Your first 30 days in Bangkok with kids, in order

The Bangkok relocation playbook covers the six months from offer letter to landing. This page picks up the moment you walk out of Suvarnabhumi customs and ends thirty days later, when the routine has taken over and the move is no longer the thing your family is doing — it’s just where your family lives now.

We landed on a Friday morning with two kids, four checked bags, the youngest melting down within an hour of the hotel lobby. The first thirty days have a natural order, and doing them out of order is the most common mistake we see new arrivals make. Below is what we did, in the order we did it, with the specific places, hours, and THB ranges that make it actionable.

Days 1-3 — Landing and the first 48 hours

The time-sensitive stuff. Three things to have arranged before the flight, two things to do before the first night’s sleep.

Airport transfer to the serviced apartment. A pre-booked private transfer with a child seat at THB 1,000-1,500 beats negotiating at the meter-taxi rank when you’ve been awake fourteen hours and a toddler is at the end of their patience. We covered the math in the relocation playbook’s first-days section; the short version is don’t try the Airport Rail Link with luggage on day one.

Pre-book a Bangkok airport transfer

SIM or eSIM activated before you leave the terminal. Grab to call a backup ride, Google Maps in Thai script for the driver, LINE to message the serviced apartment, FoodPanda to order dinner — all dependent on data. A Thai eSIM loaded before the flight skips the airport SIM counter queue entirely. THB 300-500 for thirty days.

Cash for the first weekend. THB 5,000-10,000 from the home-country airport. Bangkok runs on cards far more than it did a decade ago, but airport tolls, the convenience-store top-up that the SIM didn’t activate cleanly, and the first taxi for the kids’ shoes you forgot all want baht in hand.

Day two: groceries and the first walk. Tops Daily or Tops Market for breakfast supplies, fruit, sliced bread, peanut butter for the kids — anything you don’t have to cook on day two. Don’t try to cook a proper meal until day three at earliest. Walk a fifteen-minute radius from the serviced apartment so the kids start mapping the neighborhood in their feet.

Day three: download the apps. Grab (transport + food), LINE (messaging — everything in Bangkok runs on LINE), FoodPanda (food delivery alternative), Lalamove (when you need a small van or motorbike courier), Google Translate with the offline Thai pack loaded, Bangkok Bank Mobile Banking (you’ll activate it next week). The kids’ iPads get the FoodPanda kids’ menu permissions locked down before they discover bubble tea on demand.

Days 4-7 — Work permit, school start, the paperwork unlock

Week one is paperwork-heavy and order-dependent. The dependent visa for the partner and kids cannot be processed until the working partner’s permit is in hand, so the schedule looks like this:

Day 4-5: Work permit pickup. The working partner’s employer’s HR walks them through the Department of Employment process. Typical timing in our experience is the permit issues within three to seven business days of arrival, sometimes faster. Confirm specifics with HR, but block calendar for an HR-led morning visit. Sources: framework via the Department of Employment (checked May 2026), but every employer’s exact procedure differs.

Day 6: Dependent visa application. Immigration Division 1 at the Government Complex on Chaengwattana Road. Allow half a day. Bring the working partner’s permit, original passports for the dependent partner and each kid, marriage certificate apostille, kids’ birth certificate apostille, school admission letters, and passport photos for each family member. Bring snacks. The Chaengwattana complex is the most efficient immigration office in Bangkok and it will still take longer than you expect.

Day 7: First school day. Kids’ uniforms are usually arranged through the school’s preferred supplier in the weeks before arrival, but expect at least one item — PE kit, swim cap, the specific gym shoe color — to be missing on day one. Wells, NIST, Patana, KIS, ISB, Concordian — every school has its own first-week pattern; expect one missed thing per kid and don’t catastrophize.

Apps that come online this week. Grab Premium (with car seats), LINE OA accounts for the school’s class group chats (the school will add you), and FoodPanda kids-menu favorites that survive the first week of food culture shock.

Days 8-14 — Bank, BTS card, the rhythm starts

The week the city stops feeling like a tourist destination and starts feeling like somewhere you live.

Bangkok Bank account, working partner first. With the work permit in hand, the working partner can open a Bangkok Bank account in a single morning branch visit — allow around ninety minutes for the foreigner forms. Bring the work permit, lease agreement for either the serviced apartment or (better) the permanent house if the lease is already signed, passport, and a Thai phone number. Asok-area branches along the Sukhumvit corridor are foreigner-experienced; the branch where you open doesn’t restrict where you can transact later. The dependent partner can open later with their dependent visa, or as a joint signer on the working partner’s account — most expat families end up doing both. Framework set by the Bank of Thailand; individual banks layer their own foreigner rules on top.

BTS Rabbit card and MRT card. Top each up with THB 500. The kids will use them constantly — the BTS counter at Phrom Phong, Asok, or Siam can issue both. Expect a small issuance fee plus a refundable deposit on top of the stored value; budget around THB 200-300 extra over the THB 500 you actually want to spend. Confirm current fees at the counter — both operators have nudged them upward over the years.

Bangkok BTS and MRT passes

Pick your family pediatrician before the first fever. The three hospitals most expat families end up choosing between are Bumrungrad International, Samitivej Sukhumvit, and BNH. Pick before the first fever, not during. The decision criteria — pediatric ward setup, English-language consultation, insurance acceptance, proximity to home — overlap heavily with the long-stay insurance question we cover in our health insurance for expat families guide. This is not medical advice; confirm with the pediatrician at whichever hospital you select.

The grocery rhythm. Tops Daily for daily — bread, fruit, eggs, the boring weekday pasta. Villa Market for Western imports when the kids absolutely need a specific cereal brand. Lazada and Shopee for everything that isn’t food — children’s books in English, a kettle that fits the apartment’s outlets, the rice cooker we missed buying in week one.

