Who can file here from 31 August 2026
Residents of nine federal states: Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein. Hesse and the west of the country belong to Frankfurt, the south to Munich.
The embassy has no DTV page of its own: the document list exists only in a Thai foreign ministry document, while the page on visa types was updated on 2 September, the freshest of the three German ones. German citizens need an identity card or a registration certificate, foreign nationals a residence permit card and registration; how recent the registration has to be is not stated. Permanent residence is not required.
The criminal record certificate
Berlin gives no validity period for the certificate at all, and the foreign ministry document sets none either: the three months at Munich and the six at Frankfurt are decisions of the posts themselves. We keep the certificate no older than three months so that the package passes at any of the three. A Führungszeugnis costs €13, is issued on paper only, and its data is printed in German, English and French.
How filing works
- Everything online, through the e-Visa portal. The fee is €350, non-refundable.
- Timeline per the post’s site: 15 working days, and another 15 if documents are requested.
- The embassy strongly recommends staying in Germany until the decision, the firmest wording among the German posts.
- Screenshots of statements and bookings are not accepted, only full documents.
- Finances: no less than 500,000 THB, which is about €13,100, plus three months of statements. In the embassy’s German a sponsorship letter is called a Verpflichtungserklärung, a formal declaration of liability rather than a free-form letter.
- A portfolio is accepted.
In our single case a decision from Berlin came in 16 days; the document requests concerned the photograph, which the post accepted only from a photo studio, and the tax assessment, the Steuerbescheid. One case is a direction, not a statistic.
What else matters
Berlin carries the new foreign ministry lines under every visa type, not the DTV alone. An apostille does not work for Thailand yet: the Convention enters into force there on 28 February 2027. From 15 September 2026 visa-free entry for German citizens drops from 60 to 30 days.
What we track here
Whether Berlin will get a DTV page of its own with a validity period for the certificate, and the first decisions under the new rules.
A package you have assembled yourself we check before filing — the Preflight Check: $300, a written report within two working days. Full support all the way to the visa is the Solo Route and Family Route.
The state of every consulate is on the live board, and the consulate assigned to your country is on the map.