Thailand SME Digital Investment Tax Deduction 2026 — 200% Deduction for IoT

If you are looking at IoT for a plant in Thailand, sooner or later somebody mentions that Thailand has a tax break for digital investment. What they are referring to is the 200% deduction introduced by Royal Decree No. 802, which came into force in February 2026 and which this article calls the Thailand SME digital investment tax deduction. It is not, however, a measure that any company with a presence in Thailand can use. It is restricted to small companies — paid-up capital of 5,000,000 THB or less and revenue of 30,000,000 THB or less — and the qualifying spend is limited to vendors and products registered in the depa Digital Catalog. This article sets out who qualifies, what spending counts, how the vendor check works in practice, and what the saving actually looks like in money.

What the Thailand SME Digital Investment Tax Deduction Is — Royal Decree No. 802 in Outline

A new incentive that took effect in February 2026

The legal basis for the Thailand SME digital investment tax deduction is Royal Decree No. 802 (B.E. 2569), issued under the Thai Revenue Code. The decree was published in the Royal Gazette on 6 February 2026 and took effect the following day, 7 February 2026. Its structure is simple in outline — when a small or medium-sized enterprise invests in qualifying digital products and services, that spending is eligible for a 200% deduction. The publication of the measure was reported by ThaiPR / depa and Revenue Department Successfully Promote 200% Tax Deduction Measure to Support SME Digital Transformation, and the detailed conditions are published by the Digital Economy Promotion Agency (depa) at depa / Thailand Digital Catalog guidance on the 200% tax deduction.

The first thing to fix in your mind is that this measure is not open to companies doing business in Thailand generally. As the name says, it is for SMEs — companies that satisfy a defined size test. Simply having a registered entity in Thailand does not satisfy it. That point is dealt with in numbers in a later section.

What “200% deduction” actually means

The phrase “200% deduction” invites a misreading. It is not a scheme that refunds twice what you spent in cash, and it is not a credit that lets you subtract twice the spend from your corporate income tax bill.

What the decree provides is different — for qualifying spend, the amount you may treat as a deductible expense is doubled relative to what you actually paid. A larger deductible expense compresses taxable income. Compressed taxable income means a smaller corporate income tax charge once the tax rate is applied to it. The benefit therefore appears not as the increase in the deductible amount itself, but as that increase multiplied by the corporate income tax rate.

Miss that structure and you end up taking a proposal to your board on the premise that a 280,000 THB investment brings back 560,000 THB. It does not. The model case later in this article shows what the real number looks like.

The qualifying period runs from 24 June 2025 to 31 December 2027

The decree took effect in February 2026, but the window for qualifying expenditure reaches back further than that. Spending incurred between 24 June 2025, the date of the cabinet resolution, and 31 December 2027 falls within scope. This timing is set out by Mahanakorn Partners / Thailand approves new tax incentive to accelerate SME digital transformation.

That has two practical consequences. First, a company that already invested in IoT or systems during late 2025 or the first half of 2026 may still be able to claim, provided the other conditions are met. Second, because the window closes on 31 December 2027, deferring the decision indefinitely can mean the measure is simply no longer available. Whether any particular spend qualifies is a case-by-case judgement, but past expenditure is worth reviewing rather than assuming it is lost.

Why This Measure Is Drawing Attention Now

It is the revival of a lapsed measure, not a brand-new one

This is not the first time Thailand has offered tax relief on digital investment. According to the Mahanakorn Partners commentary cited above, Royal Decree No. 802 revives the digital investment deduction previously granted under Royal Decree No. 725 (B.E. 2564), which lapsed in 2021, and broadens its scope in the process.

The fact that it is a revival has practical value. Because the concept is not entirely new, an accounting firm that handled the earlier measure can draw on how it was applied at the time. The broadened scope is the less settled part — exactly where the new boundaries fall has not been fully worked through, and that uncertainty is directly connected to the absence of detailed Revenue Department guidelines discussed later.

