Thailand's O-A visa: the insurance floor is USD 100,000.

In short: Thailand’s Non-Immigrant O-A visa requires health cover of at least USD 100,000 — 3,000,000 baht — including treatment of Covid-19, for the entire period of stay, in force since 1 October 2021. The 40,000-baht outpatient and 400,000-baht inpatient figures still quoted across forums are the old rule, which TGIA’s own guideline files under renewals before 1 September 2022.

Search “Thai retirement visa insurance” and the first page will tell you, confidently, that you need 40,000 baht of outpatient cover and 400,000 baht of inpatient cover. Those numbers were true. They stopped being true for new applicants in October 2021, and the Thai General Insurance Association’s own guideline now files them under a heading that should end the argument: “Renewal (before Sep, 1 2022)”.

The current requirement, from the same guideline and from the Royal Thai embassy instructions we read directly: cover of at least USD 100,000 — 3,000,000 baht — including treatment of Covid-19, for the entire period of stay. Not a small revision. The inpatient floor multiplied by seven and a half; the effective total by far more.

Why do the dead numbers survive?

The 40k/400k figures were the rule for three years, repeated by every forum, broker and blog of that era, and that content still ranks. Newer articles copy older articles. Brokers quote the policy they have always sold. The result is a rare and dangerous thing: a confidently, uniformly wrong first page of the internet — and an applicant who prepares against it arrives at the counter with a policy that fails by an order of magnitude.

Three structural reasons the error is so durable. It changed twice — October 2021 for new applicants, September 2022 for renewals — so an article written between those dates could be right about renewals and wrong about everything else, and gets quoted as though it were wrong about nothing. It changed for a category rather than for the country, so anyone whose mental model is “Thailand requires X” has nowhere to file the correction. And the old figures are still printed in the primary source: TGIA’s guideline carries them under a historical heading, so a reader who goes to the authority rather than a forum, and reads one line without its heading, leaves with the dead number and a citation to prove it.

We verified the correction against three primary sources on 2026-08-01: the TGIA guideline (which administers the approved-insurer list at longstay.tgia.org), the embassy instructions (which date the change to 1 October 2021), and the BOI’s LTR portal for the neighbouring rule. This is also a page we had to correct ourselves: an earlier version carried the old figures, flagged as unverified. They are gone, and we would rather say so.

How do I check the requirement for my own visa category?

The mandate attaches to the route, not to Thailand. Which is why “what does Thailand require” has no answer and “what does my route require” has four.

Non-Immigrant O-A, applied for at an embassy abroad. USD 100,000 / 3,000,000 baht including Covid-19 treatment, whole stay — and renewals have sat under the same regime since 1 September 2022, per TGIA.

O-X, the 5+5-year route. Insurance is mandated. We could not primary-verify the amounts, so we quote none — an O-X applicant budgeting against an O-A number is guessing.

LTR, via the Board of Investment. USD 50,000 of cover, or current Thai social security benefits, or a USD 100,000 bank balance held twelve months. Dependants: USD 50,000 each, or a USD 25,000 deposit.

Non-O retirement, applied for in country. Widely reported to carry no insurance mandate, resting on the 800,000-baht funds rule instead — a report we could not confirm in a primary text, so we flag rather than repeat it.

Then check it at the body that holds your file: TGIA’s guideline and approved-insurer list for the O-A, the BOI’s portal for the LTR, the embassy handling an application made abroad, the immigration office handling an extension made in country. Ask in writing, and date the question — for an application filed this month, what sum insured and what evidence will you accept — because an answer you can re-read survives a change of officer. Couples should ask about two files: TGIA notes an ineligible spouse is considered for a category O visa instead, with the marriage certificate as evidence — a different insurance position from yours.

What evidence does an immigration office actually want?

The floor is a number; the file is a set of documents, and applications stall on the second.

The policy, from an acceptable source. Thai or foreign, both accepted. Thai policies must come from the participating insurers listed on the TGIA long-stay site. A foreign policy must be documented on the official Foreign Insurance Certificate — completed, signed and stamped by the insurer. That form is the practical bottleneck: some international insurers sign it routinely, some slowly, some not at all. Written confirmation that yours will issue it, obtained before you pay the visa fee, is the cheapest sequencing on offer.

The sum insured, and the dates. The check is not only that the number clears the floor but that cover runs the whole permitted stay. Travel insurance is not accepted in place of health insurance — the substitution attempted most often, and the one that fails fastest.

The certificate again, later. TGIA states it is strictly required to be presented to immigration, and your permitted stay tracks your cover — so a lapse mid-year surfaces at extension, the worst moment to discover it. Diarise renewal sixty days ahead, and start early: underwriting at retirement age takes longer than the visa does.

How does the new floor change the insurance decision?

At 40k/400k, the visa insurance was a formality priced in hundreds of dollars, and many retirees bought the minimum and self-insured the rest. At USD 100,000 including Covid cover, for a 65-year-old with ordinary history, the premium is a real annual number — and that changes the shape of the decision in two ways.

First, the minimum policy and a good policy now cost much closer together. Once you are buying six figures of cover anyway, the marginal cost of buying it from an insurer you would want in a bad year — with evacuation, with a renewal guarantee, with Bangkok’s private hospitals in network — is small. The old strategy of “clear the threshold, ignore the product” made a kind of sense at 400,000 baht. It makes none at 3,000,000.

For scale: in the SIP Health Cost Index 2025, which prices comparable international cover across fifty countries, Thailand ranks 9th of 50 at about $9,854 a year — dearer than Switzerland, Spain, France, Germany and Italy. By profile, roughly $6,895 at 24, $9,621 at 35 and $13,047 at 50, the fifty-year-old costing 1.36 times the thirty-five-year-old. The explanation is not that Thailand is expensive: the premium prices the hospitals, not the country — which is why a Thailand budget built on the cost of living gets the insurance line wrong.

Second, the alternatives become worth pricing. The LTR floor is half the O-A’s, and can be substituted with money entirely. Choosing the visa used to be independent of the insurance question; at current floors it is large enough to drive the visa choice, and running the decision in that order — cover first — is worth ten minutes of anyone’s time.

When is a Thai domestic policy the right answer?

The usual counsel runs towards international cover, so the case against it is worth stating. A policy from a TGIA-listed Thai insurer removes the document bottleneck — no Foreign Insurance Certificate to chase, no insurer to persuade, a name the counter already recognises. If Thailand is the address rather than a chapter, that is a coherent choice rather than a compromise.

What you trade is portability. A Thai domestic policy generally ends at the border, so a life with long stretches outside Thailand is badly served by one — and whether the contract renews at seventy, or reprices against your own claims history, is answered by the wording rather than the visa rule. The argument for the international product is not that the Thai one fails the requirement. It is what happens when you leave.

What to check today

If you are applying for an O-A now: budget against USD 100,000, not a forum post; confirm in writing that your insurer will stamp the certificate; run the LTR arithmetic if you have the deposit. If you already hold an O-A from the old era: your renewal sits under the new regime on paper and under your local office’s practice in fact — one written question settles which, asked sixty days out. And if a broker quotes you a 40k/400k policy for a new application this year, you have learned something useful about the broker.

The full Thai picture — the route table, the personas, everything we verified and everything we flagged — is on our Thailand page.