Thailand's Informal Labour Share Has Barely Moved in a Decade — Here Is What the Data Shows

The Headline Growth Figure and What It Leaves Out

Thailand's official unemployment rate has remained among the lowest in Southeast Asia throughout the past decade, frequently cited as evidence of a robust labour market. The figure, however, aggregates formal and informal employment without distinguishing between the two — a distinction that matters enormously for wage stability, social-insurance coverage, and household financial resilience. Using the National Statistical Office's Labour Force Survey, published quarterly since 2010, Forgeycloud tracked the formal-to-informal employment ratio across six survey cycles spanning 2013 to 2023. The headline finding: informal workers comprised 55.4 percent of total employment in 2013. By 2023, that share stood at 53.1 percent — a reduction of just 2.3 percentage points over ten years. If the current rate of formalisation were to continue unchanged, Thailand would not cross the 50 percent formal threshold until approximately 2038. The agriculture and construction sectors show the least movement, with informal shares remaining above 90 percent throughout the period. Manufacturing and hospitality — sectors frequently cited in government formalisation programmes — recorded modest improvements of between 3 and 6 percentage points respectively. Regional variation is pronounced: Bangkok's formal share rose from 71 percent to 78 percent, while the Eastern region, including Chonburi Province and the Eastern Economic Corridor zone, moved from 58 percent to 64 percent. The North and Northeast recorded gains of fewer than 2 percentage points. What the data cannot yet tell us is whether the 2020–2022 pandemic period masked an underlying acceleration or deceleration in formalisation — the disruption to NSO fieldwork methodology in those years makes direct year-on-year comparisons unreliable for that interval. We have therefore excluded those two survey cycles from the trend calculation and note that the 2023 figure may reflect a partial catch-up effect. Readers with access to enterprise-level payroll data from those years are invited to contact the newsroom.