Section 1734: Estate debts, limit of heirs' liability
Statutory text (Thai original)
เจ้าหนี้กองมรดกชอบแต่จะได้รับการชำระหนี้จากทรัพย์สินในกองมรดกเท่านั้น
Verbatim from the Royal Gazette / Office of the Council of State
English translation
The creditors of an estate are entitled to be paid only out of the property of an estate.
This English translation is provided for reference only and has not yet been firm-verified. Always rely on the Thai original.
Firm annotation
Section 1734 is the cornerstone protection for heirs: you cannot inherit debt beyond the asset value. If the deceased had ฿10M of assets and ฿15M of debt, heirs surrender the ฿10M and walk away, their own personal property is untouchable. This is automatic, not a renunciation; the heirs need not formally renounce. However, if assets are commingled with the heir's own property before debts are settled, the protection may be lost (creditors can argue the heir converted estate property to personal). Best practice: pay debts before distributing.
Cited in 11 Supreme Court decisions (1970 to 2024)
Selected citing decisions
- Decision 1780/2567 (2024)
- Decision 2161/2558 (2015)
- Decision 9554-9555/2557 (2014)
- Decision 1237/2555 (2012)
- Decision 4769/2566 (2023)
- Decision 3996/2540 (1997)
- Decision 4772/2531 (1988)
- Decision 3613/2525 (1982)
This list is selected automatically, weighted towards judgments that turn on this section rather than ones that merely recite it when passing sentence. It has not yet been reviewed by the firm.
Most often cited alongside
Sections that appear in the same judgments as this one most often. The figure is the number of decisions.
Counted across the firm's corpus of 83,652 Supreme Court decisions, 1921 to 2026. The count is complete; the stated year range trims rare outliers so it describes where the citations actually sit. These figures are computed by us and are not official court statistics. How we count these, and what we measured
Related guides on ThaiLawOnline
Cite this section
-
Plain citation
Civil and Commercial Code, s. 1734 (Thailand) -
Academic citation
Civil and Commercial Code (Thailand), s. 1734. ThaiLawOnline, https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-1734/ (accessed 27 August 2026). -
Thai citation
ป.พ.พ. มาตรา 1734 -
Permalink
https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-1734/ -
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<blockquote cite="https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-1734/"><p>The creditors of an estate are entitled to be paid only out of the property of an estate.</p><footer>Civil and Commercial Code, s. 1734 (Thailand): <a href="https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-1734/">ThaiLawOnline</a></footer></blockquote>
The Thai text is authoritative. The English is an unofficial translation by ThaiLawOnline, free to reuse with attribution.