Common Area Fees in Thailand: What You Actually Pay

Ask ten people who have recently bought property in Hua Hin what their common area fee is, and perhaps three will give you the figure without checking. Ask what that figure is charged on — which area, measured how — and you will be lucky to get one. It is the most frequently asked practical question we receive at DanSiam, and it is the question most poorly answered by everything else written about buying in Thailand. Brochures round it off. Portals leave the field blank. Agents, if we are honest about our own trade, tend to mention it late in a conversation and quickly.

That is a mistake, because the common area fee is the only cost of ownership that arrives every single month for as long as you own the place, and it is the one number that tells you most about how the property will be looked after over the next fifteen years. A purchase price is negotiated once. A maintenance fee is a standing judgement about whether the building you are buying into is being run by people who intend to keep it standing.

This guide sets out how the fee is calculated, what it does and does not cover, what a sinking fund is for, what happens when a building underfunds itself, and how to check a project’s financial health before you sign anything.

The unit of measurement matters more than the rate

Thai common area maintenance, usually shortened to CAM, is normally quoted as baht per square metre per month. Multiply that rate by an area, and you have the monthly bill. Simple enough, until you ask which area.

For a condominium the answer is straightforward and consistent: the fee is charged on the unit’s own area as registered on the title, and levied in proportion to each owner’s share of the building. Palm Hills, one of the larger estates we work in, runs at 33 THB per square metre per month. On a 128 square metre two-bedroom apartment that is 4,224 baht a month, or a little over 50,000 baht a year. On a 262 square metre three-bedroom in the same estate it is 8,646 baht a month. The rate is identical; the bill is not, because the bigger unit owns a bigger share of the roof, the pumps, the lifts and the gardener’s wages.

Across the Hua Hin area, condominium fees typically fall in a 30 to 50 THB per square metre per month band. That is a range, not a quoted figure, and it is worth saying which way the exceptions go: beachfront buildings such as Veranda Residence at Khao Takiab and hotel-branded residences sit above it, sometimes well above it, because they carry lifts running to a higher floor count, salt-air corrosion on every metal fitting, more security, and a level of finish in the lobby that somebody has to polish.

Villas are where buyers get caught, and it catches them badly. A villa is frequently charged on land area rather than on the house. In a development of individual homes there is no shared roof and no shared structure to apportion, so the fairest available measure of your share of the roads, the drainage, the street lighting, the entrance gate and the security patrol is the size of the plot you occupy. Which means the arithmetic runs in an entirely different direction to a condominium.

Work it through. A modest three-bedroom house of 220 square metres on an 800 square metre plot, charged on the land, is billed on 800 — nearly four times the area anyone lives in. A 262 square metre apartment is billed on 262. Depending on the two rates involved, the person in the smaller house on the larger plot can quite easily pay more each month than the person in the substantially larger apartment. Nothing has gone wrong and nobody has been overcharged: the two developments simply measure different things, and a buyer comparing "the fee" between them without asking what it is charged on is comparing nothing at all. One estate name can cover more than one answer: the three phases of The Clouds were built years apart, with different service charges.

Two live examples from our own inventory show how differently this lands in practice:

Property	What the fee comes to	What it includes
Palm Hills condominium	33 THB/sqm/month	Standard condominium common areas
Hillside Hamlet villa (new build)	7,724 THB/month	Includes private pool and garden maintenance
BelVida Parque villa	3,000 THB/month	Estate common areas
Hua Hin condominiums generally	Typically 30-50 THB/sqm/month	Higher on beachfront and branded buildings

The gap between 3,000 and 7,724 baht a month is not evidence that one estate is greedy and the other generous. The Hillside Hamlet figure includes pool servicing and garden care at your own house — a real, recurring service with a real cost, delivered by people who turn up. Strip that out and you are comparing two different products. Before you conclude that one estate is expensive, establish what the cheaper one expects you to arrange and pay for yourself, because a private pool that nobody chlorinates becomes an algae tank in a fortnight in this climate.

