eating your connection.
Carry evidence of onward travel and accommodation. This has nothing to do with the fine and everything to do with the question asked at the desk, and the two questions are different.
Do not attempt to fix it by leaving for a day and coming back. A one-day exit from Thailand does not automatically reset an overstay in progress, and a border run while in that position is a documented thing that gets worse.
The one rule that would have prevented all of this
Photograph your arrival stamp, on the day you arrive. The date in that stamp starts the clock. Everything above this line exists because that date was not recorded, or was misremembered, or was a booking somebody else made. It takes four seconds and it is the single most useful habit in a trip involving any visa at all.
