DTV Visa Cost: What You Actually Pay, Broken Down

The short answer

Three separate things get lumped together under "DTV visa cost", and they behave completely differently:

Cost	Range	Who sets it
Government visa fee	£300 (London), US$400 (Washington DC), S$500 (Singapore), AED 1,500 (Dubai), NZ$2,000 (Wellington)	The individual Thai mission
Third-party costs	A criminal record certificate, mandatory since 31 August 2026 and priced by the police authority that issues it; ฿1,000–5,000 for translation if you need it; more if your mission requires embassy legalisation	Police authorities, translators, notaries, foreign ministries, your bank
Consultancy fee	฿0 if you apply yourself, otherwise roughly ฿3,000 to ฿24,000 (US$100–700)	The firm you hire

The government fee is unavoidable, non-refundable and charged per person. The consultancy fee is entirely optional, and for a clean case it buys you nothing you cannot do yourself in an evening.

Everything below is sourced from the missions' own published pages. Where a figure is not published anywhere official, we say so rather than filling the gap with a number.

Updated 3 September 2026. There is a new item in the third-party row above. Since 31 August 2026 the e-Visa system requires a certificate of criminal record clearance from every DTV applicant — a document you buy from a police authority in your own country, at that authority's price, not Thailand's. It is set out in full under third-party costs below, and the change itself is documented in The 31 August 2026 DTV rule change.

The government fee is set per mission — and the spread is wider than you have been told

A great deal of DTV content online repeats a line to the effect that "fees are standardised across embassies, so choose on convenience rather than cost." That is wrong, and it is provably wrong from the embassies' own websites.

Here is what missions actually publish for the DTV:

Mission	Published fee	Approximate USD equivalent
Royal Thai Embassy, London	£300 (all three DTV categories)	~US$390–405
Royal Thai Embassy, Washington DC	US$400	US$400
Royal Thai Embassy, Singapore	S$500	~US$370–390
Royal Thai Consulate-General, Dubai	AED 1,500	~US$408 (AED is pegged to the dollar)
Royal Thai Embassy, Wellington	NZ$2,000 per person	~US$1,150–1,250
Royal Thai Consulate-General, Los Angeles	No fee published on its DTV page	—

The USD conversions are our arithmetic at recent rates, not figures published by anyone; treat them as indicative and expect movement.

London, Washington DC, Singapore and Dubai all sit broadly between US$370 and US$410. Wellington, which restricts applications to residents of New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Samoa and Niue, publishes NZ$2,000 — roughly three times the others. That is not a typo and it is not agency chatter: the figure and the words "per person" are on the embassy's own visa types page.

Some missions publish no DTV fee at all. The Los Angeles consulate lists the required documents for the DTV but not the price. Phnom Penh's DTV page likewise lists documents without a fee — the US$400 figure you will see quoted for Cambodia comes from aggregator sites, not from the embassy, and we are not going to launder it into a fact. The same applies to JPY 52,000 for Tokyo: it appears on aggregator pages, we could not find it on the embassy's own site, and so we report it as unconfirmed rather than as a fee.

Practical consequence: check the fee on the page of the mission you will actually apply to, on the day you apply. Do not budget from a blog table, including this one.

Jurisdiction is enforced, and it can be the largest cost of all

You do not get to shop for the cheapest mission. Jurisdiction is documented and applied:

• Singapore states plainly that the DTV "will only be granted by the Royal Thai Embassy Singapore to Singapore citizen and Singapore Resident."
• Wellington accepts applications only from residents of New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Samoa and Niue.
• London requires non-UK citizens to submit a copy of a BRP card or a letter from UKVI confirming settlement status.
• Dubai requires every applicant to hold a valid UAE residence visa with at least three months' validity.
• Los Angeles covers thirteen states plus the US Pacific Territories: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
• Washington DC covers fifteen jurisdictions: Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
• New York covers ten: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.

