Thomas Loibl was born in Brüggen in 1969 and trained as an actor at the Westfälische Schauspielschule in Bochum. His first engagement was at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus from 1994 to 1996, where he worked with director Werner Schroeter, among others. From 1996 to 1998 he was engaged at the Volkstheater Munich, followed by the Schauspielhaus Zurich (1998) and the Stuttgart Staatstheater (1998-2000). His greatest successes during these years include Shylock in "Lessings Traum von Nathan dem Weisen" (1998/99) and the detective Stader in Musil's "Die Schwärmer" (1999/2000).  

From 2001 to 2009, Loibl was a permanent ensemble member at the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel in Munich, where he appeared in numerous productions of classics and contemporary plays, including Peter Handke's "Das Spiel vom Fragen," Schiller's "Maria Stuart" and Molière's "Der Misanthrop". In 2004, he received the Bavarian Art Promotion Award for Performing Arts as well as the Kurt Meisel Award. In 2005 he made a guest appearance at the Salzburg Festival in the role of Oskar in "Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald".  

From 2006 on, Thomas Loibl also took on his first, smaller television and film roles, for example in Nina Grosse's TV crime thriller "Franziskas Gespür für Männer" (2006) and as a policeman in the Hape Kerkeling comedy "Horst Schlämmer - Isch kandidiere!" (2009).  

In 2009, Loibl began working as a freelance actor. Since then, he has regularly appeared in front of the camera for cinema and television productions. He played a priest in Marcus O. Rosenmüller's TV two-parter "Gottes mächtige Dienerin" (2011), a Bhagwan confidant in Marcus H. Rosenmüller's culture-clash comedy "Sommer in Orange" ("My Life in Orange", 2011), and a Nazi local group leader in Franziska Schlotterer's award-winning Nazi drama "Ende der Schonzeit" ("Closed Season", DE/IL 2012).

Loibl's main field of activity, however, became television. In the real-time series "Zeit der Helden" (2013) he had a leading role as a mid-forties man in a midlife crisis, in Aelrun Goette's drama "Im Zweifel" (2015) he falls in love with a female priest as a commissioner, and in "Simon sagt auf Wiedersehen zu seiner Vorhaut" ("Time to Say Goodbye") he played a doctor. Loibl also took on guest roles in numerous series such as "Wilsberg," "Marie Brand" and "Unter anderen Umständen." For his role as an aspiring provincial politician in Vivian Naefe's "Spreewaldkrimi: Die Tote im Weiher" (2014), he received a nomination for the German Academy of Television Award. In the hit series "Charité" (2017), he portrayed Bernhard Spinola, the administrative director of the famous Berlin clinic, over the course of six episodes.

Loibl also remained very active in the theater. In 2012/13, he first made a guest appearance at the Schauspielhaus Zurich and was a permanent ensemble member there in the 2013/14 season. In 2015, he made a guest appearance at the Residenztheater in Munich in a new production of "Antonius and Cleopatra"; the following year, he became a permanent ensemble member there and appeared, among other roles, as John Proctor in Arthur Miller's "Witch Hunt" (2016/17) and as trans woman Elvira in Fassbinder's "In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden" ("In a Year With 13 Moons", 2017). In 2017, he again received the Kurt Meisel Award.  

On the big screen, Thomas Loibl had a very prominent role in Maren Ade's comedy "Toni Erdmann" (2016), as the smooth superior of Sandra Hüller's main character. He played a leading role as a father in the wicked family portrait "Sommerhäuser" ("The Garden", 2017). This was followed by smaller but striking appearances as a mortician in Sönke Wortmann's comedy "Sommerfest" ("A Summer Affair", 2017), as a district forester in the children's film "Die kleine Hexe" ("The Little Witch", 2018) and as a doctor in the Hape Kerkeling film biopic "Der Junge muss an die frische Luft" ("All About Me", 2018).

Significant television roles for Loibl included a murderous police officer in the "Tatort" episode "Die Pfalz von oben" (2019), a gangster in the thriller "Jackpot" (2020) and the husband of the title character in the comedy "Annie - Kopfüber ins Leben" (2020). In the highly acclaimed miniseries "Schneller als die Angst" ("Faster Than Fear", 2021) he had a leading role as a policeman, and in the historical drama "Die Wannseekonferenz" ("The Conference", 2021) he played the Nazi ministerial director Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger.