What You Actually Get with BOI Promotion and Their Incentives

A BOI promotion certificate gets you far more than a tax break. You get a bundle of legal permissions a normal Thai company never sees, from owning land to bringing in foreign staff outside the usual quota, plus years of corporate tax you simply don’t pay.

Most people who look into BOI promotion stop at “no corporate tax for a few years.” That’s real, and for a profitable business it’s usually the biggest number on the page. But the tax exemption is only half of what the Board of Investment grants.

The other half is a set of non-tax permissions under the Investment Promotion Act that solve problems you run into almost immediately as a foreign business owner in Thailand: who can own land, who can bring in foreign experts, and who can move money out of the country without a fight.

Below we break down both halves, show how your tax break depends on which activity group your project falls into, walk through the extra incentives you can stack on top, and cover what BOI does not give you.

The Two Kinds of BOI Incentive

Everything BOI hands you falls into one of two buckets.

• Tax incentives lower or wipe out what you owe the Revenue Department: corporate income tax, import duty, and the tax on dividends.
• Non-tax incentives are legal permissions that have nothing to do with your tax return but change what your company is allowed to do, like foreign ownership, owning land or sponsoring foreign experts.

The Tax Incentives

There are several tax incentives you can get.

The Corporate Tax Holiday

The headline benefit is a corporate income tax (CIT) exemption on the net profit from your promoted activity. Instead of paying the standard 20% CIT, you pay nothing on that profit for a set number of years, and exactly how many depends on your activity group:

Activity group	CIT exemption	Cap on the amount
A1+	10 to 13 years	No cap
A1	8 years	No cap
A2	8 years	Capped at 100% of the investment
A3	5 years	Capped at 100% of the investment
A4	3 years	Capped at 100% of the investment
B	None	Keeps import duty relief and non-tax incentives

What the Cap on the Amount Means

That “cap on the amount” on A2, A3, and A4 is the total corporate tax you save, which can’t exceed the amount you actually invested in the project, not counting land and working capital. If your business is wildly profitable and hits that ceiling early, the exemption ends there even if you still have calendar years left on the certificate.

A1+ and A1 have no such cap, so the full run of years is yours no matter how much tax it adds up to. That uncapped exemption is a big part of why the top groups are worth chasing if your activity qualifies.

Group B sits at the other end.

A B activity gets no tax incentive at all, but it still keeps the import duty treatment and every one of the non-tax permissions further down this page.

For a lot of service and support businesses, group B is still very much worth having, because the foreign ownership and the ability to bring in foreign employees still make it worthwhile.

After the Holiday: The 50% Reduction

The exemption isn’t always a hard cliff edge.

Some projects qualify for a second phase once it ends: a 50% reduction on corporate income tax for up to 5 more years. This isn’t automatic on every certificate. It comes attached to the area-based incentives further down, so whether you get it depends on your activity group and where you invest.

Where it does apply, a project with 5 fully exempt years can follow that with another 5 years at half the standard rate before settling back to the full 20%.

Tax-Free Dividends

Dividends get the same shelter as the profit they come from. If you pay a shareholder a dividend out of profit you earned during the tax holiday, that dividend is exempt from the usual 10% withholding for as long as the exemption lasts.

Without this, you’d exempt your profit from corporate tax only to have the same money taxed again the moment it left the company as a dividend. It’s a quiet benefit that matters most to owners who plan to take profit out rather than reinvest all of it.

Import Duty Relief

The last tax piece is import duty. A promotion can exempt or reduce the duty on the machinery you import to run the business, and separately on the raw and essential materials used in production, including inputs for goods you export. For a manufacturing or import-heavy project this can be worth as much as the CIT exemption over the life of the project, and unlike the tax holiday it doesn’t wait until you’re profitable. We cover how the machinery and materials exemptions work, and how to claim them, in our full guide to BOI import duty exemptions.

Good to know: none of this is automatic. You claim the CIT exemption yourself, through your annual compliance and the e-Tax system, with an independent auditor’s sign-off. You also have to keep the promotion in good standing. Since March 2026 the Board requires a quarterly progress report through its e-Monitoring system, filed within 60 days of each quarter’s end. Miss it and your privileges, visa and work permit processing included, can be suspended until you file, with two consecutive misses enough to revoke the promotion outright.

The Non-Tax Incentives

These are permissions under the Investment Promotion Act that have nothing to do with your tax return, and they’re usually what actually changes how you operate day to day:

• Own your company outright (foreign ownership): your promoted activity is exempt from the Foreign Business Act, so the Board can approve full foreign ownership for it instead of forcing the usual Thai-majority structure. For most foreign founders this is the biggest draw of all. It’s granted per activity on approval rather than handed out automatically, which we cover further down.
• Own land (Section 27): you can own the land your promoted activity needs. Ordinary foreign-held Thai companies can’t own land outright, so this is one of the more consequential permissions on the list. If the promotion ends, you have to dispose of the land within a year, but for as long as you’re promoted it’s yours.
• Bring in skilled workers and experts (Sections 25 and 26): you can bring in the foreign specialists and technicians your project needs, processed through the Board rather than the standard immigration ratio.
• Remit money abroad in foreign currency (Section 37): you can send money out of Thailand in foreign currency for purposes tied to your promoted activity, such as repaying a foreign loan, returning capital, or paying a foreign shareholder.
• Enter Thailand to study investment opportunities (Section 24): before you’ve even set up the project, you can enter the country specifically to scope out the opportunity.

