Cornerstone guide
Money for expat families in Thailand 2026
Three-bucket money setup for expat families in Thailand — home-country account, Wise, and a Thai bank — with the four flows that keep it working.
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Pillar 02 · Money
Money and banking for expat families in Thailand
Getting paid, holding two currencies, and paying Thai school fees without losing a slice of every transfer to spreads nobody quotes you.
Updated
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Money is the pillar where expat advice ages worst. Rules change, banks quietly alter what they will open for a foreigner, and half the guidance online was written by someone passing through on a tourist visa who never had to pay a school invoice.
This pillar is written for the other case: a family that lives here, earns somewhere, and has to move money between the two every month without bleeding on the exchange.
Two things drive almost every money decision an expat family makes here. The first is where the currency conversion happens — not which app you use, but which leg of the journey does the converting, because that is where the spread lives. The second is whether you can pay Thai institutions directly, because rent, school fees and deposits are the real volume, and they are the payments least tolerant of a foreign card.
Everything else — cards, rewards, which app has the nicer interface — is downstream of those two. It is also why our Wise vs Revolut comparison tests them on the transfers a family actually makes each month, rather than on the headline rates that only apply to amounts nobody sends.
What we will not do here
We will not tell you what to invest in, and we will not give tax advice. Thai tax treatment of foreign income has moved recently and is being read differently by different people who are all more qualified than us. When we cover it, we will cover it with a source you can check — not a confident summary of a forum post.
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Everything else we've published in money
Questions
What families ask us about money
Do I need a Thai bank account, or can I run everything from abroad?
You can survive on foreign cards for a few weeks. You cannot run a family on them. School fees, rent, deposits and utilities all expect a Thai account or PromptPay, and the places that do take foreign cards often add a surcharge. Treat the account as part of settling in, not an optional upgrade.
Wise or Revolut for moving money into Thailand?
They are not interchangeable, and the honest answer depends on whether you are moving a salary every month or spending on the ground occasionally. We compared both on the transfers a family actually makes, rather than on headline rates that only apply to amounts nobody sends.
What does the exchange rate actually cost me?
Almost never the number on the screen. The real cost is the spread plus the receiving fee plus whichever bank converts on arrival, and it is entirely possible to pay it twice by routing money through the wrong account. Where the conversion happens matters more than which app you use.
How much does a family need per month in Bangkok?
A wide enough range that any single figure is misleading. School fees dominate almost every family budget and they vary by more than an order of magnitude. We publish our reasoning and our own numbers rather than a made-up average.
Gaps
What we have not written yet
These belong in this pillar and they are not here. We would rather name them than let the page imply the ground is covered.
- Thai tax residency and the 180-day rule
- Remitting foreign income under the current tax interpretation
- Opening an account as a non-resident before you arrive
- Investing from Thailand as a foreign national
- Mortgages and property finance for foreigners
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