Five legal forms of a Thai will — and which one actually fits a property owner

Is there only one kind of Thai will? No — the Civil and Commercial Code recognises five distinct forms (Sections 1656-1664), and picking the wrong one for your situation is one of the more common ways a foreign owner's estate plan for their Koh Phangan property fails. Thailand's 2026 will registration reform modernised the paperwork for just one of these five forms — the 'public document' will made before a district officer — but it didn't touch the other four, and for some foreign owners, one of those other forms is actually the better fit.

The five forms, in practice

• Ordinary written will (Section 1656) — dated, signed by the testator, witnessed by at least two people. No district-office visit is required, so it's the fastest and most private option, and can be drafted bilingually with a lawyer.
• Holograph will (Section 1657) — the entire document, including the date and signature, must be in the testator's own handwriting. No witnesses are needed, but a single typed line, printed template, or word not physically handwritten by the testator invalidates it — a real trap for a will drafted on a computer and only signed by hand.
• Public document will (Section 1658) — the form covered by the March 2026 registration reform: the testator declares their wishes to a district officer in Thai (an interpreter is used if needed), the officer records and reads it back, and it is signed by testator, two witnesses and the officer, then kept in the district office's own register. This is the form Thai law firms most often recommend to foreign owners specifically because of that official custody.
• Secret document will (Section 1660) — the testator signs and seals their own document, then delivers it closed to a district officer in front of two witnesses; the officer notes the delivery on the cover without ever reading the contents. It gives privacy plus an official record of the will's existence, but the sealed document itself still has to survive intact, and any drafting mistake inside stays hidden until it's opened after death.
• Oral will (Section 1663) — valid only when 'exceptional circumstances such as imminent danger of death, epidemic or war' make every other form impossible, declared before at least two witnesses. It automatically expires one month after the testator is again able to make a will in one of the other four forms (Section 1664) — a stopgap, not a planning tool.

Two formalities that void a will outright

• Under 15 years old — Section 1703 makes any will by a person who hasn't yet turned 15 void, with no exceptions.
• A witness — or their spouse — who also stands to inherit — Section 1653 strikes the gift to that person, even though the rest of the will can still stand; never use a beneficiary, or a beneficiary's spouse, as one of the required witnesses. A witness also cannot be a person of unsound mind, adjudged quasi-incompetent, or deaf, dumb, or blind (Section 1670).

Which form actually fits a foreign property owner

For most foreign owners with a villa, lease or company shares to leave behind, Thai law firms converge on two practical choices: the public document will, for the strongest evidentiary weight and safest custody (worth the Thai-language declaration and interpreter), or an ordinary written will, drafted by a lawyer and kept somewhere the executor can actually find it, when privacy or speed matters more. The holograph and secret forms are rarely recommended for a non-Thai-speaking foreigner specifically because their formal requirements — fully handwritten in one case, sealed and undisclosed in the other — are easy to get wrong without anyone catching the error until probate. Whichever form is chosen, it should be a will written in Thailand for Thai-situated assets — see dying without a Thai will for what happens by default if none of these five forms is ever completed — and coordinated with, not silently overridden by, any separate will made in the owner's home country.

None of these five forms is inherently 'better' in the abstract — the ordinary written will and the public document will cover the overwhelming majority of foreign property owners' needs, and the choice mostly comes down to whether official custody or speed and privacy matters more. What matters is picking one deliberately, executing it to the letter of its specific formal requirements, and keeping it findable — an otherwise perfectly reasoned Thai will can still fail over a missing signature, a disqualified witness, or a single typed word in what was meant to be a holograph.