What the fee buys, and what it quietly does not

The common fund pays for everything outside your own four walls. In a condominium that means security around the clock, the pool and its plant, gardens and grounds, lift maintenance and statutory inspection, common lighting and electricity, water pumps and tanks, fire equipment, rubbish, pest control, insurance on the common property, repainting and minor repairs, and the cost of the juristic person itself — manager, office staff, accountant and annual audit. In a villa estate it covers the roads, drainage, street lighting, the gatehouse and security, communal landscaping and any shared clubhouse or pool.

What it does not cover is the part people forget when they budget. Your own electricity and water are metered separately, and in some buildings the juristic person resells them at a modest mark-up. Everything inside your unit is yours: air-conditioning servicing, the water heater, appliances, plumbing beyond the riser, redecoration. So are contents insurance, internet and television, and the annual land and building tax. And in most villa estates your own pool and garden are yours unless the paperwork says otherwise — which is precisely why the Hillside Hamlet figure looks high next to BelVida Parque and, once you price the alternative, often is not.

There is one structural difference between a condominium and a villa estate that no brochure will spell out. A registered condominium in Thailand has a juristic person established under the Condominium Act, with a manager, an elected committee, a statutory obligation to hold an annual general meeting, and real legal teeth to collect what it is owed. A villa development may or may not have an equivalent. Where the project was licensed as a land allocation and has formed a juristic person of the housing estate, it has comparable standing. Where it has not, what you are signing is a service contract with a private management company, and its only sanction against an owner who stops paying is to stop providing the service — which in practice means the roads and the gate deteriorate for everyone. One development can sell both kinds of title: The Boathouse mixes condominium units with beachfront townhouses, and the ownership routes differ completely. Ask which of the two you are buying into, and on the coast ask too what a foreign buyer can actually own there. The answer changes what your fee is actually worth.

The sinking fund: the money for the things that only break once

Alongside the monthly fee, a buyer normally pays a one-off sinking fund contribution at transfer, calculated per square metre and handed over at the Land Office on the day the unit changes hands. It is not a deposit and you do not get it back.

The distinction between the two funds is the whole point. The monthly common fee is the operating budget: it pays the people and the bills this month. The sinking fund is the capital reserve: it exists for the things that fail rarely and expensively. Lift replacement. A roof. A full exterior repaint. Pool re-lining. Replacing the pumps, the generator, or the fire system. Resurfacing the internal roads. These are not maintenance, they are renewal, and they cannot be funded out of a monthly budget that is already spoken for.

A building with no meaningful sinking fund is a warning sign, and it is the single most useful thing you can check. Not because the building is falling down today, but because it has no mechanism for the day something big fails. When the reserve is empty and the lift motor goes, the money has to come from somewhere, and the only place left is the owners’ pockets — all at once, by vote, in an amount nobody planned for. A healthy reserve is the difference between a scheduled repair and an emergency demand.

What happens to the fund at resale varies between projects — in some the balance simply stays with the building and the incoming buyer makes a fresh contribution. Read what the sale documents actually say rather than assuming, and if the seller cannot tell you, ask the juristic person directly.

What underfunding looks like from the inside

It rarely announces itself. The first stage is deferral: a lift out of service for three weeks while the committee argues about a quotation, a pool closed "for renovation" with no visible renovation, paint chalking on the seaward elevation, car park lighting where half the fittings are dark, security reduced from two guards to one. Each decision is individually defensible and collectively fatal, because deferred maintenance in a tropical, salt-laden climate does not hold steady — it compounds.

The second stage is the special levy: an extraordinary assessment voted at a general meeting, charged per square metre, to pay for something that should have been reserved for years ago. It can amount to several months of ordinary fee at once, and on a genuine capital failure a great deal more. Owners who bought on a carefully worked budget discover that their fixed cost was never fixed.

The third stage is resale, and this is where it becomes financial rather than merely irritating. Two things happen. First, the market notices: a building where the pool has been closed for a season prices below its neighbours, several units come up at once, and rental yields soften because holiday tenants can see the same thing buyers can. Second — and this is a hard legal mechanic, not an opinion — a condominium unit cannot be transferred at the Land Office without a debt-free certificate from the juristic person confirming that no common fees are outstanding. Arrears are not a bad look; they are a transfer blocker. The Act also allows a penalty surcharge on late payment and, after prolonged arrears, permits the juristic person to suspend an owner’s use of common facilities and their right to vote. An owner who falls far enough behind cannot sell their way out until the debt is cleared.

