What is a floor area ratio?

The permitted gross floor area of a building divided by the area of its plot. A 1,000 square metre plot at FAR 8 may hold 8,000 square metres of floor space. In Bangkok it is set by zone in the comprehensive plan.

Does a higher FAR in the draft plan mean a tower can be built next door?

Not on its own. FAR governs the zone, while setbacks, road-width rules and a project's own environmental conditions apply on top and can bind first. A higher ratio is headroom, not a permit.

Which areas gain the most under the draft?

The least dense ones. All nine tracked projects on conserved rural and agricultural land get a higher ratio, against 6 of 39 on high-density residential land and none of the 15 on commercial land.

Is the March 2026 draft plan in force?

No. The regulation in force is still the 2013 one. The draft is a published proposal, and plans can change between consultation and adoption.

Can I check these numbers myself?

Yes. The comparison is published as the city-plan-zoning dataset on baanscope.com/data under CC BY 4.0, and the underlying zone layers are published by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration.

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MarketSeptember 4, 2026 · 6 min read

Bangkok's Draft City Plan Raises the Floor Area Ratio on 71 Tracked Projects and Lowers It on None

By Cesar Rodriguez · How we source our data

The floor area ratio decides how much building a plot may hold, so a redraw of it is a redraw of what Bangkok can build. We ran all 187 tracked projects against both plans. The draft raises the ratio on 71 and lowers it on none, and the pattern of where says more than the headline.

What the floor area ratio actually decides

The floor area ratio, FAR, is the permitted gross floor area of a building divided by the area of the plot it stands on. A plot of 1,000 square metres in a zone with FAR 8 may hold 8,000 square metres of floor space. It is the single number that decides whether a site can carry a tower or a townhouse, and it is set by zone in the Bangkok comprehensive plan rather than negotiated plot by plot.

Bangkok has been running on the 2013 ministerial regulation for over a decade. A draft revision published in March 2026 redraws the zone map, and because zones move as well as numbers, the effect on any one location is not obvious from reading either plan on its own. You have to put a coordinate into both.

How we measured it

We took the coordinates of every project we track, ran a point-in-polygon query against the city planning department's published layers for the plan in force and the draft, and compared the two ratios. 187 of the tracked projects fall inside a zone on the plan in force. 163 of those also fall inside a published draft zone, so they can be compared. The remaining 24 sit outside the draft layer and are reported as such rather than assumed unchanged.

One caveat governs everything below. FAR is a zone rule, not a plot rule: setbacks, minimum road widths and a project's own environmental conditions all apply on top, and any of them can bind before the ratio does. A higher permitted ratio is headroom, not a guarantee that anything taller gets built.

✓187 projects matched to a zone in the plan in force
✓163 comparable against a published draft zone
✓24 outside the draft layer, reported as no comparison

The result: 71 up, 0 down

Of the 163 comparable projects, the draft raises the floor area ratio on 71 and lowers it on none. The other 92 keep the ratio they have, including several where the zone is renumbered but the number that matters does not move.

Zero is the part worth pausing on. A plan revision that only ever adds permitted density, across 163 locations spread over the whole metropolitan region, is making a direction of travel explicit. Whatever else the draft does, it does not propose to build less anywhere our catalogue reaches.

The increases are almost all outside the dense centre

Split by the land-use class each project sits in today, the pattern inverts what you might expect. Every one of the nine projects on land the plan currently classes as conserved rural and agricultural gets a higher ratio. Six of the seven on rural and agricultural land do. Low-density residential gets 30 of 52, medium-density 20 of 40.

At the dense end it nearly stops. High-density residential gets an increase on 6 of 39. Commercial gets an increase on 0 of 15, and the single industrial plot gets nothing.

So the draft is not densifying Bangkok's centre. It is raising the ceiling on the fringe, where the ratio is lowest and the headroom is largest in proportional terms. The biggest single jump we found runs from FAR 1 to FAR 3.5 on conserved rural land in Bang Yai, and 1 to 2.5 appears in Pinklao, Bang Khae and Taling Chan.

✓Conserved rural and agricultural: 9 of 9 raised
✓Rural and agricultural: 6 of 7
✓Low-density residential: 30 of 52
✓Medium-density residential: 20 of 40
✓High-density residential: 6 of 39
✓Commercial: 0 of 15

What a buyer should and should not read into this

The honest use of this is narrow. A higher permitted ratio on the plot next door means the view from a low-rise fringe project is less protected than the plan in force suggests, and that is a real thing to know before signing for a unit sold on its outlook. It cuts the other way too: land that can carry more building is usually worth more, so an upzoning is not bad news for an owner.

What it is not is a forecast. A draft is a draft, plans change between consultation and regulation, and the ratio is only one of several rules that decide what fits on a site. We publish the comparison because the two plans are public and nobody had run one against the other for the projects actually being sold, not because we know what gets built.

The data is downloadable

The full table is published as the city-plan-zoning dataset on our open data page, as CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0, grouped by land-use class and the ratio in force. It carries the project counts, the districts touched, the number of distinct numbered zones behind each row and the four draft outcomes, so the totals above can be rebuilt from the file rather than taken on trust. The underlying layers are the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration's own.

Download the zoning dataset (CSV, CC BY 4.0) →

Frequently asked questions

What is a floor area ratio?: The permitted gross floor area of a building divided by the area of its plot. A 1,000 square metre plot at FAR 8 may hold 8,000 square metres of floor space. In Bangkok it is set by zone in the comprehensive plan.
Does a higher FAR in the draft plan mean a tower can be built next door?: Not on its own. FAR governs the zone, while setbacks, road-width rules and a project's own environmental conditions apply on top and can bind first. A higher ratio is headroom, not a permit.
Which areas gain the most under the draft?: The least dense ones. All nine tracked projects on conserved rural and agricultural land get a higher ratio, against 6 of 39 on high-density residential land and none of the 15 on commercial land.
Is the March 2026 draft plan in force?: No. The regulation in force is still the 2013 one. The draft is a published proposal, and plans can change between consultation and adoption.
Can I check these numbers myself?: Yes. The comparison is published as the city-plan-zoning dataset on baanscope.com/data under CC BY 4.0, and the underlying zone layers are published by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration.