Phuket raised its hillside building ceiling from 80m to 140m in 2024 — could Koh Phangan's rules loosen the same way?

If Phuket loosened its hillside building ban, will Koh Phangan's do the same? It's a fair question given how often the two islands' rules get lumped together — but the honest answer is that Phangan's rules aren't structured the same way Phuket's were, so there's no equivalent pressure building toward the same fix. Here's what actually changed in Phuket, and why the read-across to Phangan is weaker than it looks.

What actually changed in Phuket

A Cabinet-approved rezoning by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment was published in the Royal Gazette on 13 December 2024 and took effect the next day. It raised the construction ceiling in Phuket's Zone 6 — most of the island, excluding the coast, the protected Nakkerd mountain range and dense areas like Phuket Town — from 80 metres above sea level to 140 metres. Before this, land above 80m had effectively been unbuildable since Phuket's own provincial environmental protection rules took hold in 2017, leaving owners of hillside plots paying land tax on land they legally couldn't use.

The conditions attached

• Only land titled before 2017 qualifies — this is relief for existing landowners caught by the 2017 rule, not an opening for new hillside subdivision.
• Single structures only — no resorts, no multi-building villa compounds, and no adjacent buildings on neighbouring plots.
• 6 m height cap and a 90 m² footprint cap, with at least 70% of the plot left as green space and half of that area left unpaved for natural vegetation.
• A mandatory landslide, flooding and erosion impact assessment by the Phuket Provincial Office of Public Works and Town & Country Planning before any specific project is approved.

Officials framed the change as a fairness correction — landowners had been paying tax for years on land they couldn't build on — balanced against the same landslide and environmental risks that justified the original 80m line.

Why Koh Phangan's starting point is different

Phangan's hillside rules come from a separate, more recent instrument: the Surat Thani provincial environmental protection notification covering Koh Samui, Koh Phangan and Koh Tao, in force since 22 May 2025. Unlike Phuket's old rule, it was never an outright ban above a fixed elevation. As set out in Hillside building limits on Koh Phangan and Coastal setback rules in practice, a single home above 140 m elevation is already legally buildable on Phangan today — capped at roughly 90 m² of floor area with about 70% of the plot left open, similar in spirit to what Phuket's new 80–140m tier now allows. Phangan owners were never in the position Phuket's pre-2024 landowners were in: paying tax on hillside land with zero legal path to build on it.

The trend on Phangan is running the other way

If anything, enforcement on Phangan is tightening, not loosening. The 'Samui Model' drone and GPS mapping task force has expanded onto the island and issued demolition orders against villas built beyond their permitted elevation or slope tier — see The 'Samui Model' enforcement expands to Phangan. That's the opposite pressure from what drove Phuket's 2024 change: Phuket responded to landowners with genuinely trapped, unusable equity; Phangan's current story is stricter policing of limits that already permit building, just within tight caps.

The precedent that does carry over is the mechanism, not the outcome: a Cabinet-approved rezoning of a provincial environmental protection notification is exactly the kind of instrument that set Phangan's current limits and could, in principle, amend them later. Nothing in current reporting suggests that's under consideration for Koh Samui, Koh Phangan or Koh Tao. Buy or design around today's caps — set out in Hillside building limits on Koh Phangan — not a hoped-for loosening that Phuket's experience doesn't actually predict.