The policy reads as a response to a digitalisation gap among smaller firms

The fact that eligibility is confined to companies meeting a size test tells you something about the policy intent. Larger companies and large foreign-owned sites can fund system investment on their own, whereas for companies with modest capital and revenue the upfront cost of digital investment is often what stops the decision from being made at all.

The restriction to vendors with a taxable presence in Thailand points the same way. The fiscal cost of the relief is being directed towards building up Thailand’s own digital industry. That intent is what the depa Digital Catalog mechanism, discussed below, actually implements.

Some trade media have reported that the initial beneficiary population will be in the order of 600 companies. That figure could not be traced back to primary sources such as Revenue Department or cabinet documents, so this article does not treat it as established fact.

What it means for smaller Japanese-affiliated sites in Thailand

Japanese-affiliated groups operating in Thailand frequently hold more than one entity — alongside a large production subsidiary there may be a logistics or inspection outsourcing arm, a sales office, or a design and technical support base. In most cases it is these smaller entities, not the production subsidiary, for which the Thailand SME digital investment tax deduction is a realistic option.

Put the other way round, even where the group as a whole is large, the test is applied to each individual company registered in Thailand. The first practical step is therefore to work out, entity by entity, which of your companies could possibly qualify.

Who Qualifies — The Capital and Revenue Thresholds

This is the section we would ask you to read before any other. However attractive the measure looks, if you do not meet the test there is nothing to evaluate.

Both numeric thresholds have to be met

To qualify as an SME under the decree, a company must satisfy both of the following as at its fiscal year end. Meeting only one is not enough.

For anyone working in Japanese-affiliated manufacturing, these are not generous thresholds. A site that owns production equipment and runs volume manufacturing will typically be above both the 5,000,000 THB capital line and the 30,000,000 THB revenue line. Many Japanese-affiliated manufacturing operations in Thailand, and production subsidiaries above a certain size in particular, exceed these thresholds and can therefore fall outside the measure entirely. That needs saying clearly at the entrance to the evaluation, not at the end of it.

This is not a measure available to anyone with a base in Thailand

Some write-ups of this incentive tuck the size test away in a footnote and present it as “Thailand’s digital investment tax break.” In reality the size test is what defines the character of the measure.

When you circulate this internally, do not pass on the name of the measure by itself. Pass on the conditions with it — paid-up capital of 5,000,000 THB or less and revenue of 30,000,000 THB or less. That single sentence is what stops an ineligible site from spending evaluation effort while carrying an expectation it was never going to meet. When reporting to head office in Japan, add that the test is applied per Thai entity, which removes a further layer of misunderstanding.

Companies already receiving other incentives are excluded

Even a company inside the size thresholds is excluded if it is concurrently receiving tax privileges under the BOI Investment Promotion Act, the National Competitiveness Enhancement Act, or the EEC Act. Companies that have previously received a comparable incentive are also excluded.

For Japanese-affiliated companies in Thailand this matters a great deal, because manufacturing sites very often hold BOI privileges, and that alone puts them outside the measure. A smaller service or logistics entity without BOI privileges, on the other hand, is worth checking against the size test. Which of your entities sits under which incentive regime is a question your tax filing accountant can answer definitively.

What Spending Qualifies and What Does Not

Four categories of qualifying spend

According to the depa guidance cited above, qualifying expenditure is organised into four categories. For all four, the vendor and the product must be registered in the depa Digital Catalog. Useful worked examples of each category are set out in iReadCustomer / How to maximize the Thai SME digital tax deduction 2026.

Of the four, the category that most often causes argument on a Japanese-affiliated shop floor is hardware. The next subsection deals with where that boundary sits.

A general-purpose computer does not qualify

Qualifying hardware is positioned as equipment that is inseparably bound to a digital service. On this boundary, the iReadCustomer commentary cited above states that general-purpose laptops and ordinary office equipment fall outside the measure, as does procurement from an overseas vendor with no taxable presence in Thailand. The depa guidance likewise places general-purpose personal computers outside scope.