Foreign ownership and the skilled-worker permission are the two you’ll lean on most. Land solves a problem that otherwise pushes foreign investors toward long leases or nominee structures, and the skilled-worker route lets you bring in foreign staff without wrestling with the four-Thai-employees-per-foreigner ratio and the THB2,000,000 paid-up capital that an ordinary Thai company has to show for each work permit.

Good to know: the easier staff route still has rules. Since late 2025, foreign hires brought in under the Board have to meet minimum monthly salaries, roughly THB150,000 for an executive, THB75,000 for a management role, and THB50,000 for an operational one, and large manufacturers with more than 100 staff have to keep Thais at 70% of the workforce. The quota is far friendlier than a normal company’s, but it isn’t unlimited.

Extra Incentives You Can Stack On

The base exemption years by activity group aren’t the ceiling. BOI’s current framework lets you stack more on top, and you can qualify for more than one at once. They fall into a few groups:

• Spend on innovation (competitiveness enhancement): spend on R&D or technology equal to at least 1% of your sales revenue over your first 3 years, or at least THB200,000,000, whichever is lower, and you can earn 1 to 5 additional exemption years on a sliding scale tied to how much you spend.
• Invest where Thailand wants growth (area-based): set up in one of the 20 designated low-income provinces and you add 3 years of exemption.
  • A1 and A2 activities work differently here, taking a 50% CIT reduction for 5 years instead of extra full years. Locating inside a promoted industrial estate adds 1 year, though not for A1, A2, or B activities.
  • The current rules also cover bigger zones, each with its own package: the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC), the Special Economic Zones in the four regions and along the southern border, and the Science and Technology Parks such as Food Innopolis.
• Back a national agenda (agenda-based): some programs carry their own incentives, including the Smart and Sustainable Industrial Upgrade measure, local production of electric-vehicle and electrical parts, and community and social development projects.

These stack, but not without limit. The total CIT exemption you can reach caps at 8 years for most activities, no matter how many incentives you combine. The exception is at the top: A1+, A1, and A2 projects can stack their way up to 13 years total.

Good to know: these add-ons reward decisions you can plan for before you apply, like where you locate the factory or how much you budget for R&D. Building them into your application from the start is far easier than trying to qualify for them after the certificate is issued.

One Start One Stop Investment Center

This is another benefit for a BOI-promoted company in Bangkok. All BOI-related administration is handled through BOI’s One Start One Stop Investment Center at One Bangkok on Rama IV, and it’s where a promoted company handles company registration, visas, and work permits in one place instead of chasing separate government offices across the city.

The single window is itself a benefit of promotion that’s easy to overlook until you’ve felt how slow the normal route is.

What Decides Which Incentives You Get

Your group isn’t something you pick off a menu. It’s fixed to the activity you’re promoted for. BOI publishes more than 300 eligible activities across four official lists, and each one is tagged with its own group and its own conditions.

A software company and a food-processing plant can sit in completely different groups, which is why which activity you apply under matters as much as the incentive table itself.

Good to know: the current incentive framework runs under BOI’s 2023 to 2027 investment strategy, and new-project applications have to be in by the last working day of 2027 to fall under it. If you’re weighing a promoted project, it’s worth knowing the window has an end date rather than assuming today’s terms sit still forever.

What BOI Does Not Give

There are some benefits that the BOI doesn’t give.

It Isn’t Automatic 100% Foreign Ownership

The first assumption that trips people up is ownership. BOI promotion isn’t a blanket guarantee of 100% foreign ownership. What it actually does is exempt your promoted activity from the Foreign Business Act restrictions for as long as the promotion lasts, and let the Board set the shareholding structure for that specific activity.

Full foreign ownership is something the Board grants per activity, on approval, not something every certificate hands out automatically. Some promoted activities carry no equity restriction at all; others still carry conditions the Board sets case by case. The mechanism, and the handful of legal routes to genuine 100% ownership, is exactly what our guide to owning a Thai company outright walks through.

It Isn’t a Visa

The second is immigration status. BOI promotion is not a visa. It makes it far easier to bring in foreign staff, because the skilled-worker permission under Sections 25 and 26 lets you sponsor experts through the Board’s own process instead of the standard immigration ratio.

But to work in a BOI promotion company, a foreigner still needs a visa and a work permit.

It Isn’t Permanent, and It Isn’t Unconditional

The incentives run for the life of the promotion and no longer. The tax holiday has a fixed number of years, the land right ends when the activity does, and the whole package depends on you meeting your conditions and filing your reports on time.

Treat the certificate as something you maintain, not a permanent upgrade you switch on once and forget. Everything you have to do to keep it is in the annual compliance guide.

The Personal Incentives That Sit Alongside It

Everything above is a benefit to the company.

There are separate incentives aimed at the people running it, and they pair naturally with a BOI setup.

• The LTR visa gives qualifying professionals a 10-year stay, a 1-year reporting cycle instead of the usual 90 days, and, for highly-skilled hires in targeted sectors, a flat 17% personal income tax rate plus an exemption on overseas income brought into Thailand.
• The SMART visa covers startup founders and their families with no separate work permit needed. Neither is a BOI product, but both draw on the same targeted-industry logic, and a promoted company is often the cleanest way for a foreign team to qualify.

If you’re still deciding whether promotion is worth the paperwork at all, our comparison of a BOI company versus a regular Thai limited company puts the two side by side.