Vietnam Digital Nomad Visa: How to Actually Stay Long-Term as a Remote Worker

Vietnam has no digital nomad visa. It has no remote-work visa either, and nothing that came into force in 2026 changed that. What it does have is a 90-day e-visa, a short list of visa exemptions, and two brand-new categories that a lot of relocation blogs have badly misread.

Search for “Vietnam digital nomad visa” and you’ll get pages of confident results. Some of them name a visa, some quote a monthly income requirement, and a few give you an application link.

None of them are describing a real Vietnamese visa category, because there isn’t one.

The confusion got worse in July 2026, when two new visa symbols took effect: UĐ1 and UĐ2. They’re real and already in force, but they have nothing to do with remote work. Within days of the law landing, they were being written up as Vietnam’s answer to the digital nomad visa.

This guide walks through how to actually stay long-term as a remote worker: the 90-day e-visa route most people use and what it costs, who might genuinely qualify for a sponsored UĐ1 category, how border runs work in practice, and the 183-day tax rule that catches people who stop counting.

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What a Digital Nomad Visa Actually Means

A digital nomad visa is a category built for people who earn money from outside the country they’re living in. The defining feature is that you sponsor yourself: you show income, or savings, or a contract with a foreign employer, and the government gives you permission to stay on that basis alone.

No local company vouches for you, no university hires you, and you aren’t taking a job from anyone in the host country. The visa says so explicitly.

That distinction is what separates a real nomad visa from a tourist stay that people happen to work through: a tourist visa doesn’t grant permission to work, while a nomad visa does, for a specific kind of work with foreign income.

Why Vietnam Doesn’t Have One

Vietnam’s visa categories are listed in Article 8 of the Law on Entry, Exit, Transit and Residence of Foreigners in Vietnam. Every category the country issues appears on that list, each with a two-letter or three-character symbol:

• DL for tourism
• LĐ1 and LĐ2 for labour
• ĐT1 through ĐT3 for investment
• DH for study
• TT for family.

Run through the list and you won’t find one for remote work: no category whose description covers earning foreign income while living in Vietnam, and none you can apply for just by showing a contract with a company that has no presence here.

However, Vietnam recently released two new types of visa, UĐ1 and UĐ2. They’re for tech workers, and they aren’t a digital nomad visa.

What the UĐ1 and UĐ2 Visas Really Are

UĐ1 and UĐ2 are two new visa types in Vietnam that took effect on 1 July 2026.

• UĐ1 is issued to foreigners who are high-quality digital technology industry personnel, and to other people granted preferential treatment under laws, National Assembly resolutions, and National Assembly Standing Committee resolutions.
• UĐ2 is issued to the spouse and children under 18 of a UĐ1 holder. However, this dependant doesn’t have a right to work in the country.

Both carry a validity of up to five years, with matching temporary residence cards running up to ten, though what actually gets issued is decided case by case rather than guaranteed at the maximum.

Why UĐ1 Rules Out Most Remote Workers

Before you get your hopes up about UĐ1, check these two things. They close the door on freelancers and remote employees independently of each other.

You can’t sponsor yourself

The visa requires you to have a sponsoring agency, organisation, or individual, which files the visa request with the immigration authority on your behalf. This means there’s no route where you gather your own documents, apply directly, and receive a UĐ1 on the strength of your income alone.

That alone disqualifies the defining case of a digital nomad, which is someone with no institutional tie to the country they’re living in.

The qualifying criteria are narrow

Even with a willing sponsor, you still have to clear this bar. A UĐ1 applicant has to produce documents proving they’re high-quality digital technology industry personnel under the Law on Digital Technology Industry, or documents proving they fall into a preferential category. There are four cases:

• Working at a digital technology enterprise. Either a senior leadership position at a digital technology enterprise that recorded revenue of at least VND26,000 billion in one of the past three years, or a role directly engaged in digital technology industry activity earning between three and five times GDP per capita, depending on the category of person.
• A recent graduate. University graduation within the last three years with a grade of distinction or above in a digital technology or IT discipline from an institution in the global top 500, or a grade of excellent or above from a top 50 domestic institution.
• Academia and research. Dean or institute director or above at a top 500 global institution in digital technology or IT, or a lecturer or scientist holding a doctorate with at least three years of research or teaching experience in the field.
• Vietnamese officials working on digital technology industry policy, which doesn’t apply to foreigners.

