Restaurant Taxes in Thailand: What to File, and When You Must Register for VAT

Updated 17 October 2026 · Bunchee team

Most restaurant owners got into this because they can cook, not because they understand tax. Then the shop gets busy, PromptPay transfers land every day, and the same questions start nagging: "Do I need to file? Should I be registered for VAT yet? What happens if I don't?" This article answers them in the language of someone running a shop, not an accountant, using numbers small restaurants in Thailand actually deal with.

One honest caveat first: tax has a lot of case-by-case detail. The figures and thresholds here reflect the rules the Thai Revenue Department applies at the time of writing. If you have several income sources, business partners, or sales close to the thresholds discussed below, check with the Revenue Department or an accountant before you decide anything.

Which taxes does a restaurant deal with?

A typical small restaurant touches four or five taxes and contributions. Not every shop pays all of them; it depends on your sales and how the business is set up:

Land and building tax is the landowner's responsibility. If you rent, you normally don't file it yourself, but some landlords pass it on in the rent, so check your lease.

1. Personal income tax: where most shops start

If you run the shop in your own name without a company, income from selling food is section 40(8) income. The principle: take the year's sales, subtract expenses, subtract allowances, and apply the progressive rate bands. The decision you have to make is whether to deduct expenses using the flat rate or actual expenses.

• Flat 60% deduction — the Revenue Department lets you treat expenses as 60% of sales with no receipts required. Simple, and no risk of having your evidence challenged. But a real restaurant's ingredients, wages, rent, gas and electricity usually add up to 75–90% of sales, so the flat method makes your "taxable profit" higher than your real one.
• Actual expenses — deduct what you really paid, backed by evidence: receipts, tax invoices, the lease, wage slips, utility bills. Closer to reality, but fresh produce bought at the market without a receipt can't be deducted, and you must keep the evidence for at least 5 years.

After expenses you subtract a ฿60,000 personal allowance (plus ฿60,000 for a spouse with no income, children, insurance, funds and so on as applicable). What's left is your "net income", taxed at the progressive rates:

Example: a made-to-order shop with ฿1.5M in annual sales

This shop sells about ฿4,100 a day, or ฿125,000 a month, so it's under the VAT threshold. Here's the tax both ways:

If the same shop keeps full evidence and its real expenses are 82% of sales (฿1,230,000), net income is 1,500,000 − 1,230,000 − 60,000 = ฿210,000, and the banded tax is 60,000 × 5% = ฿3,000. But the law also has a minimum tax for anyone with ฿120,000 or more of 40(8) income: you must also compute 0.5% of gross sales (1,500,000 × 0.5% = ฿7,500) and pay whichever is higher. So this shop pays ฿7,500.

The gap between ฿33,500 and ฿7,500 is the price of "not keeping receipts": ฿26,000 a year for a shop this size. It's the same reason we argue in Simple restaurant bookkeeping that you should log expenses daily from day one — not for the tax office, but for yourself.

You file twice a year, not once

The mistake new owners make most often: 40(8) income requires a PND.94 half-year return covering January–June, due by 30 September, and then a PND.90 full-year return by 31 March of the following year. Tax paid at the half-year is credited against the full-year amount. You can file online at efiling.rd.go.th, which usually gives you about 8 extra days. Miss the half-year return and there's a fine of up to ฿2,000 plus a surcharge of 1.5% per month on any tax due.

2. VAT: the ฿1.8 million line many shops cross without noticing

A restaurant must register for VAT when sales exceed ฿1,800,000 in a year. That sounds like a lot, but it's only about ฿5,000 a day, or ฿150,000 a month. A made-to-order shop selling 120 plates at an average of ฿60, with a bit of delivery on top, gets there comfortably.

What you need to know about this threshold:

1. It counts sales from every channel — dine-in, PromptPay, cash, and delivery apps at the price the customer paid, not what's left after the 30% GP. Shops that sell heavily through apps hit the line sooner than their bank balance suggests.
2. It's measured over the calendar year, and you must apply within 30 days of the day cumulative sales pass ฿1.8M, not at year-end.
3. Getting out is hard — if sales drop the following year, you need to stay under the threshold for a sustained period before you can deregister, and you must still file PP.30 every month, even when the month's sales are zero.
4. Registering late is expensive — the Revenue Department can assess VAT back to the date you should have registered, plus a penalty of up to twice the tax and a surcharge of 1.5% per month. A shop that has been over the line for two years without realising can face a six-figure bill in one go.

Also worth knowing: banks must report to the Revenue Department every account that receives 3,000 or more deposits a year, or 400 or more deposits totalling at least ฿2 million. A shop taking dozens of PromptPay payments a day is certainly in that data, so filing properly from the start is safer than waiting to be asked.

