Can you extend your 9-month ED visa in Thailand without having to exit the country?

@Raymond *****

if all you're doing is trying to enroll in a school to pretend to learn thai so you can further your stay here, just give the ED visa a pass and go find an agent that can get you the in country Non-O pretend to volunteer, volunteer visa and year extension which gives you 15 months in country without doing anything but handing over your passport and a pile of baht.

You'll need to bung an agent to get an ED visa in country for a private language school

It's kind of a weird situation and difficult to get a good answer right now. Before Covid this was true, you would have to leave Thailand to get your ED visa and then renew it every few months for 9 months. Then leave Thailand again to get another ED for 6 more months (or something similar to this).

Right now there's a lot of special rules in effect, like you can convert your visa to ED inside the country, and generally you can renew for 12 months across multiple extensions.

BUT different immigration offices interpret the rules differently. Technically the in-country converted ED visa rules state you can only be in the country for 12 months total. So if you were in Thailand for 6 months before converting to ED, you could only get 6 months more. This is only being selectively enforced and the Ministry of Education told my school I could stay until my ED was 12 months total, which would have put me in the country for 14 months. I'll be leaving before then so I can't verify.

You will need your school to verify with immigration and/or the ministry of education. It'll be difficult for you to get an answer because both of them play a part in this and I don't even know if you can talk to the ministry yourself.