Check your own situation against that list honestly. Every one of those routes runs through an institution: an employer, a university, or a research body has to be attached to you before any of them is even arguable.

A freelancer billing overseas clients doesn’t fit. Neither does a remote employee of a foreign company with no Vietnamese entity, a solo consultant, or an agency owner.

The revenue and income thresholds are set at a level that describes senior people inside large technology organisations, and the academic routes describe people with a named position at a ranked institution.

If you genuinely do work for a large technology employer and think you might qualify, the sponsor drives the process, not you. The question to ask your employer is whether they’ll file a UĐ1 request, not whether you can.

Want to check this yourself rather than take our word for it? The full text of the law sits in the Ministry of Public Security’s document database, and the visa clauses are short enough to read in a couple of minutes.

The 90-Day E-Visa: What Remote Workers Actually Use

The e-visa carries the symbol EV and is valid for up to 90 days, single or multiple entry. That’s been the case since 15 August 2023. Before that date it was single entry only, capped at 30 days.

It’s open to citizens of every country and territory. There’s no nationality shortlist to check and no minimum income to prove.

This is the most popular type of visa for digital nomads and remote workers, since you can stay in the country easily for 90 days. But it comes with two limitations:

• First: an e-visa can’t be extended from inside Vietnam: when it runs out, you leave the country and come back on a new one, and that single constraint shapes how every long-stay remote worker in Vietnam organises their year.
• Second: it doesn’t authorise work either. It’s an entry permission with a set duration attached, nothing more.

That’s fine if you only want to stay 90 days. Stay longer and you’ll need a visa run, which can be a hassle. And because the e-visa is fundamentally a tourist visa, working on it, even remotely for overseas clients, sits in a legal gray area rather than a clearly permitted one.

How to apply

Applications go through the Vietnam Immigration Department’s own portals at evisa.gov.vn and thithucdientu.gov.vn. Nothing else is official, whatever the URL looks like.

Create an account, upload your passport bio page and a passport-style photo, fill in your entry and exit details, and pay the fee online. Approval comes back by email as a PDF you print and carry alongside your physical passport.

Forum regulars are consistent about two things here: apply on the official portal rather than through an agent, and apply well ahead of your travel date rather than close to it, because approvals don’t always land inside the window you’d expect.

What it costs

Fees are set by Circular No. 28/2026/TT-BTC, in force since 1 April 2026:

• Single-entry visa: US$25.
• Multiple-entry visa up to 90 days: US$50. Longer multiple-entry validities cost more, up to US$165 for the five-to-ten-year band.
• Children under 14: a flat US$25, whatever the validity.
• Extending temporary residence: US$10 per instance.

Pay the extra US$25 for multiple entry if you plan to leave and come back inside the 90 days, which covers most people using Vietnam as a base for regional travel.

How Border Runs Actually Work

Since an e-visa can’t be extended in-country, here’s the standard pattern most people follow: enter on a 90-day e-visa, leave before it expires, come back on a fresh one.

The exit can be a flight or a land crossing. Moc Bai, on the Cambodian border, is the one that comes up most often in the forums for people based in Ho Chi Minh City, described as a half-day trip rather than an overnight expedition.

However, border runs aren’t always comfortable. Community reports point fairly consistently at harder questioning after several back-to-back stays, with the general read being that repeat entries attract attention rather than being formally capped. Treat that as a pattern people describe, not a published rule, because no number of permitted runs is published anywhere.

Remember that entry is granted at the border by an officer applying judgement, and a valid visa has never been the same thing as a guaranteed entry. Someone who has spent most of the past two years in Vietnam on consecutive tourist stays is a visibly different case from a first-time visitor, and the passport shows it.

The practical result: nobody gets banned for doing one border run, and most people do several without issue. String together too many in a row, and the result is friction rather than a ban, longer questioning at the counter, more documents requested, and in rare cases a refusal, not because a rule caps the number, but because a long unbroken run of tourist stays starts to look less like tourism and more like someone living in Vietnam without the status for it.

What About Visa Exemptions?

Citizens of a shortlist of countries can enter Vietnam without a visa at all and get 45 days of temporary residence from the date of entry, regardless of passport type or purpose of entry. As of this writing, that list includes:

• The United Kingdom
• France
• Germany
• Japan
• South Korea

Confirm your own nationality against the current list before you count on it.