In practice the line is easier to apply if you restate it this way — if the device is usable on its own for general purposes it does not qualify, and if it only functions in combination with a specific digital service or system it may qualify. That is precisely why a barcode scanner tied to a warehouse management system appears in the examples.

Rule out the non-qualifying items first

Early in an evaluation you reach a conclusion faster by eliminating what cannot qualify than by hunting for what can. The following are outside scope, or carry a high probability of being so.

• General-purpose laptops, desktop PCs and ordinary office equipment
• Software or services procured directly from an overseas vendor with no taxable presence in Thailand
• Anything bought from a vendor or product not registered in the depa Digital Catalog
• Any spend by a company already receiving BOI or other listed incentives

The third item is the one to watch. A product may be unmistakably an IoT device or a system by its nature and still fail to qualify because the vendor is not in the catalog. The vendor registration check therefore comes before any debate about product categories.

The depa Digital Catalog — How the Vendor Check Works

What the catalog does

The depa Digital Catalog is a register of digital products and services operated by the Digital Economy Promotion Agency. Within the Thailand SME digital investment tax deduction, it is the catalog that actually determines the boundary of qualifying spend. The decree defines the categories; the catalog fixes the eligible vendors and products. It is a two-stage arrangement.

Registration status can be checked at the depa / Digital Catalog registered vendor list. Whether the vendor or product you are considering appears on that list is something to establish before the purchase decision, not after it.

The check point is the invoice date

The timing of the check is the detail most often missed in practice. Per the depa guidance and the iReadCustomer commentary cited above, if the vendor is not on the registered list at the point the invoice is issued, the 200% deduction cannot be claimed.

In other words, what is tested is not whether the vendor was registered when you decided to buy, but whether the vendor is registered at the time of invoicing. On a deployment project running over several months, the position can change between contract signature and invoice. Getting the vendor to confirm, at the purchase order or contract stage, that it will maintain its registration is the practical defence.

What to do if your vendor is not registered

If the vendor you were considering turns out not to be in the catalog, there are three options.

• Find a registered alternative vendor and switch to an equivalent product or service
• Ask the vendor you are currently considering whether it intends to register
• Proceed as an ordinary investment decision, without assuming the incentive applies

Do not dismiss the third option. As the model case below shows, the saving from the measure is not always large enough to change an investment decision. If you end up buying something you did not need in order to fit the rules, or selecting a functionally weaker product purely because it qualifies, the investment logic has been inverted. The measure is a nudge on an investment decision, not a reason for one.

Understanding the Mechanics in Numbers — 200% and the 300,000 THB Cap

Not a tax credit, but a doubling of the deductible amount

This section makes the effect traceable in numbers. It starts with the terminology.

The critical distinction in that table is between the first two rows. Some write-ups render this as a “200% tax credit”, but the substance is a doubling of the deductible amount, and the saving is the increase in that deductible amount multiplied by the corporate income tax rate.

The cap is 300,000 THB measured on the spend

The cap is set at 300,000 THB on the qualifying spend, not on the resulting deduction. So if qualifying spend is exactly 300,000 THB, twice that figure — 600,000 THB — can be deducted from taxable income. That is the largest deduction the measure can produce.

Any spend above 300,000 THB does not receive the 200% treatment and reverts to ordinary 100% deductibility. In other words, if you make a system investment substantially larger than 300,000 THB, only the first 300,000 THB attracts the doubled treatment and the excess is handled as an ordinary deductible expense.

The level of that cap says a lot about the character of the measure. This is not a scheme designed to ease the funding burden of a large system investment. It is designed to nudge a small company into taking its first step into digitalisation. For a company planning a full IoT deployment it will not move the overall investment case, but it can meaningfully lighten the cost of one pilot zone.

The Saving in a Model Case

From here, the effect is expressed in actual amounts. The figures below are not real statistics or survey results — they are TOMAS TECH’s own illustrative estimate based on a fictional company created for this article. Real tax outcomes vary with each company’s taxable income, applicable rate, and other deductions.

