"A 90-year lease is as good as owning." That line sold thousands of villas in Thailand. Buyers signed a 30-year lease with two renewals agreed in advance, 30 plus 30 plus 30, and called it disguised ownership, a virtual freehold. In March 2025, Thailand's Supreme Court put an end to that illusion.
For the honest investor, this is good news. The ruling killed a mirage and rewarded transparent structures.
This THEVA series of eighteen articles works through the facts one by one, with the legal text in hand. After the superficies right and the usufruct right, this piece tackles the question that worries buyers most: duration. How long does a foreigner really keep their land, and what is a promise of renewal actually worth?
Article 14 of 18 covers what the law says about lease duration and renewal, why the 90-year lease is a myth, and what genuinely protects your villa over time.
Source: Thai Civil and Commercial Code, Sections 538, 540 and 569, and Supreme Court Judgment No. 4655/2566.
The 90-Year Myth
For two decades, the arrangement was treated as a market standard. A registered 30-year lease, the legal maximum, came with a written promise to renew it twice, reaching 60, 90, sometimes 99 years. It was sold as the equivalent of ownership, since the foreigner appeared to secure use of the land for three generations. The argument was simple and reassuring, which is exactly why it became a universal sales pitch.
The problem was a weakness few buyers saw. A renewal promise signed today for thirty or sixty years in the future never had the strength people attributed to it. Eventually, it ran into the text of the law.
What Thai Law Actually Says
The starting rule fits in one line. Section 540 of the Civil and Commercial Code caps the term of a lease of immovable property at thirty years, and any longer term is automatically reduced to thirty. The law allows a lease to be renewed, but each renewal cannot itself exceed thirty years from its own date.
The March 2025 Supreme Court Ruling
In March 2025, the Supreme Court ruled on pre-agreed renewals in Judgment 4655/2566. Its conclusion is clear. A clause that provides, from the day of signing, for automatic renewals designed to exceed thirty years is void, because it circumvents Section 540.
The Court refused to treat such a clause as a personal right enforceable between the parties. It noted that the promise repeated the original rent and terms identically for the entire period, which revealed a single long-term lease disguised as a series of renewals.
Two consequences follow, and every buyer needs to know them. First, a promise to renew is not a real right. It binds only the original lessor, and it does not bind their heirs or a new owner of the land.
Second, renewal requires a new agreement, genuinely concluded and registered again at expiry, not a box ticked thirty years earlier. If the original lessor breaks the promise, the remedy is compensation, not a forced renewal.
Renew Without Limit, Never Lock In Advance
Does this mean a foreigner gets thirty years and then has to leave? Not at all, and this is the other half of the myth, the most misunderstood one. The law does not cap the number of renewals. The thirty-year ceiling applies to each registration, not to the total length of the relationship.
Nothing prevents renewing a lease at expiry, then renewing it again, and so on, with no limit on the number of times.
This distinction matters. A lease relationship can last 60, 90 or 120 years, provided it rests on successive renewals genuinely concluded at each term, rather than on a 90-year block locked in on day one. The myth made two false claims at once: that you were limited to thirty years forever, and that you could escape that limit by signing 90 years in advance. The reality sits between the two, with a renewal that is repeatable but built properly over time.
What Protects You at Renewal
One legitimate question remains. If renewal is not guaranteed in advance, what protects the occupant when the time comes?
The Renewal Priority Clause
Part of the answer lies in a renewal priority clause. This is a contractual right under which the landowner commits to offer renewal first to the villa owner, before any third party. In practice, the lessor cannot hand that renewal to someone else who turns up, even one offering more, without first honouring the priority.
Its scope needs to be stated precisely, to avoid sliding back into the myth. The priority binds the lessor who signed it, and a breach gives rise to damages. It is not a real right that would force a future buyer of the land to renew.
