Cost of living in Roi Et.

Our August 2026 spot check of the Thai rental portals found about thirty-five apartment listings across the whole province, with observed asking rents of roughly ฿1,500 to ฿7,000 a month clustering between ฿2,000 and ฿4,500. The bottom of that is student stock around Roi Et Rajabhat University at Ko Kaeo in Selaphum; the top is better apartment and mansion units in the town centre. Houses and townhouses — which is what most relocating families take, particularly with the international school inside the municipality — do not appear in the listing data and are negotiated directly. There is no published rent index for this province, so every figure on this page is either an observed asking rent or a clearly labelled indicative estimate.

This is the budget line Roi Et forces on you more firmly than most Thai provinces, and the reason is the one running through every page on this hub: there is no railway anywhere in the province — the Northeastern Line's two branches pass either side and Roi Et sits in the gap. So there is no cheap intercity fallback for the long distances. The airport is in Thawat Buri, the Rajabhat is out at Ko Kaeo in Selaphum, the regional hospital is in the town, and Khon Kaen — the nearest railhead and nearest city-scale amenity — is about 113 kilometres northwest. In the town centre songthaews and tuk-tuks will do. Anywhere else, budget a motorbike at minimum; a family will want a car.

Roi Et is a rice province in the middle of a rice region, and everyday eating is at the low end of Thai costs: markets, street food and shophouse restaurants. The Thung Kula Rong Hai plain to the south grows the jasmine rice that took a Thai geographical indication in 2006 and a European Union Protected Geographical Indication in 2013 — the first Southeast Asian product to receive EU GI recognition — which means the staple here is a premium export product sold locally at local prices. What costs money is imported and Western groceries, which have to come from Khon Kaen or arrive by delivery; budget for that as a deliberate line rather than assuming a big-city supermarket.

The provincial tier is unusually good: Roi Et Hospital is a Ministry of Public Health regional hospital with 879 beds, running a CPIRD medical education centre for Mahasarakham University. Routine care in the state system is inexpensive. Roi Et also has a private hospital in town — Roi-Et Thonburi Hospital, operating since 1997 as part of the Thonburi Healthcare Group, at 166 Patthamanont Road in Nai Mueang — for routine private care and a Bangkok-network referral line. The deepest private and tertiary resource for anything complex is still Khon Kaen about 113 kilometres away, and with no railway anywhere every transfer in that direction is a road transfer. Confirm that your cover includes out-of-province treatment and road medical transport, in writing.

If your children will attend Thai state or private-Thai schools, this line stays small, and Roi Et is one of the cheapest places in Thailand to raise a family with a regional hospital and a daily jet to Bangkok nearby. If they will attend the international school, it becomes the dominant item in the household budget — by a wide margin, and it is the single figure most likely to decide whether the province works for you. This page used to give you Silver Fern's fee schedule and attributed it to the school. That attribution was wrong: Silver Fern does not publish fees on its own site, and the numbers came from a third-party international-schools directory, as the schools guide disclosed and this page did not. Both the numbers and the false attribution have been withdrawn, in line with BAANLYY's rule against publishing per-school fees that change annually. Budget for an authorised IB programme at a substantial multiple of a Thai state English Programme and a clear fraction of a Bangkok or Phuket equivalent; add application, registration and deposit charges on top of tuition; expect a sibling discount; and get the current schedule from the school in writing before you commit. Note the cheaper middle option this hub can now name: Roi Et Wittayalai and Strisuksa both run English Programmes inside Thai-medium state schools in the same town.

Roi Et's statutory minimum wage is ฿349 a day under the National Wage Committee's Announcement No. 14, effective 1 July 2025 — a band it shares with Kalasin, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Bueng Kan and Phetchabun. That is band thirteen of the seventeen in force, so Roi Et is genuinely inexpensive but is not at the floor: four bands sit below it, down to ฿337. What makes this province unusual is what happens at its edges. Roi Et has six neighbours and they span just five baht: Maha Sarakham and Sisaket at ฿347, Kalasin level at ฿349, Yasothon ฿350, Surin ฿351 and Mukdahan ฿352. The largest single step across any Roi Et border is ฿3, under one per cent. Elsewhere in Thailand the wage map has cliffs worth planning around — the Eastern Economic Corridor boundary is a forty-five to forty-eight baht drop in a single step — and provinces whose whole labour-cost story is that they sit next to somewhere expensive. Roi Et has no such edge in any direction. Practically that means labour-cost arbitrage is not a reason to site yourself on one side of this province rather than another, and it means the two provinces that are cheaper than Roi Et are both immediate neighbours, so a wage-driven comparison here is a two-baht conversation rather than a strategic one. Note also that the statutory floor excludes agricultural work — plantation, livestock, forestry, salt pans and non-sea fishery — which in a rice province is a real share of employment and sits outside the figure above entirely.