The company in question is “G” (a pseudonym), a small Japanese-affiliated entity registered in Thailand. The scenario is a small site handling logistics and outsourced inspection work for a production subsidiary. Paid-up capital at fiscal year end is 3,000,000 THB and revenue for the accounting period is 25,000,000 THB.

Checking company G against the SME test

The first question is whether company G can qualify at all.

All three items are satisfied, so company G can be treated as an entity that may qualify. The wording here is deliberately “may qualify” rather than “qualifies”, because, as discussed below, the Revenue Department has not yet issued detailed implementation guidelines and final eligibility has to be confirmed through the tax filing process.

The IoT purchase and the resulting deduction

What company G bought was a set of IoT machine-monitoring sensors retrofitted to an existing inspection line, together with a first-year subscription to cloud monitoring software, procured from a vendor registered in the depa Digital Catalog. The purchase price is set at 280,000 THB, which keeps it inside the 300,000 THB cap.

Comparing the position with and without the measure gives the following.

• Ordinary deduction, without the 200% treatment — 280,000 THB is deducted from taxable income as spent
• Deductible amount with the 200% treatment applied — 280,000 THB multiplied by 2 equals 560,000 THB
• Assuming an effective corporate income tax rate of 20%, the saving from the ordinary deduction alone — 280,000 THB at 20% equals 56,000 THB
• The saving with the 200% treatment applied — 560,000 THB at 20% equals 112,000 THB
• Incremental saving attributable to the measure — 56,000 THB

An incremental effect of 56,000 THB means that the measure adds an amount exactly equal to the saving you would have obtained from the ordinary deduction. That follows directly from the fact that the deductible amount is doubled.

For reference, here is the position if the cap is used in full. The deductible amount becomes 600,000 THB, the saving on an assumed 20% effective rate becomes 120,000 THB, and the incremental effect attributable to the measure becomes 60,000 THB. That is the ceiling on what this measure can add.

The 20% rate used above is an assumption reflecting Thailand’s standard corporate income tax rate within our own illustrative estimate. Actual tax will vary with company G’s specific taxable income, applicable rate, and other deductions.

What we would like you to take from this

Against an investment of 280,000 THB, the incremental saving produced by the measure was 56,000 THB. As a ratio to the investment that is roughly a fifth, but in absolute terms it is not a sum that decides whether an IoT deployment goes ahead.

The workable sequence is therefore this. Judge the investment on its own necessity and payback, decide to proceed, and then use the measure if you qualify. Reverse that order — invest because the incentive exists — and you tend to end up buying things you did not need.

For a way of examining IoT payback from the cost breakdown upwards, our article on remote monitoring cost and payback for overseas plants separates the cost into five layers. Within that structure, the tax saving sits as something that lightens part of the upfront cost. Run the full payback calculation first, then factor in the tax effect.

How This Interacts with Other Incentives — BOI and EEC

The measures you cannot combine are stated explicitly

As noted above, a company concurrently receiving tax privileges under the BOI Investment Promotion Act, the National Competitiveness Enhancement Act, or the EEC Act is outside the scope of the Thailand SME digital investment tax deduction. So is a company that has previously received a comparable incentive.

For Japanese-affiliated manufacturers in Thailand this condition carries real weight. A great many run their production sites under BOI privileges, and in that case exclusion is settled before the size test is even reached. Depending on your group, checking incentive status before checking the size thresholds may be the faster route to an answer.

The test is applied entity by entity

Eligibility is determined per legal entity. So within one Japanese-affiliated group you can easily end up with a manufacturing subsidiary holding BOI privileges that is excluded, alongside a small service company without privileges that may qualify depending on its size.

If you operate several entities, assembling the following three facts for each one makes the decision much faster.

• Paid-up capital and revenue for the most recent accounting period
• Status under the BOI Investment Promotion Act, the National Competitiveness Enhancement Act, and the EEC Act
• Whether a comparable digital investment incentive has been received in the past

This is a schedule your tax filing accountant can generally produce in a short time. It is worth having in hand before you go deeply into the detail of the measure.

