Vietnam Visa Guide: How Entry Works and How to Check Your Own Rules

Entering Vietnam: the two routes and how to choose between them

Entering Vietnam is not complicated, but it is a place where the details depend entirely on the passport in your pocket. This page does not give you a table of rules by country, and that is deliberate. Entry conditions are set by the Vietnamese authorities, they are revised from time to time, and any number printed in a travel guide can be out of date by the time you read it. What a guide can do honestly is explain how the system is organised, which questions to ask, and where the authoritative answer lives.

In broad terms there are two routes into the country for a tourist:

• A visa exemption. Some nationalities, including several European ones, are allowed to enter without a visa for a limited number of days. You do not apply in advance, but you still need a valid passport and you are still subject to checks on arrival.
• An electronic visa, or e-visa. A broad list of nationalities can apply online before travelling. The e-visa is valid for up to 90 days, which makes it the route for longer journeys and for travellers whose country is not on the exemption list.

There is also a regional variation: Phu Quoc, the island in the Gulf of Thailand, has its own exemption scheme for direct arrivals. We come back to it below.

Which route applies to you is a fact about your nationality at the moment you travel. It is not something this site can settle for you, and it is not something a friend’s experience can settle either, because their passport and their travel date were different from yours.

The first job: confirm your own rules on the official source

Before anything else, spend ten minutes establishing your position from a source that is accountable for being right. There are two good ones:

1. The official Vietnamese immigration portal. This is the authority on who needs what, and it is the only place to submit an e-visa application. It lists the nationalities eligible for the e-visa and the current exemption arrangements.
2. Your own government’s travel advice. Most foreign ministries publish a page on Vietnam covering entry requirements, passport validity, and warnings. These pages are written for your nationality specifically and are usually the clearest summary available.

Read both, because they serve different purposes. The portal tells you what Vietnam asks for; your government’s advice tells you how the rule applies to a holder of your passport, and often flags recent changes.

If you travel on a second passport, or on a passport that is not from the country you live in, do the check for the passport you will actually present at the border. Airlines look at the passport you use to check in, and the border officer looks at the same one.

Our own visa tool can help you organise the questions, but it is a planning aid, not an official source. The official portal always wins.

Why you should settle this before you book

The sequence matters more than people expect. A sensible order is:

1. Check your entry route, and your passport validity, as soon as you have a rough idea of the dates.
2. Fix your dates and the shape of the trip.
3. Book the flights and the non-refundable parts.
4. Apply for the e-visa, if that is your route, in good time before departure.

The reason to check first is that an exemption is limited in days, and an e-visa has its own validity window. Both can quietly shape the trip. If you are weighing a long stay, a slow overland journey, or a side trip into Cambodia and back, the entry rules decide how much flexibility you have. The duration question itself is covered in how many days in Vietnam, and this page deliberately leaves it there.

A few realistic situations where checking early pays off:

• You hold a passport that is close to its end. Renewal is the longest single step in the process for some travellers, and it can take longer than the rest of the planning combined.
• You are combining Vietnam with other countries. Each country has its own rule, and an entry to Vietnam in the middle of a longer trip is a separate event. The Vietnam and Cambodia itinerary is a good example of a route where this needs thinking about in advance.
• You travel in peak season. Nothing about the rules changes at a festival, but everything around them gets busier. If you are going near the lunar new year, read Tet in Vietnam first, because services around the holiday slow down.

The e-visa: how to think about it

The e-visa is the route that works for most travellers who are not on an exemption list. A few points of orientation, without stating anything that depends on a particular country:

It is an online application. You fill in your details, upload a photograph and a scan of your passport page, and pay the fee through the official site. The fee and the specifics are on the portal and can change, so we do not quote them here.

It is valid for up to 90 days. That is the ceiling on the validity of the document. It does not mean you must stay that long, and it does not mean every application is granted for the maximum. Read the dates on the approval carefully.

The dates are fixed in the application. The entry and exit dates you enter matter. Treat them as part of the document, and if your plans move, find out what the portal says about correcting or reapplying before you travel, not at the airport.

It is not instant. There is a processing period between submitting and receiving the approval. Its length is decided by the authorities and varies, so we give no duration. The practical advice is to apply with a comfortable margin, not in the last days before the flight.

Details must match the passport exactly. Name spelling, passport number, date of birth. A small mismatch is a common cause of trouble. Copy from the passport page, not from memory, and not from a booking confirmation that may have been typed quickly.

Keep a copy. Save the approval as a file and print one copy. Airlines may ask to see it at check-in, and you will be asked to show it at the border.

Watch out for lookalike websites

Searching for visa information tends to produce websites that look official and charge a service fee for submitting the same form you could submit yourself. Some are simply expensive intermediaries; some are worse. A reliable habit is to reach the portal from your government’s travel advice page or from the embassy site, and to treat any page you reached through an advertisement with caution. If a site asks for much more than your passport details, a photograph and a payment, stop.

Visa exemptions: useful, but limited

For travellers whose countries are on the list, the exemption is the easiest way in: no application, no fee at the border, and no waiting. Several European countries are among those currently benefiting, but we will not tell you which, or for how many days, because that is exactly the kind of detail that changes and exactly the kind that you must confirm for your own passport.

What is worth understanding about exemptions in general:

• They are for a limited number of days. If your plans call for a longer stay, an exemption may not cover it, and the e-visa route may suit you better. Ask the question before you book a long itinerary, not once you are there.
• They apply to the nationality, and the conditions can include passport validity. The details are on the portal.
• They can be adjusted. Governments change exemption lists and durations for policy reasons, sometimes with little notice. A friend who travelled last year may have enjoyed a different arrangement from the one that applies now.
• They can be applied for the whole entry, not for each trip separately. What the rules say about repeated entries, or about returning soon after leaving, is something to read on the portal rather than assume.

If you are close to the edge of what an exemption allows, and you are not sure whether the e-visa is a better fit, the portal and your government’s advice are the places to settle it. Do not rely on a travel forum for this.

Phu Quoc has its own exemption scheme

Phu Quoc is Vietnam’s largest island, set in the Gulf of Thailand off the Cambodian coast, with its own international airport. Because it is a major beach destination, it has a separate exemption scheme for travellers who arrive directly on the island.

The idea is simple: a traveller arriving directly at Phu Quoc, for example on a flight that lands at the island’s own airport, may benefit from an arrangement that differs from the one that applies on the mainland. The specifics, including who qualifies, how long you can stay on the island, and what happens if you want to continue to the mainland afterwards, are set by the authorities and are subject to change. They are exactly the kind of thing to verify on the official portal, and with the airline, before you plan a route around them.

Two planning consequences are worth keeping in mind:

• If you want only the island, the scheme may suit a beach-only trip, and the details on arrival and exit are worth reading carefully.
• If you want the island and the mainland, think about the order. Arriving on the mainland and flying to the island is a different situation from arriving directly on the island, and the two do not necessarily carry the same conditions. Read how the rules treat your intended sequence before you book the flights.

For the island itself, see our Phu Quoc destination page. If you are deciding whether the island deserves a place in the trip at all, is Phu Quoc worth visiting is a more useful read than any visa page.

Your passport: the thing everybody forgets to check

Whichever route you take, the passport is the document the whole process hangs on. Three checks, all cheap:

1. Validity. Entry rules normally require a certain remaining validity on the day you arrive. The exact requirement is on the official portal and is also applied by airlines at check-in. Do not guess; look it up.
2. Blank pages and condition. A damaged or heavily worn passport can cause trouble, and many border officers expect space for stamps.
3. The name. The name on the passport, on the flight booking and on the e-visa application should be the same. If your passport has more than one given name, or a different order than you usually use, follow the passport.

If the passport needs renewing, do it first. Everything else, including the e-visa application and the flight bookings, depends on it, and a renewal can take longer than any other step on the list.

Arrival: what the border looks like in practice

Most visitors arrive at Noi Bai (HAN) in Hanoi, Tan Son Nhat (SGN) in Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang (DAD), Cam Ranh (CXR) for Nha Trang, or Phu Quoc (PQC). The airports differ in size, but the sequence is the same: you queue at immigration with your passport, your e-visa approval if you have one, and the details of where you are staying. Officers may ask about your onward travel.

What helps:

• Have the documents ready and accessible. A saved file on your phone and a printed copy of the approval, plus your accommodation details for the first nights.
• Be ready to show your onward or return plans. Airlines sometimes check this at departure, because carriers can be fined for carrying passengers who are refused entry.
• Expect a queue at busy times. Arrival halls at the main airports can be crowded when several long-haul flights land together. A short wait is normal; do not book a tight connection on the same day.
• Keep some local currency in mind. Cash still matters for the first taxi, a coffee and a SIM, and our money in Vietnam page explains the practicalities. The dong is the only legal tender; the US dollar is not.

