Work Rules in Thailand for Companies with 10 or More Employees

A company has nine employees and its tenth person starts on 3 March. That date matters. Section 108 ties the duty to the point at which the employer has 10 or more employees, and the 15-day period for announcing the rules runs from that threshold event; it is not something to park until the next annual HR review.

The harder question is often who counts as an employee. The Act defines an employee by the substance of the relationship: a person who agrees to work for an employer in return for wages, regardless of the label used. A spreadsheet category such as contractor, part-time consultant or freelancer is therefore not a substitute for classification under the applicable labour law.

Outsourced arrangements need the same care. Thai labour law has separate provisions that can affect workers supplied through another party, so there is no safe universal formula that says every agency worker counts toward the threshold or that none of them do. Where the arrangement is borderline, identify the legal employer and the real working relationship before relying on the headcount.

Dropping back below 10 does not reset the clock. Once the employer has announced the rules under Section 108, Section 111 says it must continue to comply with Sections 108 and 110 even if the number of employees later falls below 10.

Statutory work rules are the employer's written framework for core working conditions and internal procedures. An employment contract does something different: it records the individual terms agreed with a particular employee. A company can need both, and a carefully drafted contract does not remove the Section 108 obligation once the threshold is reached.

This distinction is easy to miss in an international business. A regional office may already have a polished English handbook covering conduct, remote work, IT security and company culture. That can remain useful, but it does not by itself satisfy the Thai statutory requirement. The rules required by Section 108 must be in Thai and must cover the mandatory labour topics.

A document that looks complete but no longer matches the workplace is a weak control. If the written hours say one thing while the team follows another schedule, or if the leave section still reflects an older statutory entitlement, the gap is operational as well as legal. Employees and managers need to know which rule actually governs the situation before a dispute occurs.

The rules cannot contract out of mandatory minimum protections. Nor do they solve immigration issues for foreign staff: visas and long-stay status in Thailand and Asia, work authorisation and employment rules sit in related but separate legal layers.

Section 108 lists eight mandatory subjects, but a usable set of rules should do more than reproduce the statute. Each subject needs to answer a workplace question that a manager or employee could actually face.

The first group is time. The rules cover working days, normal working hours and rest periods, so the reader can tell what the normal schedule is and how it applies across shifts or teams. Holidays and the rules for taking them form the second subject. Overtime and holiday work are the third: the document should make clear how those situations are authorised and recorded, without pretending an internal policy can override statutory consent or payment rules.

The fourth subject is payment: when and where wages, overtime pay, holiday pay and holiday overtime pay are paid. The rules do not need to recreate payroll calculations, but they should remove ambiguity about the payment process. Leave and the procedure for taking leave are fifth. This is one of the fastest places for an old template to become misleading when statutory entitlements change.

Discipline and disciplinary measures are sixth. Employees should know what conduct the employer regulates and what measures may follow, while management should avoid inventing a universal punishment ladder that the law does not require. The seventh subject is grievances: the route must be more than a sentence telling staff to speak to a supervisor. Section 109 supplies minimum elements for how grievances are defined, handled, investigated, resolved and how people involved are protected.

The eighth subject is termination, severance and special severance. Internal wording cannot remove statutory entitlements. Read together, the eight subjects are meant to form a functioning set of employment rules, not eight headings copied from legislation and left disconnected from the way the company actually operates.

The weakest part of many rulebooks is not the schedule or leave table; it is what happens when something goes wrong. A line saying “speak to your manager” may look adequate until the complaint is about that manager, the facts are disputed or the employee is worried about retaliation.

Section 109 gives the grievance procedure a minimum structure. The rules should address what a grievance is, how it is submitted and handled, how it is investigated and considered, how it is resolved, and how the claimant and other people involved are protected. A 10-person company does not need a corporate bureaucracy, but it does need a route that still works when the complaint is uncomfortable.