How to check a building’s real health before you buy

All of the above is knowable in advance, and most of it is knowable in an afternoon. Four documents matter.

The minutes of the last two or three annual general meetings. These are the most informative pages you will read about any Thai building, and almost nobody asks for them. Read what owners argued about. Read whether the meeting achieved quorum — a building that cannot assemble enough voting share to pass a budget is a building that cannot decide anything, and that paralysis is itself the defect. Look for repairs raised in one year and raised again unresolved in the next.

The audited accounts and the reserve balance. Compare the reserve against the age of the building and against what is plainly coming next. A fifteen-year-old block with lifts, a generator and a large pool needs a materially bigger cushion than a three-year-old low-rise with neither. Compare budget against actual: a fund that overspends its operating budget every year is quietly eating its reserve.

The arrears schedule. Ask how many units are behind, and by how much. A handful is normal in any building. A significant proportion in arrears means the compliant owners are carrying the rest, which ends in a fee rise, a levy, or a decline in service — and it tells you something about who your neighbours are.

Who controls the committee. Voting is by ownership share, so a developer still holding a substantial block of unsold units controls the outcome of every vote. That matters because a developer’s interest during the sales phase is a low headline fee that helps shift stock, not a well-provisioned reserve for a building they will have left behind. Ask what proportion remains unsold and whether handover to an owners’ committee has actually happened. A building where the developer still runs the meeting is not necessarily badly run — but the fee it advertises is not yet a market-tested number. Where an estate is released in stages, as at Aria Estate, ask whether each stage has its own juristic person or one covers the whole site.

While you are asking, establish whether the building is self-managed, professionally managed, or run to an operator’s standard as at the hotel-branded Amari Residences, and whether a maintenance schedule exists at all. The seller can request all of this from the juristic person on your behalf, and "the office is closed" is an answer worth pressing on.

Why an unusually low fee is bad news

Buyers instinctively read a low fee as a saving. It is more often a deferral.

Do the arithmetic from the building’s side. The fee multiplied by the total saleable area of the development is the entire annual income available to run the place — every guard, every pump, every litre of pool chemical, every repair. If that number is small, only two explanations exist. Either there is genuinely little to maintain — a small low-rise with no lift, a modest pool, a compact footprint, perhaps volunteer self-management — in which case a low fee is honest and correct. Or there is plenty to maintain and it is not being funded, in which case you are looking at a building that is spending its future.

Three patterns produce the second kind. A developer subsidising the fee during the sales phase, with the true cost emerging after handover. A committee that has voted down every proposed increase for a decade because owners are retired and on fixed incomes — entirely sympathetic, and a real-terms cut in maintenance spending every year it happens. And a budget that simply omits capital replacement, which looks balanced right up until the moment it isn’t.

A fee that has not risen in ten years is not a well-run building. It is a building whose costs have risen while its income has not.

What we tell our own clients

Budget the fee annually, not monthly, and put it next to the other running costs — electricity, water, insurance, land and building tax — before you decide what you can afford to buy. On a condominium, take the quoted rate per square metre and multiply it by the area on the title yourself rather than accepting a round monthly figure. On a villa, ask what the fee is charged on, and ask specifically whether pool and garden care are inside it or outside it.

Then ask for the minutes and the reserve balance before you make an offer, not after. On any listing we hold, we will pull the current fee, the sinking fund contribution and the last general meeting minutes and put them in front of you — including when what they show is unflattering. A building with an honest fee and a funded reserve is worth paying more for than one advertising a bargain it cannot sustain, and over a fifteen-year hold the difference between the two is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a property that still looks like the photographs and one that does not.

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Ask about the fee before you commit

Every listing we publish states its common area fee, and we will pull the building accounts for anything you are serious about. That is a question worth asking before the reservation, not after.