For a remote worker the exemption is usually worse than the e-visa: forty-five days is half the e-visa’s ceiling, and it only grants permission to enter, not to work.

If you’re planning a stay measured in months, use the 90-day multiple-entry e-visa instead.

How Digital Nomads in Vietnam Can Actually Stay Long Term

Strip out the visas that don’t exist and the realistic options are short.

• Rolling e-visas. Ninety days at a time with an exit between each one. It’s what most remote workers in Vietnam are doing, it’s straightforward, and it doesn’t authorise work or lead anywhere.
• A sponsored work category. The labour symbols LĐ1 and LĐ2 exist for people working for an entity in Vietnam, and a work permit sits behind them. This route means a Vietnamese employer, not a foreign one.
• An investment category. The ĐT symbols cover investors, and like every sponsored category they run through an entity in Vietnam that files on your behalf.
• UĐ1, if you actually meet the Decree 353 criteria and have an organisation willing to sponsor you. For most remote workers this is theoretical.

If a self-sponsored status is the thing you actually need, look at Vietnam’s neighbours instead. Malaysia has the DE Rantau Nomad Pass through the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation, and Thailand has the Destination Thailand Visa. Compare those against what Vietnam offers, which on this specific point is nothing.

If you’re weighing Vietnam as a base rather than as a visa, our guides to moving to Vietnam and the cost of living in Vietnam deal with the parts of the decision that immigration law doesn’t touch. There’s also a separate guide to the Vietnam retirement visa question, which runs into the same self-sponsorship wall from a different direction.

Read more: Digital Nomad Visas in Asia covers which countries in the region have a real self-sponsored category and what each one asks for.

Good to Know

Rules on paper and rules at the border aren’t always the same thing

Everything in this guide describes what the law says. What actually happens to you at immigration on a given day also depends on the officer in front of you, the airport, and how your entry history looks on paper. Two people with identical visas can have noticeably different experiences at the same checkpoint on the same day. Treat the law as the baseline, not a guarantee of a specific outcome.

A “Vietnam digital nomad visa” rumour resurfaces every year or two

Vietnam has floated the idea of a dedicated remote-work category in policy discussions before, and it will likely come up again. When it does, run it through the same test this guide uses throughout: a visa symbol in Article 8, and an effective date in an actual law or decree. An official mentioning the idea in an interview is not that.

The visa-exemption list is worth rechecking close to your travel date

Vietnam adds and removes countries from the exemption list by government resolution rather than by amending the law itself, which means it can change with less notice than a visa category can. If your plan depends on entering visa-free, confirm your nationality’s current status shortly before you book rather than relying on a list from months ago, including this one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Vietnam have a digital nomad visa?

No. There’s no digital nomad visa and no remote-work visa. No category in Article 8 of the foreigners’ entry law authorises working remotely for a foreign employer or foreign clients while living in Vietnam.

Aren’t UĐ1 and UĐ2 the new digital nomad visas?

No. UĐ1 is for high-quality digital technology industry personnel as defined by Decree No. 353/2025/ND-CP, and it requires a sponsor to file on your behalf, while UĐ2 is a dependant category for a spouse and children under 18. Neither is available to a self-sponsoring remote worker.

How long can I stay in Vietnam on an e-visa?

Up to 90 days, single or multiple entry, and it can’t be extended from inside the country. When it expires you leave and return on a new one.

What does a Vietnam e-visa cost?

US$25 for single entry and US$50 for multiple entry up to 90 days. Children under 14 pay a flat US$25.

Can I work remotely on a Vietnamese tourist visa?

A tourist visa doesn’t grant permission to work. There’s also no visa category that covers remote work for a foreign employer, which is the whole point of this guide. Anyone doing it is relying on the absence of a rule that fits, not on a rule that permits it.

How many border runs can I do?

No number is published. Community reports describe harder questioning after several consecutive stays, and entry is always an officer’s decision rather than an automatic consequence of holding a valid visa.

Is Vietnam likely to introduce a digital nomad visa?

The 2026 amendments added preferential categories aimed at digital technology talent working through institutions, not at independent remote workers. Nothing currently in force points toward a self-sponsored category. Treat any claim that one is coming as commentary until a visa symbol and an effective date exist.