Abstract Automatic dependency parsing of Thai sentences has been underexplored, as evidenced by the lack of large Thai dependency treebanks with complete dependency structures and the lack of a published evaluation of state-of-the-art models, especially transformer-based parsers. In this work, we addressed these gaps by introducing the Thai Universal Dependency Treebank (TUD), a new Thai treebank consisting of 3,627 trees annotated according to the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework. We then benchmarked 92 dependency parsing models that incorporate pretrained transformers on Thai-PUD and our TUD, achieving state-of-the-art results and shedding light on the optimal model components for Thai dependency parsing. Our error analysis of the models also reveals that polyfunctional words, serial verb construction, and lack of rich morphosyntactic features present main challenges for Thai dependency parsing.