Thailand’s international school sector has nearly tripled since 2014. School numbers rose from around 100 to 275 by 2025, and enrolment climbed from under 50,000 to 92,960.
Industry leaders now warn that growth could reach saturation within three years. The fertility rate has fallen steadily over the past decade, and more couples are delaying marriage or choosing not to have children. The domestic pipeline that filled those schools is narrowing.
Capacity keeps arriving regardless. Dulwich College opened a Bangkok campus in Bang Na this month. Wells International is preparing an IPO and weighing further campuses in Chiang Mai and Phuket.
An investor reading the growth figures and an operator reading the birth data are looking at the same market and reaching opposite conclusions.
Nobody agrees how many schools there are
Depending on the source, Thailand has 275 international schools, or 257, or 249, or around 200, or 170. The spread is not sloppiness. The counts measure different things.
Some count only schools teaching a full international curriculum in English. Others include bilingual schools, international preschools and standalone early years centres. Some count ISAT members. Others count everything holding the relevant licence category.
This matters when a feasibility study reports competitor density. A catchment with twelve international schools by one definition has five by another, and the fee bands those two groups occupy are not the same. Establish which definition a number uses before it goes anywhere near a model.
Where demand comes from now
The old expatriate package market is a smaller part of the picture than it was. What has replaced it is domestic wealth and regional mobility.
Thai households with assets above one million US dollars are projected to reach around 162,000 in 2026, growing at roughly 11.7 per cent a year, concentrated in Bangkok and the larger provincial cities. Alongside that, Thailand’s position as a regional hub draws professionals from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, as well as from Russia, Ukraine and China.
Fees run from about 500,000 to 1.2 million baht a year, against a GDP per capita of roughly 250,000 to 300,000 baht. That gap tells you the market is a wealth product rather than a middle-class one, and wealth is more geographically concentrated than population.
British curricula lead, followed by American, IB and Singaporean programmes.
The ownership problem
Private schools operate under the Private School Act B.E. 2550, licensed by the Office of the Private Education Commission within the Ministry of Education.
The licence holder must be a Thai national, or a juristic person in which more than half the shares or capital is held by Thais. The school must have a named director who is a Thai national holding at least a bachelor’s degree. Nominee shareholding arrangements are prohibited under Thai law.
A foreign operator therefore cannot hold the licensed entity outright. The structures used in practice separate the school from the intellectual property: the licensed company operates the school, while curriculum, trademarks and educational systems are licensed to it under a separate agreement, with foreign appointees in academic and operational roles and defined governance rights over finance and approvals.
That structure is legitimate and common. It also needs to be built carefully enough to survive scrutiny, because arrangements designed to give a foreign party the economics of ownership without the shareholding are where the nominee prohibition bites.
Enforcement stopped being theoretical this year
Through 2026 Thai authorities have run a sustained campaign against unlicensed schools and improper structures, and the cases are instructive because each one fails in a different way.
- Bangkok, Prawet, April. An unlicensed international school raided, ten foreign teachers and staff arrested for working without permits. The school had been running for over a year with more than 100 students, mostly kindergarten and primary, having begun teaching before approval was granted.
- Koh Phangan, May. A site licensed as a childcare centre for eighteen children aged two to five was found operating as a school with 89 children on the premises and more than 100 linked to it. Nine people arrested.
- Bangkok, Pridi Banomyong area, May. OPEC ran a joint inspection with immigration and the Department of Employment, confirmed the school held no licence, identified six foreign teachers without work permits, and filed a police report.
- Phuket, August. Two foreign nationals and two Thai nationals arrested over three international schools that police allege operated through nominee arrangements in breach of the Foreign Business Act.
The Phuket case is the one that matters most to an investor, because it is not about missing paperwork. It concerns the structure itself, and specifically the use of Thai shareholders to hold a position that a foreign party actually controls.
The line between a properly constructed joint venture and a nominee arrangement is not always obvious from the outside, and it is not decided by what the documents are called. Ownership relief, IP licensing, service agreements and governance rights can all form part of a legitimate structure. The same devices assembled with the intention of giving a foreign party the substance of ownership are the thing being prosecuted.
There is an operating point here as well as a legal one. In the Prawet case, more than 100 children had their schooling interrupted, and in the Koh Phangan case a nursery licence was being used to hold a school. Parents in this market read that coverage. A market that is clearing out its improvised operators is a market where a properly licensed school with a credible operator has an easier story to tell.
A claim worth checking before you rely on it
Most guides to opening a school in Thailand state that Board of Investment promotion delivers 100 per cent foreign ownership, and stop there.