VAT bites restaurants harder than other businesses

Most businesses that register for VAT charge 7% to customers, then offset the VAT they paid on their own purchases (input tax), and remit the difference. Restaurants have two weak spots:

• Your main ingredients carry no VAT to offset — fresh meat, vegetables, eggs, rice and fresh market produce are VAT-exempt agricultural goods, so however much you buy there's no input tax to credit. Rent is exempt too. What you can actually offset is gas, electricity, packaging, sauces from the wholesale store and delivery-app GP fees — and only with a tax invoice from the seller every time.
• A 7% price rise in one go is hard to sell — a ฿60 fried rice becomes ฿64.20 and customers don't understand why. Most shops keep the same price "VAT included", which means the revenue the shop actually keeps drops by 7/107, about 6.5%, overnight.

Here's a shop with ฿200,000 in monthly sales (฿2.4M a year) that keeps its prices unchanged:

That's about ฿125,000 a year gone from profit. If this shop was netting ฿25,000 a month before VAT, nearly half its profit disappears while it sells exactly as much as before. This is why a shop approaching ฿1.8M needs a plan rather than waiting to cross the line and thinking about it afterwards. The usual options are raising menu prices gradually in advance, using the approach in How to price your menu for real profit, or, if you decide to stay under the threshold, genuinely controlling sales to stay under it, not just leaving them off the books.

3. Sole trader or company?

This comes up constantly, and the answer isn't automatically "a company pays less tax". An SME company (paid-up capital up to ฿5M, revenue up to ฿30M a year) pays tax on net profit: the first ฿300,000 is exempt, ฿300,001–3,000,000 is taxed at 15%, and anything above at 20%. That looks cheaper than personal rates that climb to 35%, but there are hidden costs:

• You must keep statutory accounts, close the books and have a licensed auditor sign off every year. For a small shop that's roughly ฿20,000–60,000 a year.
• The company's money isn't your money. Taking it out means a salary (taxed again as personal income) or a dividend (10% withholding).
• You must withhold tax when paying rent (5%) and services (3%) and file PND.3/53 every month.
• Financial statements go to the Department of Business Development annually, and the paperwork multiplies.

The rule of thumb most accountants use: if your real net profit is under roughly ฿700,000–800,000 a year, the sole trader almost always wins once bookkeeping fees are included. A company starts to pay off when profit is high enough that your top personal rate passes 20%, or when there's a non-tax reason: several partners, plans for multiple branches, separating liability from personal assets, or credibility when taking over a lease or borrowing from a bank. For the capital and reserves side of that decision, see How much does it cost to open a restaurant?.

4. Signboard tax and social security: small, but not optional

Signboard tax depends on the sign's area and language. A sign in Thai only is taxed at ฿5 per 500 cm²; one with English mixed in is ฿26; and one where the English sits above the Thai, or that has no Thai at all, is ฿50 per 500 cm², with a minimum of ฿200 a year. A 1 × 3 m shopfront sign (30,000 cm²) with the shop's Thai name and the word "Restaurant" therefore costs about ฿1,560 a year. File at your municipality or local administrative office during March; new shops file within 15 days of putting the sign up. A small trick: put the Thai on top and the English underneath, and the tax nearly halves.

Social security isn't a tax, but shops often miss it because they assume "daily-paid staff don't count". In fact, from your first employee you must register as an employer within 30 days and remit contributions monthly. The employer pays 5% of wages and the employee has 5% deducted, on a wage base capped at ฿15,000, so at most ฿750 each per person per month. A shop with 3 staff adds about ฿2,250 a month in cost, which belongs in your labour cost when you price the menu.

Restaurant tax calendar (sole trader)

Companies add PND.3/53 every month (by the 7th, or the 15th online), PND.51 within 2 months of the half-year, and PND.50 plus financial statements within 150 days of the year-end.

Common restaurant tax mistakes

• Assuming PromptPay income doesn't need filing — money arriving by any channel is income, and the banks already report it.
• Counting delivery sales net of GP — taxable sales are what the customer paid; the GP is a separate expense (and you can get a tax invoice for it from the platform).
• Filing only once a year — forgetting the PND.94 half-year return means a fine every year even when the actual tax is a few thousand baht.
• Choosing actual expenses without receipts for fresh produce — market purchases with no evidence can't be deducted. If your records are patchy, the 60% flat rate may be the better choice.
• Mixing shop money with personal money — at year-end you're left sorting out which transfers were shop income, which wastes time and invites errors.
• Throwing receipts away after filing — you must keep them for at least 5 years. Photos stored in an app are safer than a pile of paper in a drawer.

Tax gets easier when the numbers are already there

Every topic in this article needs the same three numbers: total monthly sales across every channel, real expenses by category with evidence, and the cumulative total since January. With those in hand, choosing a deduction method, filing the half-year return and watching the VAT threshold take minutes. Without them, everything becomes a mountain of work at the end of March.

Bunchee isn't tax-filing software, but it keeps those three numbers ready all the time. Snap a receipt and AI sorts it into a category, the photo is stored as evidence, you can see sales and expenses for every month of the year on one screen, and you can ask the AI assistant "what are my total sales so far this year?" before you hand things to your accountant or fill in the return yourself.

Restaurant tax isn't as complicated as it feels. You need to know four things: shop income is filed twice a year, sales over ฿1.8M mean registering for VAT within 30 days, a sole trader is usually cheaper than a company until profit is genuinely high, and every receipt is worth money. Know that much and you'll sleep better than the shop next door.