The Best Way to Pay for Purchases in Thailand: Cash is King

A very real consideration for travellers coming to Thailand is the best way to pay for purchases while you’re here. Most night markets, street vendors, and restaurants require customers to either pay in cash or use a QR code payment tied to a Thai bank account (which isn’t an option for tourists). Even larger stores that accept credit cards have high minimum purchase thresholds that make using your card difficult unless you’re spending a lot all at once.

In Thailand, cash is definitely still king. But it can be hard to figure out how much cash you’ll need to have on hand, how to reduce banking and forex fees, and how to minimize the risk of theft while you’re here. So we’ve put together some tips for paying for purchases and managing your cash situation while you’re here in Thailand.

Use a Forex-Friendly Card

Our strategy has been to keep limited amounts of cash on hand and use our Wise cards as credit cards wherever possible. Wise offers good forex rates and strong security functionality through their app, and doesn’t charge the foreign exchange fees of 1 to 2% that most conventional credit cards charge (in addition to gouging you with their crappy forex rates).

The downside of using Wise for some is that you need to prepay into the account — but for us this is actually a positive, as it limits your potential loss if the card is ever hacked. You can refill the funds on your Wise card through your domestic bank account at minimal cost, so it’s easy to keep your balance low and top up it often to minimize any risk. If you want to check out the Wise card and all of its benefits, click the image at the bottom of this page. For us, it was a no-brainer.*

Choose an ATM with Low Fees

But since cash remains king, we also try to keep a reasonable amount of Thai baht on hand at any given time as well, which we withdraw using local ATMs. The conventional wisdom here (which we have found to be true) is that the cheapest ATMs for foreigners to use in Thailand are either Krungsri Bank, which charges a service fee of 220 THB (about 6 USD) for up to 30,000 THB withdrawal, or Aeon Bank, which charges a service fee of 150 THB (about 4USD) for up to 20,000 THB withdrawal. So if you do the max withdrawal, your charge from the Thai bank is less than 1%. However, in our experience Krungsri Bank has many more locations that are much more accessible than Aeon, so these are the machines we have typically used.

(We note that we recommend Krungsri bank in this post notwithstanding the fact that one of their ATMs recently spit our 30,000-baht withdrawal all over the sidewalk like a rapper trying to “make it rain.” So they get karma points docked for making us scramble all over the place trying to grab our money before it blew away or someone snatched it up!)

Be Wary of Your Domestic Bank’s Fees

You should also be aware that your domestic bank may charge service fees on top of the Thai bank fees for cash withdrawals. As such, we try to max out each withdrawal amount to minimize our service charges relative to overall withdrawals. We use our Wise card for this because of its favourable exchange rates and the fairly minimal transaction fees for cash, but even so we typically end up paying fees of 1 to 2% for all cash withdrawals. There are no equivalent fees when using the Wise card as a credit card, so this is how we typically prefer to pay for items where possible — in Thailand, it primarily ends up being used for food deliveries and transportation booked directly via the Grab or Food Panda apps.

Stash Your Cash in a Safe Place

As tourists, we know we’re easy targets for petty thieves and scammers, so we also try to keep our wits about us as much as possible: we avoid bringing more money out with us than we could conceivably need, we try not to flash large amounts of money when making purchases, and we split up larger caches of money into smaller amounts and keep them hidden separately, in places that are as secure as possible. Sometimes theft happens — as it did for us on a trip to Panama many years ago — but we try to take steps to at least minimize the chances of losing large amounts all at once.

*Disclosure: All opinions expressed here are our own, and we only recommend products we use ourselves. This post contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.