How Much Money Do I Need to Live in Thailand?

Many people have the assumption that moving to Thailand is an affordable endeavor as well as an exciting adventure. While they’re not technically wrong, you should be as knowledgeable as possible about the process.

Moving to Thailand lets you experience one of the most affordable places in southeast Asia. However, there are some things that can affect how much you will spend while making your new home. Your living cost in Thailand depends on a variety of factors. Most important of these is how comfortably you’d like to live. The following is a breakdown of how much it costs to typically live in Thailand.

Budgeting to Consider
You may find some articles that claim you can live in Thailand for a mere $500 a month. Unless you’re living in a small village with no entertainment and making your own food, this is simply untrue. For a modern one-bedroom apartment in Bangkok, $800 would pay the rent. However, living in a city isn’t just about paying rent. You have to fit other expenses into your budget.

Housing

Since the price of a one-bedroom apartment in the capital is $800, it’s about 24,000 baht, per month. If you’re okay with a smaller space that’s further away from the center of the city, then you can find a studio apartment for about 8,000 baht per month.

On the other hand, you can expect to pay triple for a two-bedroom and two-bath place in the center of Bangkok. A housing budget that large would go further with apartments in Hua Hin, Chiang Mai, or Phuket. If you include utilities and internet to your housing, you can expect to spend about 3,000 baht, or $100, per month.

Food

Food is a huge part of Thai culture. Chances are you’re not going to be growing your own or eating in every night. If you did cook every night, you would still spend about 4000 to 8000 baht a month on food supply. Chances are you’re going to eat out. Eating is a social event in Thai culture, and eating out by yourself is said to be bad luck. Since you’ll probably be sharing your food with those with you, you’ll spend a bit.

Transportation

If you wanted, you could buy a car while living in Thailand. However, it may be wiser to utilize the various mode of public transportation throughout the cities. A public taxi will cost about $6 or 180 baht for 8km. Catching a ride with Uber Black in the same area would cost about the same. If you’d prefer to take a train, you pay 1,499 baht for a monthly MRT subway ticket or 1,100 baht for a monthly BTS Skytrain. If you opt to buy a car, you can expect to pay 41 baht per liter of premium gas.

Entertainment

Moving to a new place is exciting and will bring new opportunities, but a lot of what you do will be the same. You’ll go to the gym, the cinema, out to drinks, and to get coffee. You have to factor in these forms of entertainment and activity into your living cost. After all, doing things you’re used to in an environment you’re not used to will help you become comfortable.

Your cell phone bill would fall into this category of the budget and will cost about 1000-2000 baht per month. Depending on what you like to do for entertainment and how often, you can expect to spend anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 baht per month on entertainment activities.

Personal Expenses

Your personal expenses usually include clothes and hygiene products. Shopping for clothes can vary in price just as much as anything else. Depending on whether you want to spend extra money on brand names or not, you can expect to pay about 1,000 to 3,000 on an article of clothing. Personal hygiene products cost 1,000 baht for each month.

So How Much Do You Need to Live in Thailand?

If you want to move to Thailand and have realistic expectations, you can create a reasonable budget to live on. Going off just the basics, you can live comfortably in one of the smaller cities for 65,000 baht, or $2,000, a month.