Сколько экспатов живёт на Пхукете?

The ceiling is softer. Retirees, spouses, children, digital nomads on the DTV visa, students and anyone living on savings need no work permit and appear in no Phuket-level count. The nearest official reading of that population is the NSO migration survey: in 2023 it estimated 150 671 people living in Phuket without a Phuket house registration, 30.5% of the night-time group (about 45 429 people) registered outside Thailand — a figure that includes migrant workers as well as expats and is a weighted survey estimate, not a count. Put together, the sources support this: at least 15 314 working expats and 113 796 documented foreign workers of all kinds; a total foreign population that the last census put at 94 690 (18.0% of residents) when work permits were a fraction of today’s; and, for expats in the everyday sense, a plausible band of roughly one to three times the skilled-permit figure. Anything more precise is a guess, and this page does not print one.

A permit is a stock, not a person-year: it counts people whose permit was valid on the last day of the month. It misses everyone who works without one, everyone whose employer sits in another province, and — the larger gap for this question — everyone who does not work. A retired couple in Раваи, a Russian family whose income is abroad, a remote worker on a DTV, an investor on a Thailand Privilege visa, a student at an international school: none of them appear here. The Phuket office register and the national report also disagree with each other. The office newsletter counts 15 314 skilled permits on август 2026 г.; the national table counted 13 482 for ноябрь 2025 г., +13.6% apart, because the office includes Section 63/1 in its “Work Permit” total and closes its books on a date printed in each issue rather than at month end. On the migrant side the gap is far wider in registration years: the office counted 126 980 four-nationality workers in май 2025 г. while the national table for December 2024 showed 91 796, and both are published here as printed, without adjustment.

These are permits, not people. A British retiree, an Australian who owns a villa and runs nothing, a Chinese family with a child at an international school and a Russian couple on tourist-visa runs are all invisible to this list, and the nationalities that dominate Phuket’s tourism statistics do not dominate its permits: the Ministry of Tourism and Sports counted 10 748 204 foreign visitors to Phuket in 2025, Indians and Chinese lead the arrivals, while Russians, Britons and Filipinos lead the permits. The nationality list is reproduced year by year in the table below; a nationality absent from a year’s top fifteen has no figure for that year, and the country hubs on this site show that gap as a gap rather than a zero.

The migrant-labour line tells a different story: it jumps whenever the government opens a registration round and falls when a round expires, from 12 558 in 2015 to a peak of 91 796 in 2024 and 39 819 in the latest national table — while the Phuket office counted 98 482 four-nationality workers on август 2026 г.. Those swings are administrative, not demographic: the Burmese construction, hotel and fishing workforce did not halve and double in a year, its paperwork did. For the island’s economy this series matters more than the expat one — it is the workforce behind every new villa and hotel — but it answers a different question and is kept in its own column throughout.

The house register is the opposite kind of count: precise, and mostly empty of foreigners. DOPA lists 432 464 registered residents at the end of 2025, of whom 9 345 are non-Thai — 2.2% — up from 1 499 in 2010. A foreigner enters a Thai house register (the yellow tabien baan) only by applying for one; most never do. The register also misses most Thais who moved to Phuket from other provinces and kept their home-province registration, which is the “hidden population” that Phuket officials complain about when budgets are allocated per registered head: the NSO survey put it at 150 671 in 2023, 69.5% of them registered in another Thai province and 30.5% abroad.

The dataset is rebuilt from the source documents by a script, without hand-typed figures: the December issue of the national report for each year (the newest issue for the current year), every Phuket newsletter that carries the foreign-worker page, the DOPA registration API at 31 December and the census summary. Where a newsletter’s nationality list does not add up to its own total the year is skipped rather than corrected. The compilation is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to phukettravels.com and the agencies named; the CSV below carries the national series by year, the Phuket office series by month and the nationality lists. Источник: Департамент занятости (Министерство труда), Департамент провинциальной администрации (DOPA) и Национальное статистическое управление Таиланда, получено сентябрь 2026 г.; retrieved сентябрь 2026 г.. Guest arrivals by nationality — who visits, as opposed to who lives here — are on the statistics hub and the by-country pages.