Putting the Measure to Work on IoT Investment

Factory IoT spending that could qualify

Within OT and IoT, the candidates most likely to qualify look like this. In every case the precondition is that the vendor and product are registered in the depa Digital Catalog.

• Machine-monitoring sensors retrofitted to installed equipment, and their gateway devices
• Subscriptions to cloud monitoring software that visualises the collected data
• Edge computing servers hosting a local database
• Barcode scanners and handheld terminals integrated with a warehouse management system
• ERP systems and related modules linked to production and inventory management

Edge computing servers and barcode scanners are the hardware examples given in the iReadCustomer commentary cited above. What they have in common is that neither is a general-purpose device used on its own — each functions only as part of a specific system.

It suits the first zone of a pilot deployment

A cap of 300,000 THB measured on the spend corresponds, in factory IoT terms, roughly to the scale of a pilot covering one line or a handful of machines. It will not reach the scale of a site-wide rollout, but it can genuinely lighten the cost of trying the first zone.

For the cost structure of a phased IoT deployment, our article on factory IoT deployment cost in five layers and how to start machine monitoring sets this out in detail. Understanding that cost arises in layers — devices, communications, platform, application and operation — rather than in devices alone also makes it much easier to separate the part of an investment that qualifies from the part that does not.

Do not distort the design to fit the measure

Avoid changing a configuration you actually need in order to steer it into a qualifying category. The typical version of this mistake is selecting a dedicated device for a use case that a general-purpose PC would have handled perfectly well, purely because the dedicated device qualifies.

The order of decisions should be as follows. Decide the functions and configuration you need first, then check whether any of the vendors able to deliver that configuration are registered in the catalog. If a registered vendor can meet the requirements, use the measure; if none can, drop the measure and keep the requirements. Follow that order and the quality of the investment is preserved whether or not the incentive applies.

Working Through the Claim in Practice

Detailed Revenue Department guidelines have not been issued

Before the practical steps, an important caveat. The Mahanakorn Partners commentary cited above states explicitly that, at the time of writing, official implementation guidelines from the Revenue Department are yet to be issued. Claim forms and the detail of supporting documentation have therefore not been published in settled form.

For that reason this article does not describe procedures that do not yet exist. What can be done today is confirming eligibility, assembling documentary evidence, and obtaining case-specific confirmation through a tax adviser or accountant. The three steps below are set out on that basis.

Step 1 — check the vendor and your own eligibility

The first step is confirmation carried out before any purchase or contract. It comes down to three items.

• Whether your company meets the size test — paid-up capital of 5,000,000 THB or less and revenue of 30,000,000 THB or less
• Whether your company is receiving privileges under the BOI Investment Promotion Act, the National Competitiveness Enhancement Act, or the EEC Act
• Whether the vendor and product under consideration are registered in the depa Digital Catalog

The third can be checked at the depa / Digital Catalog registered vendor list referred to earlier. Keeping a record of the date you checked and what you found is useful later, both for internal explanation and for tax confirmation.

Step 2 — purchase and assemble the evidence

At the purchase stage, the vendor has to be on the registered list at the point the invoice is issued. This bears repeating because it is the condition most frequently dropped in practice.

As evidence, keep the invoice, the contract and the payment record, and add material that explains which of the qualifying categories the purchased product or service falls into. While implementation guidelines remain unissued, exactly how much documentation will be required is not settled. Where you are unsure, keeping more rather than less is the safer position.

On the internal approval side, an investment proposal built on an assumed tax incentive tends to attract a rejection when the incentive is used as a justification for the amount before eligibility is settled. For how to structure an IT investment proposal, and how to handle the dual-approval patterns common at Thai sites, our article on writing an IT investment proposal and the approval structure that prevents rejection sets out the approach. Presenting the tax saving as a supporting factor rather than the primary justification produces a much steadier discussion at the approval meeting.

Step 3 — apply it in the tax return and confirm case by case

The final step is applying the treatment in the corporate income tax return. Do not decide this alone — work through the tax adviser or accountant who handles your Thai filings.