If you are outside any jurisdiction that will take you — a common situation for people already travelling — the real cost is a flight and a hotel, not a visa fee. That can easily exceed the government fee several times over, and it is the single most under-budgeted line item in this process. It also matters that the DTV must be applied for from outside Thailand. Filing from inside the country results in refusal, and the fee is gone.

Payment mechanics add a small amount

Washington DC states that visa fees must be paid in the e-payment of the e-Visa system "by using a credit card only." Paying a foreign-currency fee by card normally attracts your issuer's FX margin and possibly a cross-border fee. We are not going to invent a percentage — it depends on your card, not on the embassy — but budget for a small amount above the headline figure rather than exactly the headline figure.

Not every mission works this way. Dubai's published DTV document list asks for the fee in cash, in exact change, at the counter. Check what your mission actually accepts before you assume a card will work.

Non-refundable means non-refundable

Singapore's DTV page marks the fee "Non-Refundable" twice. Wellington instructs applicants to make payment for the visa fee, noting it is non-refundable. Kuala Lumpur states that the visa application fee is non-refundable. Dubai puts it as plainly as anyone: "Each applicant is required to pay a non-refundable visa fee for the visa application to be processed."

London and Washington DC say nothing about refundability on their DTV pages at all. That absence should not be read as generosity.

There is no published refund mechanism and no reliable appeal route. Applicants who are refused consistently report having to submit a fresh application and pay in full again — that is corroborated across multiple secondary sources rather than stated in those words by a government page, and we would rather tell you the status of the claim than dress it up.

The same applies to your own clerical errors. A misspelled name or a wrong passport number is not corrected in place; it is a new application and a new fee.

The cost of getting it wrong

This is where the real money is, and it is why the "cheapest" route is not always the one with the smallest sticker price.

The reason DTV applications fail is usually not the amount of money in the account. It is seasoning — whether ฿500,000 has genuinely been held, or was moved in shortly before the application. No mission publishes refusal statistics, so nobody can honestly give you a percentage; what we can tell you is that this is the failure we see most often and the one reported most consistently by applicants.

Missions generally ask for three months of statements precisely to see this. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs' own DTV checklist asks for "a copy of the bank statement for the last 3 months with an ending balance of no less than 500,000 THB". Washington DC asks for statements "for the last three months with an ending balance of no less than 500,000 THB or ($16,000 USD) for each month". Singapore asks for a balance of "at least 500,000 THB (Approximtely 20,000 SGD)" for the past 3 months. Dubai wants "an original stamped 3-month bank statement… showing a maintained balance". A borrowed balance parked for a fortnight reads exactly like a borrowed balance parked for a fortnight.

Run the arithmetic on failure:

• London: a refusal costs £300. Reapplying costs another £300. Total £600 for one visa, plus whatever you have already paid a consultant, plus three months of waiting while the balance seasons properly.
• Wellington: the same mistake costs NZ$2,000, twice.

Crypto holdings, brokerage accounts, pension pots and available credit are not accepted as proof of funds. The account must be in your own name, matching the passport exactly — a company account in your business's name fails even when you own the business outright.

The missions do not agree on what ฿500,000 is worth

A detail almost nobody publishes, and one worth real money to you:

Mission	Published equivalent of ฿500,000
Washington DC	US$16,000
Los Angeles	US$17,000
London	£12,000
Singapore	~S$20,000
Dubai	AED 50,000
Kuala Lumpur (MFA checklist)	65,000 MYR

Two US missions publish USD equivalents a thousand dollars apart for the identical baht requirement. Dubai's AED 50,000 converts to roughly US$13,600 — well below Washington's US$16,000 — for what is supposedly the same threshold. You are assessed against your own mission's published figure, in a currency that moves.

The practical advice: clear the higher of the published figures for your region and hold a buffer above it for the full three months. Sitting exactly on ฿500,000 means an ordinary exchange-rate movement can put you under on the day an officer opens your file.

Third-party costs — including the ones you may not have budgeted for

Most cost breakdowns for the DTV pad this section out. We would rather cut it back to what is real — but one item we previously played down deserves more weight, not less.

The criminal record certificate: new since 31 August 2026, and the price is not Thailand's

Since 31 August 2026 at 00:00 Thailand time, a certificate of criminal record clearance has been a mandatory supporting document for every DTV applicant. The Royal Thai Embassy in London publishes the announcement on its visa information page — page updated 31 August 2026, read by us on 3 September 2026:

"In addition, a certificate of criminal record clearance will be required as a mandatory supporting document for all DTV applicants."

You buy that certificate from a police authority, and that authority sets the price. No Thai mission publishes a figure for it, because no Thai mission charges it. Two authorities are worth naming, because two missions name the document they want:

United Kingdom — the ACRO certificate. London names "the ACRO certificate or the Irish police certificate" and requires it to have been issued within six months of submission. The ACRO Criminal Records Office police certificates page is where ACRO publishes its own fees and service levels. We could not confirm a current price from that page on 3 September 2026 — it renders only inside a browser and returns nothing readable to an automated check — and we are not going to copy a number off a third-party visa site and present it as ACRO's. When we could last read ACRO's own content, in an Internet Archive capture dated 20 February 2025, it listed two service levels at different prices, a standard one and a faster premium one. Both figures are far too old to quote as current. Read the fee off ACRO's page before you budget.

United States — the FBI Identity History Summary Check. Los Angeles names the FBI certificate and gives it a three-month window. The FBI's own Identity History Summary Checks page states: "The cost for an Identity History Summary Check (Rap Sheet) is $18 per person." The same page adds, in the same passage, "You cannot pay extra for faster service." Two things add to that $18 and the FBI sets neither: fingerprinting at a participating US Post Office, where "additional fees may apply", and using an FBI-approved channeler — "You may also have to pay an additional fee to use a channeler. Contact each channeler for costs, processing times, and availability in your area." Our caveat, so you can weigh it: fbi.gov blocks automated retrieval, so we read that page through the Internet Archive's capture of it dated 25 August 2026, checked on 3 September 2026. Confirm the figure on the FBI's page before you pay it.

Everywhere else it is your own national or local police authority, on its own schedule, and we have no basis for a range. If your mission does not name the certificate it wants, ask before you pay for the wrong one.

The expensive part is the window, not the fee. Missions publish different validity periods: six months at London and Rome; three months at Washington DC, Los Angeles and Munich; no window stated at Taipei, Fukuoka or Helsinki. A three-month certificate ordered too early — or a file that sits while you chase the rest of it — expires, and a replacement is a second fee and a second wait. The FBI's published turnaround, from the same capture: within 48 hours of your visit to a participating US Post Office for electronic fingerprints if you filed online, approximately 10 days after a mailed fingerprint card reaches them, and up to 15 days for a request made entirely by post. Order the certificate when the rest of your file is nearly ready, not first.

Two groups pay less than they expect. Hong Kong requests the certificate from the police directly rather than asking the applicant to produce one. And London allows dependants under 16 to submit the primary DTV holder's police clearance certificate instead of their own — for a family of four with two young children, that is two certificates rather than four.

A mission that has not listed it yet has not opted out of it. When the requirement was checked mission by mission at the start of September 2026, several pages — Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, Yangon, Phnom Penh, Oslo, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Madrid and Budapest — did not mention it. This is a change at the national e-Visa layer rather than a local checklist item, so budget for the certificate even where your mission's page is silent, and read that page again on the day you file. What the announcement actually says, and which of the claims now circulating about it are false, is set out in The 31 August 2026 DTV rule change.

