Thailand's Marriage Equality Act: Royal Assent, 18 September 2024; Effect, 22 January 2025

Thailand's Marriage Equality Act received Royal Assent on 18 September 2024, published in the Royal Gazette on 24 September 2024. The law amended the Civil and Commercial Code by replacing gendered terms — "man and woman," "husband and wife" — with gender-neutral equivalents throughout the marriage provisions, extending to same-sex couples the same rights, duties, and legal status previously available only to opposite-sex couples. The amendments affected Book V of the Code, which governs family law, including sections on the capacity to marry, consent, registration, and the mutual obligations of spouses.

The bill passed the Senate on 18 June 2024 by a vote of 130 to 4, with 18 abstentions, following National Assembly approval in March 2024 ↗. Royal Assent followed the constitutionally prescribed period for royal consideration. The Act took effect 120 days after publication, on 22 January 2025.

On 22 January 2025 — the day the statute took effect — district offices across Thailand began registering same-sex marriages. Couples in Bangkok and other provinces registered on the morning the law came into force, producing the first legally recognised same-sex marriages in Thai history and, for that matter, in Southeast Asia ↗.

The Act makes Thailand the first country in Southeast Asia to enact marriage equality through statute, ahead of any comparable measure in neighboring jurisdictions. No country in the ASEAN bloc had previously extended civil marriage to same-sex couples in any form. The passage followed roughly a decade of legislative attempts; an earlier Civil Partnership Bill, which would have created a lesser parallel status, failed to advance. The 2024 Act went further, granting full marital status rather than a separate civil-union framework.

Under the amended Code, same-sex spouses have equal rights with respect to inheritance, property, medical decision-making, and parental consent. The minimum age for marriage, applicable to all couples, remains governed by the existing provisions of the Code. Foreign nationals wishing to marry in Thailand under the Act are subject to the same registration requirements as opposite-sex couples, including documentary proof that their home jurisdiction recognises the union or does not prohibit it.

The statute represents legislative action rather than judicial mandate — no Thai court had ordered the change — placing Thailand alongside countries such as the Netherlands and Ireland that effected marriage equality through their elected legislatures rather than through constitutional litigation.