The points worth raising with them are these — whether additional documents are needed to support the claim, whether the Revenue Department has expressed any view on how the qualifying categories are determined, and what procedure applies where spend from an earlier period is being claimed retrospectively. Until implementation guidelines are published, this case-by-case confirmation is effectively the procedure.

Common Mistakes and Points to Watch

Starting the evaluation without checking the size test

The most frequent failure. Someone hears about the measure, internal evaluation begins on the assumption that the company qualifies, and only later does it emerge that paid-up capital or revenue is above the threshold. That wastes evaluation effort, and it also leaves internal expectations that have been built up along the way with nowhere to go.

The remedy is straightforward — check paid-up capital, revenue and other incentive status first. For anyone in finance those three items take well under an hour.

Not checking the vendor’s registration before purchase

The pattern here is spending weeks comparing specifications and prices, then discovering that the selected vendor is not in the catalog. It happens most often when the vendor is the Thai arm of a supplier chosen by head office in Japan, or when an overseas cloud service is contracted directly.

Add catalog registration status to your evaluation checklist early in vendor selection, ideally before the shortlist is narrowed.

Overestimating the saving

This is the misreading of “200% deduction” as getting back twice what you spent. In this article’s model case, the incremental saving against an investment of 280,000 THB was 56,000 THB. Confuse those two figures inside an investment proposal and the justification for the investment collapses with them.

Assuming spend above the 300,000 THB cap also qualifies

The cap is 300,000 THB measured on the qualifying spend. Anything above it reverts to ordinary 100% deductibility. If you are planning a large system investment, build in from the outset that the 200% treatment does not apply to the whole amount.

Investing because of the incentive

Because the saving is always smaller than the spend, buying something you did not need leaves you with less cash than before. The measure supports an investment decision; it is not a reason for one. The model-case numbers make that obvious.

Not checking whether other incentives block the claim

Exclusion of companies holding BOI privileges is explicit in the decree. Since a great many Japanese-affiliated companies hold BOI privileges at their manufacturing sites, skipping this check can render the entire evaluation pointless.

Frequently Asked Questions

We have an entity in Thailand — can we use this measure

Not necessarily, and in many cases no. Eligibility is confined to SMEs that satisfy both conditions as at fiscal year end — paid-up capital of 5,000,000 THB or less and revenue for the accounting period of 30,000,000 THB or less. Companies concurrently receiving privileges under the BOI Investment Promotion Act, the National Competitiveness Enhancement Act, or the EEC Act are also excluded. Many Japanese-affiliated manufacturing operations in Thailand, and production subsidiaries above a certain size in particular, exceed these thresholds and can fall outside the measure, so start by checking the test against each of your Thai entities individually.

Does a 200% deduction mean twice the spend comes back

No. It means that the amount deductible for qualifying spend becomes twice what was actually paid. The saving appears as that increased deductible amount multiplied by the corporate income tax rate. In this article’s own illustrative estimate, spend of 280,000 THB produced a deductible amount of 560,000 THB, a saving of 112,000 THB on an assumed effective rate of 20%, and an incremental effect attributable to the measure of 56,000 THB.

Does any IT equipment we buy qualify

No. Qualifying spend falls into four categories — computer software and programs, hardware, smart devices and equipment, and digital services — and in every case the vendor and product must be registered in the depa Digital Catalog. General-purpose personal computers are outside scope, as is procurement from an overseas vendor with no taxable presence in Thailand. Hardware additionally has to be equipment that is inseparably bound to a digital service.

What is the cap on the deduction

It is 300,000 THB measured on the qualifying spend. Twice that figure, a maximum of 600,000 THB, can therefore be deducted from taxable income. Spend above 300,000 THB reverts to ordinary 100% deductibility for the excess. Using the cap in full gives a saving of 120,000 THB on an assumed effective rate of 20% in our own illustrative estimate, of which 60,000 THB is the incremental effect of the measure.

How do we go about making the claim

At the time of writing, official implementation guidelines from the Revenue Department have not yet been issued, so claim forms and the detail of supporting documentation have not been published in settled form. What can be done now is checking the size test and other incentive status, checking the vendor’s catalog registration, assembling documentary evidence, and obtaining case-specific confirmation through the tax adviser or accountant who handles your Thai filings.