What you may genuinely pay:

• The criminal record certificate above. Mandatory since 31 August 2026, priced by the police authority that issues it, and payable again if it falls outside your mission's validity window.
• Translation or notarisation of documents: roughly ฿1,000–5,000, based on the most detailed published breakdown we found (Issa Compass). Many applicants pay nothing here, because employment letters, contracts and bank statements are already in English.
• Embassy legalisation or authentication. This is a real requirement at some missions and we were wrong to imply otherwise in an earlier version of this page. The MFA's DTV checklist asks for a foreign employment contract or employment certificate "authenticated by the embassy of the country where the company is located", and the same for the company's registration or business licence. Kuala Lumpur requires that supporting materials issued outside Thailand and Malaysia be "accompanied by certified English translations and notarized by an Embassy or Ministry of Foreign Affairs only". Dubai requires relationship documents for dependants to be "attested by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Dubai". Fees and turnaround for that step are set by the authenticating body, not by Thailand, and vary far too much for us to quote a range. Check your mission's checklist for the word "authenticated", "attested" or "notarized" before you assume this is free.
• Health insurance: not a stated DTV requirement on any primary source we could find. Some cost guides describe it as mandatory; we do not think that is supportable. Published estimates run ฿5,000–20,000+ per year. Treat it as a living cost you would pay anyway, not a visa cost.
• Soft-power course or treatment fees: if you are applying under the Thai Soft Power category — Muay Thai, Thai culinary training, or medical treatment, generally six months or more from a registered provider — the course or treatment fee is yours to negotiate with the provider. There is no official schedule and we will not invent a range. Note that Thai language schools no longer qualify under soft power; those applicants need an ED visa, and the DTV fee spent finding that out is not refundable.

What most applicants will not pay:

• Courier fees. Where the application runs through the e-Visa portal, the process is upload-based and your passport stays with you. This is the normal case, but it is not universal: Dubai's published procedure requires personal attendance, retains the original passport during processing, and states that you "will not be able to take your passport back while your visa application is being processed." Read your own mission's page rather than assuming the digital route.

Consultancy fees — ours, and everyone else's

Here is the market as published:

Provider	Published fee	Government fee included?
Applying yourself at thaievisa.go.th	฿0	n/a — you pay it directly
Issa Compass (their survey of the market)	Agent fees ฿3,000–15,000+; preparation-only assistance from ฿9,000	Varies
Thai Visa Centre	First-time DTV from ฿8,000; extension packages ฿12,000 (existing client) / ฿14,000 (new), each including the ฿1,900 government fee; border run ฿6,500	Mixed by package
Siam Legal	US$499 Regular / US$699 Premium / US$199 per dependant — "prices do not include the government's embassy fees"	No
Siam DTV (us)	US$499 Regular, US$699 Premium, US$999 Executive VIP, US$199 per dependant	No

You will have noticed that our headline package prices are identical to Siam Legal's. We would rather say that ourselves than have you find it on a comparison page and wonder what else we left out. On price, we are not undercutting the largest firm in this market; we are matching it.

Three things follow from that table.

First, read which fee a refund promise attaches to. Thai Visa Centre's DTV page states that "all of our DTV service fees are fully refundable if we are unable to successfully assist you in obtaining your visa," and on the same page notes that "DTV visa fees (฿9,400-฿41,100) are non-refundable, even if denied." Those two sentences are almost certainly describing service fee versus government fee, and we are not suggesting otherwise — but they sit side by side, and a hurried reader takes away "fully refundable". Whenever you see a refund guarantee, work out which of the two fees it covers.

Our own position, stated plainly: our professional fees are non-refundable once work begins, and nobody — us, Siam Legal, anyone — can refund a government fee. The money goes to the Thai government at the point of submission.

Second, nobody controls the outcome. No consultant, ours included, has any influence over a consular officer's decision. Any firm quoting you an approval rate is quoting a number that does not exist: no official approval or refusal statistic is published for the DTV. There is a widely circulated pair of percentages that traces back to a source which does not contain it. We will not reprint it, because reprinting it is how it survives.