BOI promotion can grant relief from the foreign ownership limits in the Foreign Business Act, along with corporate income tax exemptions and land holding rights for promoted activities. The Private School Act is separate legislation with its own licensee requirements, and relief under one statute does not automatically carry into the other.
Whether BOI promotion changes who may hold a formal school licence is not something the published guidance settles, and the confident assertions online are mostly made by parties selling the application. Establish the position with Thai counsel and with BOI and OPEC directly before a structure is built on it. Getting this wrong is not a compliance detail. It determines who owns the school.
The fee ceiling is a judgement, not a formula
The Act sets no maximum fee. It does allow OPEC or the Ministry to order a reduction where fees are judged to represent exorbitant profit-seeking or an excessive burden.
Dubai regulates fees through a published index tied to inspection outcomes, which is restrictive and predictable. Thailand’s constraint is discretionary. It is unlikely to bind a school priced in line with its peers, and it is a real consideration for anyone modelling aggressive fee escalation in a market where affordability is becoming a political question.
Land carries its own constraint. Foreign entities cannot own land directly, so most projects run on long leases. Lease term against the length of the investment horizon is a question to settle before site selection, not after.
Bangkok, and the argument for looking elsewhere
Bangkok holds the greatest concentration of schools, the strongest brands and the most crowded premium tier. It is also where the wealth is.
Expansion is moving outward. Chonburi and the Eastern Economic Corridor, Chiang Mai and Phuket all now carry international provision, driven by industrial employment in the east and by lifestyle relocation in the north and south. Provincial markets offer lower land cost and less competition, and they draw on much shallower wealth pools. A school that would fill in Bangkok may take twice as long to fill in a provincial city, and the ramp assumption matters more than the fee assumption.
Phuket has a further complication. Its demand includes internationally mobile families whose stay is measured in years rather than school careers, which lifts churn and makes the retention assumption in any model worth testing twice.
What this means for how a Thai project is structured
Put the ownership question and the demographic question together and Thailand rewards operators rather than owners.
The equity route is constrained by statute. The returns available to a foreign party come from the management position, the curriculum and brand licence, and the governance rights attached to them, rather than from the shareholding. That is a different investment case from the one most investors arrive with, and it is closer to how the mature markets in the region have ended up working anyway.
It also makes the operator selection the whole decision. In a market with a contracting domestic pipeline and mature competition, a school that fills is one that parents choose over an established alternative. Nothing in the structure of the deal produces that.
The contrast with Malaysia is instructive, since the two markets are often modelled together. Malaysia permits full foreign equity in education and removed its cap on domestic enrolment in 2012. Thailand does neither. Two neighbouring markets, similar fee bands, opposite ownership regimes, and a plan built for one will not transfer.
The GSE view
Thailand is not short of international schools. It is short of schools that will still be filling in 2035, when the cohort now entering kindergarten reaches secondary and the year groups behind it are smaller again.
That is an argument for entering on quality and for treating enrolment ramp assumptions with more caution than the growth data invites. A market approaching saturation punishes optimistic ramps first, because the students a new school needs have to come from somewhere, and in a shrinking cohort they come from other schools.
The provinces are where the map is still being drawn, with the caveat that provincial wealth pools are thinner and take longer to convert. The regional inflow from neighbouring countries is real and is worth building an admissions strategy around, and it is also the most volatile part of the catchment.
GSE has delivered more than 60 school and education projects across 28 countries, including in Southeast Asia. If you are weighing a Thai project, the structure conversation should happen before the site conversation. Speak to us through the contact page.
Sources
School numbers and enrolment growth 2014 to 2025, saturation warning and fee ranges: Bangkok Post special report citing industry data and ISAT, March 2026. Market value and school count projections: Kasikorn Research Centre. High net worth household projections and demand segmentation: LH Bank, reported by The Nation. Licensing framework, licensee nationality requirements, director requirements, nominee prohibition and fee reduction powers: Private School Act B.E. 2550 and published legal commentary. BOI incentives and Foreign Business Act relief: Board of Investment guidance and legal commentary. Enforcement cases: Bangkok Post and Thai PBS (Prawet, April 2026), The Nation (Koh Phangan, May 2026, and the OPEC joint inspection, May 2026), The Thaiger (Phuket nominee arrests, August 2026).
This article reflects the position as at 9 August 2026. The interaction between BOI promotion and Private School Act licensing is not settled in published guidance and should be confirmed with Thai counsel. General commentary, not legal advice.