Does equipment we have already bought qualify

The qualifying period covers spend incurred between 24 June 2025 and 31 December 2027, so expenditure inside that window may be claimable retrospectively. The conditions still apply — the size test must be met, the spend must fall into a qualifying category, and the vendor must have been registered in the depa Digital Catalog at the point the invoice was issued. Retrospective claims need case-by-case confirmation through a tax adviser or accountant.

Summary

Here are the key points of this article.

The Thailand SME digital investment tax deduction is granted under Royal Decree No. 802 (B.E. 2569), issued under the Thai Revenue Code, published in the Royal Gazette on 6 February 2026 and effective from 7 February 2026. It revives, with broadened scope, the measure previously granted under Royal Decree No. 725 (B.E. 2564), which lapsed in 2021. The qualifying period covers spend from 24 June 2025 to 31 December 2027.

Eligibility is confined to SMEs meeting both conditions as at fiscal year end — paid-up capital of 5,000,000 THB or less and revenue for the accounting period of 30,000,000 THB or less. Companies concurrently receiving privileges under the BOI Investment Promotion Act, the National Competitiveness Enhancement Act, or the EEC Act are excluded, as are companies that have previously received a comparable incentive. This is not a measure available to anyone with a base in Thailand, and Japanese-affiliated production subsidiaries above a certain size can fall outside it entirely — that is the first fork in the road when evaluating it.

Qualifying spend falls into four categories — computer software and programs, hardware, smart devices and equipment, and digital services — and in every case the vendor and product must be registered in the depa Digital Catalog. General-purpose personal computers are outside scope, as is procurement from an overseas vendor with no taxable presence in Thailand. Because registration is tested at the point the invoice is issued, the check has to extend beyond the purchase decision to the invoicing date.

Mechanically, the measure does not subtract anything from the corporate income tax charge — it doubles the deductible amount relative to the spend. The cap is 300,000 THB measured on the spend, so a maximum of 600,000 THB can be deducted from taxable income. In our own illustrative model case, an investment of 280,000 THB produced a deductible amount of 560,000 THB, a saving of 112,000 THB on an assumed effective rate of 20%, and an incremental effect of 56,000 THB against the ordinary deduction. Using the cap in full gives 600,000 THB deducted, a saving of 120,000 THB and an incremental effect of 60,000 THB. These figures are our own estimate based on a fictional company, not real statistics.

On the practical side, official implementation guidelines from the Revenue Department have not been issued at the time of writing, so the detail of the claim procedure is unsettled. What can be done now is checking the size test and other incentive status, checking vendor registration in the catalog, assembling documentary evidence, and obtaining case-specific confirmation through a tax adviser or accountant. When applying this to IoT investment, keep the order — judge the investment on its own necessity and payback first, and use the measure only if you then qualify.

Where to Turn While You Are Still Considering This

If the Thailand SME digital investment tax deduction is what prompts you to start looking at IoT, the first things you need are a check on whether your entity meets the size test and a clear view of whether the investment you have in mind is likely to fall into a qualifying category. At TOMAS TECH we work with plants run by Japanese-affiliated manufacturers in Thailand, and we are happy to start from the earliest stage — what to measure and how far to go with an IoT deployment, and which layers the cost will actually land in. Whether the measure applies to your company is a question for a tax adviser or accountant, but having the substance of the investment organised makes that conversation far more productive too. There is no need for a fixed budget or timeline before you get in touch — feel free to reach us through our contact page.

References

• ThaiPR / depa and Revenue Department Successfully Promote 200% Tax Deduction Measure to Support SME Digital Transformation
• depa / Thailand Digital Catalog guidance on the 200% tax deduction
• Mahanakorn Partners / Thailand approves new tax incentive to accelerate SME digital transformation
• iReadCustomer / How to maximize the Thai SME digital tax deduction 2026
• depa / Digital Catalog registered vendor list