Paid in years

Before every long weekend, Thai media publish the list. These expressways are free. These ones are not.

Typically the free ones are the Chaloem Maha Nakhon, Si Rat and Udon Ratthaya expressways, waived by the Expressway Authority of Thailand for the whole day, midnight to midnight, on the major holidays. The Department of Highways usually does the same on its motorways.

Don Muang Tollway is not on the list. It is essentially never on the list.

The natural assumption is that somebody decided it was too important, or too profitable, or that the operator refused.

There is a rule, EXAT publishes it, and almost nobody has read it. It is one sentence long, it sits on a page nobody links to, and it explains every apparent exception — including two that an earlier draft of this article said had no available explanation. Working out why took me somewhere considerably more interesting than the question deserved.

The explanation that doesn’t survive contact

The tidy version, and the one I started with, goes like this. Some roads belong to the state and some are private concessions. The Department of Highways operates motorways directly; the Expressway Authority of Thailand is a state enterprise. A toll on a road the state owns is the state’s own revenue to forgo. A toll on a concession road belongs to the concessionaire under contract, and giving it away would be giving away somebody else’s money.

It is a lovely explanation and it does not hold.

Look at what actually gets waived on an ordinary public holiday. Three routes: Chaloem Maha Nakhon, Si Rat and Udon Ratthaya.

Chaloem Maha Nakhon, the First Stage expressway, is EXAT’s. Fine.

But Si Rat and Udon Ratthaya are both operated under concession by Bangkok Expressway and Metro. Two of the three free roads are the private ones. So a concession evidently can be waived — by agreement, by compensation, or because the contract provided for it. The public-versus-private line does not sort the list.

And then there is Chalong Rat — 28.2 kilometres in two parts, Ram Intra to At Narong (18.7 km, open 6 October 1996) and Ram Intra to the Outer Ring Road (9.5 km, open 23 March 2009). EXAT’s own road, operated directly, and it does not appear on the free list.

A state-owned road that stays paid while two private concessions go free. That is the exact opposite of the tidy explanation. An earlier version of this article said no published reason for it existed and flagged it rather than inventing one. There is one, and I had not looked in the right place.

The rule, which is published

EXAT keeps a page listing the toll plazas that go free. The explanatory line above the tables is a single sentence, and it answers the entire question:

The plazas exempted from expressway tolls on the annual government public holidays announced by the Prime Minister’s Office, in accordance with government and Ministry of Transport policy as it appears in the newly amended concession agreements between EXAT, Bangkok Expressway and Metro (BEM) and Northern Bangkok Expressway (NECL) — three routes, 63 plazas.

Two conditions, both of them checkable, and between them they explain everything the tidy version could not.

The trigger is a government public holiday. Not a day off — วันหยุดราชการ, the specific list the Prime Minister’s Office publishes each year.

The scope is the concession network. Not roads the state owns and not roads a company owns: the roads covered by the amended agreements with BEM and NECL. Chaloem Maha Nakhon, 21 plazas. Si Rat, 32. Udon Ratthaya, 10. Sixty-three.

Why Chaloem Maha Nakhon is on a concession list

Because it is tolled as part of one. EXAT’s own published terms for the Second Stage Expressway System treat “the in-city network — Chaloem Maha Nakhon and Si Rat sections A and B” as a single tolled network with a single fare, and split the revenue from it between EXAT and the concessionaire. The First Stage expressway is EXAT’s road and the money it takes is inside somebody else’s contract.

Chalong Rat is not. It is EXAT’s, it is tolled by EXAT, and it is outside the BEM and NECL agreements entirely — so the clause that frees the other three does not reach it. That is the published reason I said did not exist.

Why 1 May is not on the list

Because 1 May is not a government holiday. National Labour Day is a statutory holiday for the private sector and the state enterprises; government offices open as normal, and it does not appear on the Prime Minister’s Office list. The absence of a waiver on 1 May 2026 is not evidence that the decision is discretionary. It is evidence that the rule is exactly what EXAT says it is.

Where discretion does live

The long holidays. At Songkran 2026 the three contract routes were free for three days, 13–15 April, while Burapha Withi (Bang Na–Chonburi) and Kanchanaphisek (Bang Phli–Suksawat) were free for seven, 10–16 April. New Year works the same way.

Those two are EXAT’s own roads, and waiving them is a policy decision about the exodus rather than a contract term. So there are two mechanisms and they are easy to tell apart. The three that go free on every government holiday go free because a contract says so. The two that go free for a week at Songkran go free because somebody decided.

And the reader’s practical question has a real answer after all. Not “check the listicle” but: the same three routes on every government holiday, plus the two roads out of town when the whole country is leaving.

Which is still the shape this site keeps finding, only sharper than the version I first wrote. Article 89 The wrong way round argued that Thai systems fail when access is categorical rather than universal, because whether you qualify depends on a boundary you cannot see. Here the boundary is real, published and knowable — and it is a contract signed in 1988, amended in 2020, between a state enterprise and two companies. Which side of it your journey falls on was settled before most of the people driving it could drive.

What the contract says on the tollway

The specifics are worth having, because they answer the follow-up question everyone asks, which is why it keeps getting more expensive. All of what follows is the operator’s own published description of its contract.

The concession was signed with the Department of Highways on 21 August 1989, over roughly 21 kilometres of National Highway 31 — Vibhavadi Rangsit Road — with nine toll plazas. It is a build-transfer-operate arrangement: the company built the elevated road, transferred ownership of it to the Department of Highways, and holds the right to run it and keep the tolls.

It has been amended three times, in 1995, 1996 and 2007. The third amendment, dated 12 September 2007, is the one that matters, and it did two things at once.

It extended the concession to 11 September 2034 — forty-five years from signature.

And it fixed the toll rates in advance, in five-year steps, all the way to that expiry. The current step runs 22 December 2024 to 21 December 2029. End to end, Din Daeng to Anusorn Sathan, that is ฿130 for a car and ฿170 for anything with more than four wheels. The next step begins 22 December 2029 and runs to the last day of the contract.

The price rises are not a decision anybody takes. They are a term, and they were agreed in 2007. Which is why the argument about them recurs identically every five years and resolves identically every five years.

One thing to notice before the next section, because it is the whole article in miniature. The document that extended the concession by years and the document that locked in the price rises are the same document.

And an earlier version of this article said the concession “began as a 25-year term and was extended twice, adding twenty years”. The operator publishes three amendments and attributes the current expiry to the third of them. It does not publish an original term, and I have taken that claim out rather than repeat a number I could not find in the contract’s own account of itself.

The instrument

Now the part that makes this a Bangkok Lad article rather than a service piece.

When Thailand has owed money on a road, it has repeatedly paid in years rather than in baht.

The clearest case: EXAT and BEM had a long-running set of disputes — reported as seventeen of them, over compensation claims running to tens of billions of baht, which Thai press calls ค่าโง่, roughly “the fool’s fee”, a term I’m glossing rather than adopting because it is a verdict rather than a description.

Here is the primary anchor, from EXAT’s own project page. The Second Stage Expressway System contract was signed with the concessionaire on 22 December 1988 for thirty years, and its published revenue-sharing table ends with a final nine-year band running 1 March 2011 to 28 February 2020. That is where the original contract stopped. Everything after that date is running on an amendment.

The Cabinet settled the disputes in February 2020 by extending the concessions, and the extensions as reported were: sections A, B and C by 15 years and 8 months, section D by 8 years 6 months, the Bang Pa-in–Pak Kret expressway by 9 years 1 month, all realigned to expire together on 31 October 2035, with scheduled toll increases of ฿10 every ten years. Those specific lengths are from reporting of the Cabinet decision, not from the contracts, and the article does not claim otherwise.

No cash changed hands. The liability was converted into time.

And here is the part that connects this section to the one about free holidays. The instrument EXAT cites as the reason three expressways go free on government holidays is “the newly amended concession agreements” — the same amendments. The free day and the extra fifteen years are terms of one document. Whatever else it was, the settlement was not only a payment; it was also the thing that put a holiday waiver in writing.