Days 15-21 — Weekend escapes and finding your places

Week three is when the family starts wanting a weekend, not a project. A Saturday activity that resets the kids’ baseline is what makes the move feel real.

Saturday: kids’ big activity. SEA LIFE Bangkok Ocean World under Siam Paragon is twenty minutes by BTS from most central neighborhoods and is the easy default. Safari World and Dream World are thirty to sixty minutes by taxi, bigger commitments, better for older kids. KidZania at the Siam Paragon mall is the indoor-air-conditioned answer for forty-degree-feels-like weekends. Booking the ticket ahead means a newly-arrived parent doesn’t queue at a counter while two over-tired kids melt down on the floor.

Bangkok activities for families

Sunday: slow start and a Thai meal you order yourself. Open Google Translate, point at the menu, smile. You will get the dish wrong the first three times. The eighth time you’ll order in Thai without the app and the staff will switch back to English anyway, but you’ll feel like you live here. The kids learn faster than the parents — let them.

The first weekend outside the city. Ayutthaya is a day trip — the old capital, ninety minutes north by car or train, kid-paced if you skip half the temples and let them feed the elephants if you’re comfortable with that. Kanchanaburi and the River Kwai is a longer day or an overnight; the bridge is real, and seven-year-olds care about the history more than you’d think. Hua Hin is a three-hour drive and the easiest first beach weekend — quieter than Phuket, family-shaped, hotel pools that don’t have a nightclub three floors above them.

Optional: a Bangkok food tour as family education. A two-hour guided walk through Bang Rak, Chinatown, or the Klong Toei market with a guide who can name what the kids are eating is worth more than a guidebook chapter. The kids will eat things they wouldn’t eat at home because everyone else is eating them. We did one in month two; in retrospect month one would have been better.

Days 22-30 — Permanent house, ninety-day reporting, month-two handoff

The closing-week sprint. Three things to lock down before month two starts and the routine takes over.

Permanent house decision. Most leases are signed by day twenty-five. We covered the neighborhood-by-school logic in the relocation playbook’s neighborhood section — by now the school commute pattern is known, the kids have favorite playgrounds, and one neighborhood is “the one we keep coming back to.” That’s usually the right answer.

Ninety-day reporting calendar. Every non-citizen on a long-stay visa reports their address to immigration every ninety days. Set the date on every family member’s calendar today, ninety days from the entry stamp date in each passport, with a reminder two weeks before. Three reporting options: in person at the Chaengwattana complex (longest queues, easiest first time), online via immigration.go.th (eligibility varies by nationality and visa class — check before relying on it), or by post (Thai postal address required, fiddly the first time). Most Non-B and dependent-visa families end up online after the first in-person report. We use the online portal now and it takes ten minutes per family member.

The month-two money handoff. First salary lands at the end of month one or early month two, depending on the employer’s payroll cycle. Continue to use Wise for any remaining home-country transfers (kids’ school deposit follow-ups, the home-country utility that didn’t actually cancel, the deposit on the home you sold that the realtor still hasn’t released). The dependent partner who hasn’t yet opened their own Wise account should — relocation lump sums are exactly what Wise was built for. We covered the math in our Wise vs Revolut for Thailand breakdown.

Open a Wise account

The mistakes we made in our first 30 days

Five honest ones, in case naming them helps you skip them:

Ordered school uniforms a week too late. Our seven-year-old wore PE kit for a week and a half while the regular uniform shipment cleared the school’s preferred-supplier backlog. Order the moment the enrollment confirms — not after you land.
Booked an airport Grab Premium without confirming car-seat fit for two kids. The driver showed up; the second car seat didn’t fit. Spent forty minutes on the curb at Suvarnabhumi negotiating an upgrade. The pre-booked private transfer through Klook would have taken five minutes.
Hosted a friend from home in week two. They wanted to do tourist things; we needed to do school-paperwork things. Both ended up half-done. Push visiting friends to month three minimum. If they push back, send them this paragraph.
Didn’t pre-load the dependent partner’s home-country card with month-one cash. When the joint home-country ATM card was the only working one for the first week, every withdrawal was the dependent partner asking the working partner first. Predictably awkward. Now we keep a working-partner card and a dependent-partner card always loaded, even on home leave.
Tried to cook a proper Thai meal in the serviced apartment’s two-burner kitchenette in week one. The pan was too small, the kids were too tired, and the smoke alarm went off twice. Eat out the first week. Cook in month two when you’ve found the wet market and the proper kitchen.

What’s next — when the first 30 days end

The thirty-day mark is when the move stops being something you’re doing and starts being where you live. The pieces still in motion at day thirty:

Permanent house — usually signed, sometimes still being walked.
Ninety-day reports — calendared, first one due around day ninety to one hundred.
Dependent partner’s bank account — sometimes day forty, depending on visa paperwork timing.
Kids’ first school report — month two or three; the first signal of how the academic side is going.
Family pediatrician — picked in week two, usually visited for the first time in month two when the first proper fever lands.

For everything upstream of arrival — visa selection, school timeline, neighborhood by school — the Bangkok relocation playbook is the cornerstone. For the long-stay health insurance that you’re now overdue to lock down, we wrote a detailed comparison for expat families in Bangkok. For the money flows that don’t stop after the first month, Wise vs Revolut for Thailand is the next read.

The pillar 3 supporting articles we’re working on next: a deep dive on visa types for expat families (Non-B vs Non-O vs LTR vs ED), the shipping math for moving household goods to Thailand, and a Bangkok-to-Singapore weekend playbook for the weekends when the city gets too much.