Thailand 90-Day Report: TM47 Deadlines and How to File

A visa expiry date is easy to remember, which is exactly why people sometimes use the wrong date for TM47. The 90-day report follows a separate rule: a foreign national who has permission to stay temporarily and remains in Thailand continuously for more than 90 days must notify Immigration of their current residence. The duty is tied to continuous presence, not to the printed validity of a visa sticker or extension. Staying at the same address for the whole period does not remove the reporting duty: TM47 is a recurring notification that the long stay is continuing.

TM47 does not give you extra time in Thailand. The official receipt itself states that it is not an extension of stay. You can therefore be fully up to date with 90-day reporting while still having a separate extension or permission-to-stay deadline to manage. The reverse is also true: extending your stay does not automatically complete the next 90-day report.

TM30 is another process again. It is the accommodation notification made by the house-master, owner, possessor or hotel manager in the situations covered by the immigration rules; it should not be interpreted as a substitute for your TM47 clock. There are also confirmed exceptions to the standard 90-day cycle. LTR holders use annual address reporting, including TM95 under the LTR process, while Smart Visa holders have their own one-year reporting procedure. If you hold one of those statuses, follow that programme’s current rules; ordinary TM47 should not be assumed.

The easiest mistake is to translate “90 days” into “three months” and count from whichever immigration date is most visible in the passport. Calendar months vary in length, and your visa expiry, extension date or TM30 record may have nothing to do with the TM47 start point. After an international arrival, the first reporting cycle runs from that latest entry. Once a 90-day report has been accepted, the next appointment date shown on the receipt becomes the practical reference if you remain in Thailand.

A simple calendar example shows why the wording matters. If someone entered Thailand on 1 January 2026 and did not leave again, treating the arrival date as day one puts day 90 on 31 March: January contributes 31 days, February brings the running total to 59, and another 31 days in March reaches 90. That is an illustration, not a substitute for the date in your own immigration record or previous receipt. If you file early, do not invent the next deadline by adding 90 days to the day you happened to submit. Use the new appointment date on the approved receipt; otherwise a small manual counting error can accumulate across several cycles.

International travel is the event that changes the clock. Imagine your previous receipt showed 15 July as the next reporting date, but you flew to Singapore on 20 June and re-entered Thailand on 27 June. The old 15 July appointment is no longer the date you should keep counting toward; the new cycle runs from the 27 June arrival. A domestic trip from Bangkok to Phuket or Chiang Mai does not have the same effect because you never left the Kingdom. That matters for residents who travel frequently inside Thailand: a hotel change, domestic flight or temporary stay in another province is not a new international arrival date for the 90-day clock.

This is where people who otherwise keep excellent records get caught. They save the old TM47 receipt, travel for a week, return, and then continue using the old reminder in their phone. After an international re-entry, rebuild the reporting calendar from the new arrival date. If you have not left Thailand, keep the previous receipt because its next appointment date remains the most useful reference for the following cycle.

Keep your permission-to-stay date on a separate line in your calendar. That date controls how long your current immigration status lets you remain in Thailand. The TM47 due date controls when you must make the next long-stay address notification. One does not replace or extend the other.

Online filing works well when your immigration record is already consistent and you are inside the window accepted by the TM47 system. You submit through the official service and the application moves into a pending status for review. Pending is not the finish line. Treat the report as complete only when it is approved and you can save the new receipt and appointment date. The system manual uses English-language data entry and sends status information through the account and registered email.

In-person filing is the cleanest fallback when the system cannot match your details, you have a new passport, or the deadline is getting close. The correct office is the one responsible for the area where you live. A single nationwide address would be misleading: Bangkok and provincial residents are handled through different immigration units, and service locations can change. Going in person is particularly useful after a passport replacement or when the online service cannot reconcile your record.

An authorised representative can also lodge the notification where the procedure allows it. That does not remove the need for accurate records, the required signature or any local supporting documents. If someone else is filing for you, use the requirements of the office that serves your address, because provinces can differ in the supporting copies they request.

Registered mail remains an official route, but it is designed for early filing. Immigration guidance requires the package to be sent in advance and the registration receipt to be retained. That makes post a poor rescue option for somebody who remembers TM47 only when the due date is almost here; there may be no time left to correct a missing document or a delivery problem. Older official checklists still refer to passport copies, the previous TM47 receipt, a return envelope and legacy TM6 details. Since TDAC replaced the paper arrival card, use the current checklist of the office receiving your mail instead of copying an old document list unchanged.

The sensible choice is driven by time and record quality, not by which channel sounds easiest on paper. A pending online application can be perfectly normal, but a rejected application — or one that never reaches approval — should not be treated as a completed report. Filing online early leaves room to move to the local immigration office or another permitted route if the system does not resolve in time. That buffer also matters when a public holiday, planned trip or extension appointment sits near the same date: the tasks may be adjacent in your calendar, but each one needs its own completed process and evidence.

The online system should not be treated as automatic approval for every report. Its current manual lists incomplete data, filing at the wrong point in the reporting cycle and a duplicate application while an earlier one is still pending among the reasons a request may not be accepted. There is also a specific rule for a new passport: Immigration guidance says the online service may not support that report until the passport record has first been updated through the appropriate Immigration Office; later cycles can then return online. Having an account does not guarantee that the underlying immigration record already matches a new passport or the latest arrival, so a refusal after a data change does not mean the reporting duty has disappeared.

A mismatch in an older immigration record, a name or passport-number discrepancy, or address data can also cause trouble, but not every error message is published as a formal legal ground for refusal. The practical test is simpler: do you have an approved receipt before your permitted filing period runs out? If the application is rejected, or remains unresolved too close to the deadline, move to an allowed offline channel and contact the Immigration Office responsible for your address.

Email reminders are useful, but they are not a legal guarantee. Travel, a new passport or a changed reporting cycle is a good reason to keep your own due-date record instead of waiting for the system to tell you what to do.

Being late is not the same as missing a reminder you set for yourself. The Immigration Bureau public handbook gives a general filing window from 15 days before the appointment date to 7 days after it. The TM47 online manual is narrower in wording and describes online submission as advance filing within 15 days before the due date. Do not assume the seven-day post-due period is also guaranteed for online filing. That post-due allowance is a general reporting window around the appointment date, not a new date from which you should manually build the next 90-day cycle; once the report is accepted, use the next date issued on the receipt.

Once the permitted window has been missed, the handbook directs a late reporter to deal with the notification in person. It publishes a 2,000-baht fine for someone who comes forward with an overdue report. The TM47 form itself also carries a warning that the fine for overdue notification does not exceed 5,000 baht. Those figures should not be collapsed into one supposed fixed penalty: 2,000 baht is the handbook figure for the ordinary late self-reporting scenario, while 5,000 baht is the higher ceiling printed on the form.

A late TM47 is not visa overstay. Overstay means remaining in Thailand beyond your permitted stay; a missed 90-day report is a separate reporting breach and can exist even while your permission to stay is still valid. That distinction is reassuring, but it does not make the missed report irrelevant to future immigration dealings. The reverse is equally important: an on-time TM47 does not cure overstay if your permission to remain in Thailand has already expired.

If you are already outside the normal reporting window, an old screenshot or forum answer is a weak basis for deciding what to do. Confirm the late-report procedure with the Immigration Office that holds responsibility for your address, because the correct next step depends on your record and the rules being applied when you attend.