Discipline should connect to that route. If the rules promise one process while managers improvise another, the written policy quickly loses credibility. Thai law does not require every employer to invent the same step-by-step warning ladder for every type of misconduct, so a company-specific disciplinary model should not be presented as a universal statutory sequence.

Termination sits at the end of the same chain. Internal rules can describe procedures and consequences, but they cannot erase statutory severance or other mandatory protections. Reading grievance, discipline and termination provisions together is a useful way to test whether the document behaves like one system rather than three unrelated sections.

Once the drafting is finished, the formalities matter. Section 108 requires the rules to be in Thai, announced within 15 days after the employer reaches 10 employees and kept continuously at the place of business or the employer's office. They must also be publicised and posted so employees can know about them and read them easily.

The 2017 amendment also allows electronic dissemination as an additional way to provide access. In a modern office that may mean an HR system, intranet or another stable channel where staff can retrieve the current version. The useful question is not whether the company owns a portal; it is whether an employee can identify the operative version without hunting through old attachments.

Filing is where older material causes the most confusion. The older English translation of the Act still contains the former requirement to send a copy to the authorities. Current Ministry of Labour e-Labour guidance and the Ministry's Q&A on this specific point state that employers are not required to file the work rules with the labour inspector under the current general procedure. The employer prepares, announces, retains and makes the rules accessible.

As an internal control, keep a version number, effective date and evidence of how the operative rules were made available. Those records are not a separate ninth statutory topic; they simply make it possible to show which text applied at a particular time.

Work rules become stale for two different reasons. Sometimes the business changes: hours move, payroll timing changes, overtime approvals are redesigned or responsibility for grievances shifts. At other times the company operates exactly as before while the law changes underneath it.

The 2025 labour protection amendment is a useful example. Labour Protection Act (No. 9) B.E. 2568 came into force on 7 December 2025 and increased maternity leave from 98 to 120 days, alongside other childbirth-related rights. A rulebook that still states the old entitlement is no longer made accurate by its original approval date; the statutory minimum applies and the document needs to catch up.

Section 110 creates a separate control point when the work rules themselves are amended. The employer must announce the amended rules within seven days from the date the amended version takes effect. That is different from the effective date of a new law, so HR needs to keep both dates straight and avoid a period where the internal text continues to state less than the law requires.

A smaller headcount is not a reason to freeze an old version. Section 111 keeps the Section 108 and 110 duties alive after the workforce drops below 10. For a small employer, the sensible review cycle is event-driven: revisit the rules when core operating practices change and whenever statutory minimums that the rules describe are amended.

The easiest failure to spot is a growing company with no Thai-language rules at all. The English handbook is on the shared drive and everyone has signed an employment contract, yet nobody has produced the statutory document covering the eight Section 108 subjects. A tidy HR folder does not cure that gap.

A subtler failure is a rulebook with missing mechanics. It may have a discipline section while the grievance route is one sentence, or it may discuss termination without covering special severance. Sometimes every heading is present, but an employee still cannot tell where to submit a grievance or which version of the rules is current.

The third problem is drift between paper and reality. Old rules refer to previous working hours, outdated leave entitlements or a manager who no longer handles complaints. In a dispute, that creates a basic evidence problem because different people can point to different versions of “company policy.” Version control and reliable employee access are simple ways to reduce that ambiguity.

Another recurring gap is reliance on the former filing process. Current dedicated e-Labour guidance says a copy does not need to be sent to the Director-General or an authorised person, although the older English translation still shows the superseded requirement. When official materials from different periods conflict, the current procedure needs to be identified rather than copied from the oldest English PDF.

Section 146 provides a monetary penalty of up to THB 20,000 for failure to comply with Section 108. The fine should not be the reason to maintain the rules. A dispute is harder to manage when the employer cannot show a coherent current procedure. Before adopting or revising the document, confirm the operative Thai text and current Ministry guidance for the date in question.