Third, some missions do not deal with agents at all. Dubai's own document list states that the Consulate-General "has not authorized any agency or travel agents to process the Thai visa on the applicants' behalf" and that all applicants must attend in person. We are an independent consultancy. We are not a government body, we are not authorised by any Thai mission, and no consultancy is. Anyone telling you otherwise is telling you something a Thai consulate has explicitly denied.

When you should not pay us anything

If all of the following are true, you do not need a consultancy and you should not pay for one:

• You are a salaried remote employee or a straightforward freelancer with a clear contract.
• You hold ฿500,000-equivalent in a personal account in your exact passport name, and it has genuinely been there for at least three months — not moved in recently.
• You are legally resident in the jurisdiction of the mission you will apply to, and you are physically outside Thailand.
• Your documents are already in English, and your mission's checklist does not require embassy authentication of them.
• You can get a criminal record certificate from your own police authority inside your mission's validity window, and pay for it directly.
• You are 20 or over, and your nationality is not one of the roughly thirty subject to enhanced scrutiny.

That case is a form, a set of uploads and a card payment at thaievisa.go.th. It costs you the government fee and an evening. Paying US$499 for it buys you a proofreader. If that is your situation, go and do it yourself — that is the honest answer and it is the one we would give a friend.

Consultancy earns its fee where the case is genuinely awkward: a company account you cannot easily unwind, income spread across several countries, a business-owner structure that needs explaining, documents that need authenticating in a third country, a dependant application sequenced after a primary approval, a nationality that triggers additional ministry clearance, or a previous refusal you now have to explain to the same mission.

Costs after you are approved

The visa fee is not the last payment.

The extension. Each 180-day entry can be extended once, inside Thailand, at an Immigration office, for ฿1,900 — the standard Thai extension-of-stay fee. We were not able to retrieve a primary immigration.go.th page confirming it specifically for the DTV this session, but Thai Visa Centre's published extension packages break out ฿1,900 as the government component, which is consistent. You will be asked to evidence your finances again. There are unconfirmed reports of some offices charging considerably more; we cannot stand those up, so treat ฿1,900 as the figure and any larger demand as something to question.

Dependants pay full freight. London publishes £300 for DTV1 (Workcation), DTV2 (Thai soft power activities) and DTV3 (spouse and children under 20 of DTV holders) alike. A family of three applying in London pays £900 in government fees, not £300 with add-ons. Dependants also apply separately, after the primary applicant is approved. Our US$199 per dependant sits on top of that government fee, not instead of it.

Banking and tax. DTV holders frequently cannot open Thai bank accounts, and some existing accounts have been closed. And spending 180 days or more in Thailand in a calendar year makes you a Thai tax resident — which, given the visa grants 180 days per entry with an extension available, is a realistic outcome rather than an edge case. Neither is a fee, but both are financial consequences worth pricing into the decision.

Timing, honestly

There is no single official processing time for the DTV. Individual missions publish their own guidance, and it is not even measuring the same thing from one to the next:

• Dubai states the visa process "takes 2 working days from the date that the applicant submits all required documents."
• Wellington states it takes "around 5-10 working days to process the visa applications" — general guidance, not DTV-specific.
• Kuala Lumpur asks applicants to apply "at least 15 working days before the intended date of travel."
• Singapore asks applicants to complete the application "at least 21 working days before the intended date of travel."

Note that the last two are advance-notice instructions, not processing estimates. Anyone who lines these up into a single "DTV processing time" range is comparing unlike quantities. Any page quoting you "5 to 10 business days" as a universal rule is guessing.

Check your own mission's page and add margin. Booking flights before a visa is issued is a cost of getting it wrong that does not appear on any fee schedule.

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If your case is the straightforward one described above, apply yourself and keep the money. If it is not, a free eligibility review will tell you where you stand before you commit to a package — including when it concludes you should simply file it yourself.