Its real strength therefore comes less from the clause itself than from the identity of the lessor. If the landowner is a stable entity aligned with the project, the scenario of a hostile lessor refusing renewal in order to sell to the highest bidder does not arise. This is where structure matters more than promise.
Rent Cannot Spiral
The second classic concern is renewal rent. What happens if, after thirty years, the owner demands ten times the original amount? Protection here does not come from a public rent control authority, which does not exist for private leases. It comes from an indexation clause written into the contract.
Renewal rent is tied to an objective index, the official cadastral value, which the State reassesses at regular intervals. Rent therefore rises at a predictable pace set by the State's schedule, not at the lessor's discretion.
This mechanism avoids two traps at once. Freezing the rent at the same amount for 90 years would get the whole arrangement reclassified as a disguised lease, and that is precisely one of the elements the Court relied on. Leaving rent to an undefined future negotiation would make the clause unenforceable, a mere agreement to agree later. A determinable formula anchored to a public index is the solid middle ground between the two.
Why This Combination Is a Strength
This is the point that changes how the whole arrangement looks. At first glance, two features could pass for weaknesses: renewal is only a priority rather than an automatic guarantee, and rent rises with the cadastral value. They are in fact what makes the structure legally sound, and the 2025 ruling proves it in reverse.
What the Court struck down was an automatic renewal locked in advance, at a rent frozen identically for ninety years. Together, those two traits revealed a single disguised lease, not genuine renewals. The structure described here is its mirror image.
| Feature | Struck down in 2025 | Authentic renewal |
|---|---|---|
| Renewal | Automatic, agreed at signing | Genuinely concluded again at each expiry |
| Rent | Frozen at the original amount for 90 years | Indexed to the official cadastral value |
| Legal nature | A single long-term lease in disguise | A new transaction at each term, at current value |
Each renewal is therefore a new transaction at the price of the day, not the mere continuation of an agreement locked in at the start. Far from weakening the structure, indexed rent and a non-guaranteed priority are the very proof of an authentic renewal, the kind the law recognises, rather than a disguised workaround.
"The 90-year lease locked in advance is a myth the courts have buried. What truly protects you is a repeatable renewal, a contractual priority, rent indexed to a State schedule, and a villa that belongs to you whatever happens."
What Changes for Foreign Investors
The 2025 ruling brought down the fake 90-year leases. The model THEVA follows does not depend on them, which is exactly what makes it sound. Rather than promising a magic number, it stacks real protections.
The first is structural alignment. The land belongs to a genuinely Thai entity, and that same entity is the lessor. The landowner and the developer are not two opposing interests but one, so the scenario buyers fear, a third-party lessor refusing to renew in order to take the land back, does not exist in this configuration.
The second is the villa itself. You own it through a superficies right registered on the title, separate from the land. Even in the extreme case of non-renewal, your villa does not pass to the landowner, and its value is owed to you.
Add to this the renewal priority with its compensation remedy, rent indexed to the cadastral value, and a buy-back at a defined value if you choose not to renew, which we cover in a dedicated article on the buy-back at cadastral value.
Ask the real question. How long can I keep my villa? For as long as I keep renewing, with no limit on the number of renewals, with a lessor who is on my side. And if one day I stop?
Then I leave with the value of my villa, not empty-handed. That is the exact opposite of the myth, which promised a great deal on paper and collapsed at the first serious examination. Here, the promise involves less magic and far more substance.
Final Thoughts
The 90-year myth reassured buyers for years until legal reality caught up with it, and its fall is a clean-up of the market rather than bad news. A market that rejects fake 90-year leases is one where tenure rests on genuine renewals, a villa you own, rent tied to a public index and a controlled exit. The right question is not how to lock in 90 years on paper, but which protections actually hold on the day you need them, and that is the standard THEVA builds on.
Sources: Thai Civil and Commercial Code, Sections 538, 540 and 569; Supreme Court of Thailand, Judgment No. 4655/2566, March 2025.
