Thailand BOI mandates 70% Thai-worker ratio and salary floors for foreign hires at promoted manufacturing projects

Mechanism

Announcement Por. 8/2568 rewrites the BOI's criteria for approving and staffing foreign-worker positions at promoted projects under Sections 25-26 of the Investment Promotion Act, replacing the prior Por. 3/2567 (9 August 2024). The headline change is a workforce-localization floor: BOI-promoted manufacturing projects with more than 100 total employees must keep Thai nationals at 70% or more of the workforce, checked against Social Security filings, rather than relying on self-reported headcounts. Alongside the ratio, the announcement sets minimum monthly salary thresholds for foreign hires — THB 150,000 for executive-level roles, THB 75,000 for managers, engineers, IT specialists and researchers (reduced to THB 50,000 for degree-qualified specialists), and lower floors for operational and workstation roles — effectively raising the cost floor for using expatriate labor in place of Thai nationals.

Implementation is staggered by promotion-certificate date: projects whose BOI promotion certificates issue on or after 5 June 2025 must comply from 1 October 2025; projects with certificates issued before that date have until 1 January 2026. Small manufacturers (≤100 employees) and all promoted service activities are not subject to the ratio, short-term (≤6 month) positions are exempt, and BOI retains case-by-case discretion for high-investment or high-technology projects where qualified Thai talent is unavailable.

This sits within Thailand's broader BOI promoted-investment framework (see 2022-12-08-thailand-boi-investment-promotion-strategy-2023-2027, 2025-06-05-thailand-boi-sor5-2568-battery-investment-incentives): the incentive side of that framework courts foreign manufacturing investment, while Por. 8/2568 tightens the domestic-labor-content condition attached to it.

Downstream implications

• Raises operating costs and compliance burden for foreign manufacturers

(particularly Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese electronics/auto investors) running large BOI-promoted plants in Thailand, by capping expatriate headcount and floor-pricing the expatriate labor that remains.

• Creates an incentive to accelerate localization of mid-level technical and

managerial roles ahead of the October 2025 / January 2026 compliance dates.

• Verification via Social Security filings closes a self-reporting loophole,

making the ratio meaningfully enforceable rather than aspirational.

Open questions

• Whether BOI's case-by-case strategic-project exception is applied broadly

enough in practice to blunt the ratio for flagship semiconductor/EV investors, or is tightly rationed.

• Compliance and penalty data once the first (1 October 2025) deadline has

passed.