The short answer, and why it is a range
Nobody counts expats. Thai statistics count three things that overlap with the question: foreigners holding a valid work permit (Department of Employment, monthly), foreigners with a name in a Phuket house register (Department of Provincial Administration, yearly) and everyone usually resident in the province on census day (National Statistical Office, once a decade, last full count in 2010). The first is the only series that names nationalities, and it is the floor of any honest answer: on 2026年8月 the Phuket Provincial Employment Office reported 15,314 skilled work permits in force — the managers, teachers, chefs, sports coaches and company directors that the word “expat” usually means — plus 98,482 permits held by workers from Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, 113,796 documented foreign workers in all.
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.
What a work permit counts — and what it does not
The Department of Employment publishes, every month, the number of foreigners holding a valid work permit in each province, by the section of the Foreign Workers Management decree under which the permit was issued. Section 59 “general” permits are the skilled category: a foreigner employed by a Thai company or running one, on a non-immigrant B visa. Section 62 covers staff of Board of Investment promoted companies. Section 63/1 is stateless and hill-tribe persons — neither expats nor migrants, kept separate on this page. Everything else — workers imported under government-to-government MOUs, nationality-verified workers, the successive cabinet-resolution registration rounds and Section 64 border commuters — is migrant labour from Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The national report for 2025年11月 gives Phuket 53,570 permits: 13,482 skilled (12,986 general, 496 BOI), 39,819 migrant labour and 269 minority permits.
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 拉威, 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 2026年8月; the national table counted 13,482 for 2025年11月, +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 2025年5月 while the national table for December 2024 showed 91,796, and both are published here as printed, without adjustment.
Where Phuket’s working expats come from: 俄罗斯, Philippines, 中国, 英国, 法国
The Phuket Provincial Employment Office is the only agency that publishes work permits by nationality for the province, and it does so as a top-15 list plus “others” in its monthly newsletter. In the 2025年10月 snapshot Russians held 3,477 skilled permits, 22.9% of the total; Philippines 1,538 (10.1%), 中国 1,218 (8.0%), 英国 1,167 (7.7%), 法国 849 (5.6%). The top five hold 54.3% of skilled permits, the fifteen named nationalities 76.9%, and 3,491 permits belong to nationalities below the cut. Five years earlier, in 2020年12月, the same list was led by 俄罗斯 (895), 英国 (876), 中国 (783): the British and Chinese communities have grown slowly, the Russian one by +288.5% since 2020, and Filipinos — hotel staff, teachers and nurses — are now the second largest group.
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.
2015–2025: the skilled series doubled, the migrant series moved with policy
Skilled permits in Phuket grew from 7,605 at the end of 2015 to 13,767 in 2024 — +77.3% over the period, −2.1% in the last year. The dip is the pandemic: the Phuket office register fell from 10,083 skilled permits in 2020年7月 to 5,851 in 2021年11月, when hotels closed and employers let permits lapse, and recovered to 15,620 by 2025年4月. Against a registered population of 432,464 (2025) the skilled figure is 31.2 permits per 1,000 registered residents, up from 19.7 per 1,000 in 2015.
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 2026年8月. 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.
Census, house registers and the hidden population
The census is the only count that includes people without permits or paperwork. On 1 September 2010 the NSO found 525,709 people living in Phuket, 431,019 Thai and 94,690 non-Thai (18.0%); the preliminary release had put non-Thais at 115,881 before revision. No nationality table was published for the province; for the Southern region as a whole 294,955 of 362,967 non-Thai residents were from Myanmar, so the great majority of Phuket’s 2010 foreigners were migrant workers, not expats. The 2020 census was cut back during COVID-19 and no provincial nationality table has appeared, which is why this page has no 2020 census row.
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.
What is not on this page, and how to read the estimates in the press
Immigration holds the data that would settle the question — every TM30 address report, every extension of stay, every DTV, retirement and marriage visa issued to a Phuket address — and publishes none of it by province; The Phuket News noted in 2024 that Phuket Immigration had stopped releasing even its headline count of foreigners on the island. Until that changes, the figures in circulation are of three kinds. Official statements without a method (“more than 1.5 million people actually live here” against 432,464 registered) describe Thais and foreigners together. Numbers such as “100,000–115,000 expats” travel from one relocation website to the next without an origin. And a few dated official readings — the 2010 census, the 2011 statistical office comment that undocumented migrants exceeded 100,000, the 2023 survey — are the ones worth quoting. All of them are listed in the estimates table with their date, source and a note on quality, apart from the data.
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. 来源：泰国劳工部就业厅、内政部地方行政厅与国家统计局，检索于 2026年9月; retrieved 2026年9月. Guest arrivals by nationality — who visits, as opposed to who lives here — are on the statistics hub and the by-country pages.