For a clear picture of which airport serves which region, and how the cities connect to them, read Vietnam’s airports explained. If your journey continues overland or you plan to cross a land border, Vietnam border crossings and Vietnam to Cambodia overland cover the practical side, and we repeat the same advice: confirm the entry rules for the next country on its own official source.

Onward travel inside the country

An entry document says nothing about how you move around once you are in, but it is worth keeping the geography in mind when you set your dates. Vietnam is long and narrow, roughly 1,650 km from the Chinese border to the Mekong Delta, and going from the north to the south is a domestic flight of about two hours or more than thirty hours on the Reunification Express, never a day trip. The practicalities of the flights are in domestic flights in Vietnam, and the full picture of trains, buses and cars is in getting around Vietnam.

The reason this matters for the entry question is simply that your arrival airport and your departure airport do not have to be the same. Many travellers fly into Hanoi and out of Ho Chi Minh City, or the other way round, and the visa or exemption you hold is for the country, not for a city. Planning an open-jaw route saves a long backtrack, and the border check at one end does not change because the other end is far away.

Once you have your entry sorted, there are a couple of ways to make the first day easier. A short guided outing soon after arrival is a gentle way to settle in, for example a private street food walk in Hanoi that introduces the Old Quarter without any planning, or a small-group day trip from Hanoi to Ninh Binh if you would rather get out of the city early.

If a bay cruise is the reason you are going, an overnight cruise on Lan Ha Bay is worth booking only after your entry route is confirmed, since dates on a cruise are rarely flexible.

Building a sensible planning routine

Because the rules differ by passport, the most reliable thing you can do is follow a routine instead of a table. Here is the version we recommend.

Step 1: identify the passport and the date. Which passport will you use, and roughly when do you travel? Write both down.

Step 2: find your route on the official portal. Exemption or e-visa? If the portal or your government’s advice says something unexpected, believe it over any article, including this one.

Step 3: check passport validity and condition. Renew now if there is any doubt.

Step 4: fix the trip, then book. The shape of the trip, from the number of regions to the order of cities, is covered in first time in Vietnam and in our best time to visit Vietnam, because the country has three different climates and no single best month.

Step 5: apply for the e-visa, if needed, with a margin. Do not leave it to the week of departure.

Step 6: keep your documents together. One folder on your phone, one printed set, the same details everywhere.

Step 7: recheck close to departure. Rules change. A quick look at the portal and at your government’s travel page in the days before you leave costs almost nothing.

What this page leaves to others

A visa page can easily swell into a general planning page. We keep this one narrow on purpose:

• Money. How much a trip costs, and what to budget per day, is in Vietnam travel budget.
• Length of stay. How long to stay and how to divide the time between regions is in how many days in Vietnam.
• Safety and health. Is Vietnam safe covers the real risks, from traffic to bag snatching. Insurance, which many travellers check at the same moment as their entry documents, is in Vietnam travel insurance.

Entry rules also sometimes intersect with insurance and with licences: if you plan to ride a motorbike, the right licence matters, and an insurer may refuse a claim without it. That is a separate question from the visa and it has its own page.

Frequently asked questions about entering Vietnam

Do I need a visa to visit Vietnam?

Some travellers do and some do not. Vietnam grants visa exemptions of a limited number of days to certain nationalities, and issues an e-visa valid up to 90 days to a broad list of others. Which category you fall into depends on your passport and can change, so check the official immigration portal or your government’s travel advice.

What is the difference between an e-visa and a visa exemption?

A visa exemption lets you enter for a limited number of days without applying in advance, but only for the nationalities on the current list. An e-visa is an application you complete online before travelling, valid for a longer stay of up to 90 days, and open to a much wider list of nationalities.

Is there a special rule for Phu Quoc?

Yes. Phu Quoc has its own exemption scheme for travellers arriving directly on the island. The conditions, such as where you must arrive from and how long you may stay on the island, are set by the authorities and can change, so confirm the current terms on the official portal before relying on it.

How early should I apply for a Vietnamese e-visa?

Apply once your dates are settled and before you pay for anything that cannot be refunded. Processing times are set by the authorities and vary, so this guide gives no fixed duration. Build in a comfortable margin rather than applying in the last days before departure.

Where should I apply for the e-visa?

Use the official Vietnamese immigration portal, which you can reach through your own government’s travel advice or the embassy website. Many unofficial lookalike sites charge extra fees for the same application, so be wary of any page that you found through an advertisement.

Does my passport need to be valid for a minimum period?

Yes, entry rules normally require remaining validity on your passport, and the exact requirement is stated on the official portal and by your airline. Check it before booking, because renewing a passport can take longer than the trip itself takes to plan.