Thirty years at fifteen thousand

Thailand has one social security fund and three ways into it, and which one you are in was mostly decided by somebody else.

Section 33 is the employee. If a workplace has one employee or more, membership is compulsory and automatic.

Section 39 is the person who was a section 33 member and stopped being one. You may keep your membership if you had contributed for at least twelve months and you apply within six months of leaving.

Section 40 is everyone else who wants in — the self-employed, the trader, the freelancer, the motorcycle-taxi rider. Voluntary, and for people who were never inside.

As at March 2026 the three together covered 24.7 million people, on the Social Security Office’s own count.

What each of them pays

Section 33 costs the member 5% of wages, and the member is the smallest of three contributors. The employer pays another 5%, and the government adds 2.75%. Three parties, one account.

Section 39 costs ฿432 a month, paid by the member, with the government adding ฿120. The employer has gone, and the member has taken over most of the employer’s share.

Section 40 costs ฿70, ฿100 or ฿300 a month, depending which of three options you choose. There is no employer at all.

That is the first thing worth noticing and it is not a criticism of anybody. The people with the least secure income pay the largest share of their own protection, because the contributor who disappears when the job does is the employer.

What each of them gets

Section 33 has seven benefits, and Policy Watch sets all three side by side: sickness and injury, maternity, invalidity, death, child allowance, old age, and unemployment.

Section 39 has six. Everything except unemployment — which is coherent, since a section 39 member has by definition already left work.

Section 40 has three, four or five, by tier. ฿70 buys sickness, invalidity and death. ฿100 adds old age. ฿300 adds child allowance.

And the amounts are where the distance really shows.

Sick pay. A section 33 or 39 member gets 50% of average wages, up to 90 days at a time and 180 days a year. A section 40 member on the lower tiers gets ฿300 a day if admitted to hospital, ฿200 a day if signed off at home — for a maximum of 30 days a year. The top tier extends that to 90 days.

Child allowance. Sections 33 and 39: ฿800 per child per month, up to three children under six. Section 40 top tier: ฿200 per child, up to two.

Funeral. Sections 33 and 39: ฿50,000, plus a death grant of two or six months’ average wages depending on contribution history. Section 40 lower tiers: ฿25,000 and a grant of ฿8,000.

Maternity. Sections 33 and 39: ฿15,000 a birth, plus 50% of wages for 90 days. Section 40: nothing.

Unemployment. Section 33 only: 50% of wages for 180 days if dismissed, 30% for 90 days if you resign.

Same fund. Same institution. Same misfortunes. Three prices and three answers.

Now the part nobody explains

Here is the mechanism this article exists for, and it is not in any of the comparison tables.

The old-age pension under sections 33 and 39 is 20% of your average wage over the final 60 months, once you have contributed for 180 months, rising by 1.5 percentage points for every additional 12 months of contributions.

But “your average wage” is not your wage. It is your wage as counted for contributions — and contributions are capped at a ceiling.

So the ceiling is not only the limit on what you pay in. It is the limit on what the pension is calculated from. A person earning ฿50,000 a month and a person earning the ceiling retire on the same pension, having paid the same contributions, for the same years.

And that ceiling was ฿15,000 a month from 30 March 1995 until 1 January 2026. It was set by Ministerial Regulation No. 7 of B.E. 2538 (1995), under section 46 of the Act, which leaves the floor and ceiling to regulation — and that regulation stood until the one that replaced it was gazetted on 11 December 2025.

Thirty years. Over the same period Thailand’s minimum wage in Bangkok went from well under ฿150 a day to ฿400. The number that decided what a private-sector pension would be worth did not move while the wages it was measuring quadrupled.

It is moving now, on a staircase, and the staircase is published

This is the current part and it is genuinely new.

From 1 January 2026 the ceiling rose to ฿17,500, taking the maximum monthly contribution from ฿750 to ฿875. The regulation sets out the next steps rather than leaving them to a future decision:

฿20,000 from 2029, a maximum contribution of ฿1,000. ฿23,000 from 2032, a maximum contribution of ฿1,150.

The rate stays at 5% throughout. What changes is the base.

That is a real reform and it deserves to be called one. It raises contributions, and because the ceiling is the pension base, it raises the pension it will eventually pay. It is also indexed to a schedule rather than to a minister’s willingness, which is the harder and better design.

And it is worth being honest about the pace. The ceiling reaches ฿23,000 in 2032. Thailand’s minimum wage is ฿400 a day now, which is roughly ฿12,000 a month for a six-day week. A ceiling of ฿23,000 six years from now is not a generous ceiling; it is a less inadequate one than ฿15,000 was in 2025.

Which is article 92, again, in a different building

Article 89 The wrong way round established that Thai protections work when universal and fail when categorical, because the category is always drawn around people who already had options. Article 92 The first toll added the limit: universal is not enough — it has to be universal and adequate.

Social security is the categorical case with the adequacy problem inside it as well, which is why it has taken this archive eleven articles and a hundred and seventy-eight to write it down.

The category is the door. Whether you are in section 33 is not a decision you make; it is a decision about whether anybody was willing to employ you formally. Article 84’s delivery rider is classed as a partner and is outside it. Article 91’s saleng collector is employed by nobody. Both can join section 40 and buy a third of a safety net for ฿300 a month.

And the adequacy is the ceiling. Even inside section 33, where the protection is real and the employer pays half, what the pension is worth was pinned to a number set when the people now retiring on it were in their twenties.

Article 173 It arrived, and it was not enough found that the universal health scheme is kept solvent at the point of delivery by the categorical ones — that the civil servants’ scheme and this one pay hospitals more than their patients cost. This is what the second of those two schemes looks like from the inside, and it is not a rich scheme. It is a scheme whose members pay 5% of a number that stood still for thirty years.

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Common misconceptions

“Everyone in social security gets the same benefits.” No. Section 33 has seven benefits, section 39 six, and section 40 three, four or five depending which of three contribution tiers you pay.

“The wage ceiling only affects how much I pay.” This is the article’s point. The old-age pension is calculated as a percentage of your average wage as counted for contributions, so the ceiling caps the pension too.

“The ceiling has just gone up, so the problem is solved.” It rose to ฿17,500 on 1 January 2026, and is scheduled to reach ฿20,000 in 2029 and ฿23,000 in 2032. It had been ฿15,000 since 1995.

“Section 40 is basically the same protection for less money.” Sick pay is ฿200–300 a day for up to 30 days a year on the lower tiers, against 50% of wages for up to 180 days. There is no maternity benefit and no unemployment benefit at all.

“Section 39 is a good deal because it is cheap.” It is ฿432 a month paid entirely by you, where section 33 cost you 5% of wages with an employer paying the same again. The price fell because a contributor left.