What are DTV visas?

Destination Thailand Visa (DTV) is a 5-year, multiple-entry visa for digital nomads, remote workers, freelancers, those engaging in Thai soft power activities like cooking or Muay Thai, and those coming for long-term medical treatment. DTV is allowing stays up to 180 days, extendable once for another 180 days. This means you can stay in Thailand the whole year if you are willing to become a tax resident in the country.

Personally I am a freelancer selling my own products as well as contracting remotely for software companies.

Are you eligible for DTV?

As I said various people can apply for DTV. Since I am a remote worker there are two main considerations:

• You have a bank account with 500k Baht (~ 16k USD)
• You are employed or contracting for a company outside of Thailand

Savings

The first requirement is confirmed by a bank statement. Now the official requirement is 500k Baht but depending on the applicant and embassy they sometimes want this money to be sitting in the account 3-6 months. Investments don't count.

Employment

The employment requirement is confirmed with a letter by your employer. Personally I didn't have that as I had just smaller clients recently. I was afraid they might not accept my personal circumstances but they did.

Further requirements

Something that wasn't immediatelly clear to me is that you have to apply when you are actually going to Thailand. You need to be coming to Thailand within 3 months since the application and you should have full stay booked.

This is a bit weird since I was thinking I apply for the future and then could search for a condo later. I had to submit form with flight dates, accomodation address in Thailand, and passport-sized photo (I just quickly took a picture of myself with an iPhone).

After I submitted the original form, I received this email:

This is not exactly what I expected. I had two options. I could try to provide everything so that it would match, including a booking of 3+ months stay in advance. Or just be honest about my situation and hope for the best.

The hard part here is that there is nobody to talk to. There are no text-based fields (in fact even PNGs aren't accepted). You also have to provide exactly one file per requirement.

What I did required thinking outside the box. I created 2 text documents which I exported later to a PDF. One explaining my freelancing situation without explicit employer approval and one about my future (unbooked) accomodation.

Luckily this worked and I received the visa.

Processing time and price

I was surprised that everything was done super fast. I had it all in 2 days. However, I also heard that it can take up way longer. The price for me was 8000 CZK (~ 385 USD).