And that is a genuinely unusual thing to have done, because of who ends up paying.

A cash settlement is paid by the current budget, out of current taxation, by people who are alive and can complain about it, in a year when somebody is accountable for the decision.

A concession extension is paid at a toll booth, by drivers, one journey at a time, for fifteen years and eight months — ending in 2035. Many of those drivers were children when the disputes arose. None of them was party to anything. And the payment appears in no budget line, in no deficit figure and in no debt statistic, because the payer has not arrived yet.

It is off-balance-sheet in the most literal possible sense.

I want to be careful about what I’m claiming. Extending a concession to settle a dispute may well have been the cheaper option for the state, and it is a normal instrument used in many countries. The point is not that it was wrong. The point is that it moves the cost onto a group with no say and no visibility, and that the choice between paying in money and paying in years is almost never presented as the choice that it is.

Which is article 61’s argument arriving at the invoice. That piece found that Thailand delivers through private operators the functions a state elsewhere provides directly. This is how the bill is settled: not in a budget, but in the years of everyone who will ever use the road.

The one time it went the other way

There is an ending to this and it is more encouraging than the rest of the article.

In December 2024, the offer was on the table again and it was not taken.

The shape was the usual one — extend the contract in exchange for holding the price down. What is documented is the outcome rather than the deliberation: the scheduled increase took effect on 22 December 2024 as the 2007 amendment provides, and the operator’s own disclosure still gives the concession’s last day as 11 September 2034. No extension was agreed.

I had written that the Department of Highways “declined to extend, stating it was not worth it.” That characterisation is from press reporting and I could not find it in any departmental publication, so what stands here is what the contract and the operator’s disclosures show, which is the same outcome without a quote I cannot source.

Either way it is the state choosing to pay in money. The money in question being public irritation, headlines, and a decade of drivers paying more: all of which arrive now, land on the people who decided, and end when the contract does.

After decades of the opposite, that is the more interesting decision, and almost nobody noticed it because what got reported was the price going up.

Practically

On an ordinary government public holiday, three expressways are free for the full day: Chaloem Maha Nakhon, Si Rat and Udon Ratthaya. That is a contract term, not an announcement, so it does not change from holiday to holiday.

Check whether the day is actually a government holiday. This is the trap. 1 May is not one — Labour Day closes banks and private offices, not ministries — so there is no waiver, and every year people are surprised.

At Songkran and New Year, add Burapha Withi and Kanchanaphisek, usually for about a week rather than three days. Those are discretionary and the dates are announced each year, so they are the ones actually worth checking.

Don Muang Tollway: assume you are paying. Budget for it on airport runs specifically, because that is the journey most people are surprised by.

And if you are driving south, article 114 It cannot be closed is relevant and not reassuring.

Common misconceptions

“State roads go free, private ones don’t.” The neatest explanation and it fails on the evidence. Two of the three routinely waived expressways, Si Rat and Udon Ratthaya, are BEM concessions, while Chalong Rat, which EXAT operates directly, is not on the list.

“There’s no rule, then.” There is, and EXAT publishes it: government public holidays as announced by the Prime Minister’s Office, on the routes covered by the amended concession agreements with BEM and NECL. The list is not the state’s roads. It is the concession network.

“Don Muang Tollway is greedy.” It is operating a disclosed contract with scheduled price increases written into it. The argument worth having is about the contract, not the operator’s conduct.

“The tollway contract is 45 years.” It runs 45 years from signature — 21 August 1989 to 11 September 2034 — and that end date comes from the third amendment to it, signed in 2007. The operator publishes three amendments and does not publish an original term.

“The BEM dispute was paid off.” It was settled by extending concessions by up to 15 years and 8 months, all ending 31 October 2035. No cash settlement was made.

“Concession extensions cost nothing.” They cost exactly what the tolls collect during the extension, paid by drivers rather than by the budget.