Keeping your device working long term means keeping your SIM active.

Prepaid SIM validity in Thailand

How to keep your SIM active and working even when you are outside Thailand.

Published in

MobileTopUp

3 min readJun 15, 2018

When getting a prepaid SIM card in Thailand, you may decide you’d like to keep it for a longer period of time. If so, you’ll do best with a local SIM, and skip the Tourist SIMs. You can then easily keep your Thai SIM valid for 1 year periods.

Almost all Thai SIMs have a maximum validity of 365 days, while some tourist sims max out at 90 days. The methods below should work find on all local SIMs and outbound roaming SIMs like SIM2Fly, but you may have mixed results with your Tourist SIM. You can of course call the call center and see about converting your Tourist SIM to a normal package.

Starting Point — Check your current expiry

First check your SIMs remaining validity by dialing:

AIS 12Call — *121#
DTAC — *101*9#
True — #123#

You will receive an SMS with a date in DD/MM/YYYY format. This is the date your SIM will expire if you do not add any more credit.

You should get a flash message like this.

Method 1 — USSD code balance deduction

The first option to extent your validity is to pay from your balance to add additional months. This is a great option for both True Move and DTAC users, but AIS 12Call, not so much. You can do this by entering in the codes below either in Thailand or abroad while on roaming.

DTAC

Cost is 2 Baht per 30 days. So 180 days is 12 Baht. Your SIM must have been active for at least 90 days and have usage of 200 THB.

*113*30*9# for 30 days  
*113*60*9# for 60 days  
*113*90*9# for 90 days  
*113*180*9# for 180 days

True Move

Cost is 2 Baht per 30 days. Tourist SIM can be extended 30 days at a time.

*934*30# for 30 days  
*934*90# for 90 days  
*934*180# for 180 days

AIS

Cost is 30 Baht for 30 days. As this is quite high it’s not the best option, see below.

*500*9# for 30 days.

Method 2 — Topup method

Due to all the confusion in validity and topup promotions, in 2015 the NTBC passed a rule that simplified these validity programs and mandated any topup of any amount gives a minimum of 30 days validity to your SIM. Since the lowest available consumer amount of credit is 10 Baht, this means you can add 30 days of validity with each 10 Baht topup purchase. If you repeat this in the same day, you can effectively add 1 year of validity this way.

While Thai banks only offer 20 Baht minimum topup amounts, you can find 10 Baht at top up kiosks that will cost 12 Baht. So for 144 Baht you can get 1 year of validity.

Online, you can do this with validity packages from our site’s shop. What these products do is send 10 Baht worth of credit 3, 6 and 12 times. This gives you 90, 180 or 360 days credit, and can be done from anywhere in the world — with or without the SIM around.