Offshore hiring in Vietnam is well covered by people selling development services and barely covered by anyone else. The result is a lot of published advice about why Vietnam is cheap and very little about the things that actually determine whether the arrangement works: what the fully loaded cost is, which legal structure you need, what happens when you want to end someone’s employment, and who owns the code your offshore team writes.

This guide covers those. It sets out the real cost of employing someone in Vietnam, compares the four operating models honestly, and goes into the entity, work permit, termination and intellectual property rules that most guides skip entirely. Several of those rules changed in 2025 and 2026, and a lot of content still in circulation is now out of date.

All regulatory references verified October 2026. Vietnamese employment, investment and tax law has moved quickly over the past eighteen months, so confirm anything decision-critical with local counsel before acting on it.

Key Takeaways

• Budget 23.5 percent on top of gross salary. Employer social insurance is 17.5 percent, health insurance 3 percent and unemployment insurance 1 percent, plus a 2 percent trade union fund contribution.
• Severance exposure is far smaller than most employers assume. The statutory rate is half a month’s salary per year of service, but service time covered by unemployment insurance is excluded. Since unemployment insurance became mandatory in 2009, most post-2009 hires carry close to zero severance liability.
• Work permit rules changed in August 2025. Decree 219/2025/ND-CP replaced both Decree 152/2020 and Decree 70/2023. Processing is now 10 working days, the separate labour-demand approval step is gone, and the expert experience threshold dropped to two years, or one year in priority sectors including technology and digital transformation.
• You probably own your code by default, but not reliably. Under Article 39 of the Law on Intellectual Property, work an employer assigns to an employee vests in the employer unless agreed otherwise. The catch is that it only covers assigned duties, moral rights never transfer, and US work-made-for-hire clauses are the wrong instrument here.
• An “offshore development center” is not a legal structure. It is a commercial label. Every real ODC resolves to one of the four models below, and knowing which one you are actually buying matters.
• Vietnam offers real tax incentives for software work, including preferential corporate income tax for qualifying software production and, from 2026, a five-year personal income tax exemption for high-tech and digital technology workers.

Why Vietnam? A Rising Global Talent Hub

• Scale. Vietnam’s digital technology industry reported roughly 198 billion US dollars in revenue in 2025 across 80,052 active firms, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology, with close to 1.26 million people working in the broader ICT sector.
• Talent supply, and its limits. Vietnam produces around 50,000 IT graduates a year, but industry and ministry reporting puts the share who are immediately employable at roughly 30 percent, against demand of about 700,000 IT personnel versus roughly 500,000 trained domestically. That leaves a persistent shortfall near 200,000 people, concentrated at senior level.
• Third-party standing. Vietnam placed 7th of 78 countries in Kearney’s 2023 Global Services Location Index, ahead of the Philippines and Singapore.
• English, honestly. Vietnam scored 500 and ranked 64th of 123 countries in the EF English Proficiency Index 2025, which is the moderate band. Written English among developers is generally solid; spoken fluency varies and should be screened rather than assumed.
• Time zone. UTC+7 with no daylight saving. A shared working day with Australia and Singapore, a three to four hour afternoon overlap with Europe, and no natural overlap with the United States.

For the talent market in depth, including salary tables by role and seniority and a city-by-city breakdown, see our guide to software developers in Vietnam. For how Vietnam compares with its neighbors, see hiring offshore talent in Southeast Asia and our wider comparison of the best countries for outsourcing software development.

What an Offshore Team in Vietnam Actually Costs

Most guides quote a salary band and stop. Here is the full build, which is the number your finance team needs.

Salary medians below come from ITviec’s Vietnam IT Salary and Recruitment Market Report 2025-2026, based on 1,839 respondents. Employer contributions are the statutory rates. USD conversions are approximate at 26,000 VND to the dollar.

Cost line	Mid-level developer	Senior developer
Gross monthly salary (median)	30,100,000 VND (~$1,160)	39,900,000 VND (~$1,535)
Social insurance (17.5%)	5,267,500 VND	6,982,500 VND
Health insurance (3%)	903,000 VND	1,197,000 VND
Unemployment insurance (1%)	301,000 VND	399,000 VND
Trade union fund (2%)	602,000 VND	798,000 VND
Total monthly employer cost	37,173,500 VND (~$1,430)	49,276,500 VND (~$1,895)

Four things to add on top of that table when you build your own model:

• The 13th month salary. Not a statutory requirement in Vietnam, but so widely paid, usually around Lunar New Year, that candidates assume it. Budget 13 months rather than 12.
• Contribution caps. Social and health insurance contributions are capped at a multiple of the government reference level, so for high earners the effective percentage falls below 23.5 percent. Model your actual salary rather than applying the headline rate.
• Your operating model’s cost. An EOR fee, a vendor margin, or the running cost of your own entity. See the model comparison below.
• Recruitment and attrition. With a structural shortage at senior level, assume you will pay to find people and pay again when they leave.

Note what is not on that list: severance accrual. The reason is explained in the termination section below, and it is the most useful cost insight in this guide. See also our guides to payroll services in Vietnam and global salary benchmarking.

Offshore Hiring Models in Vietnam

There are four ways to put people to work in Vietnam, plus one structure that is widely misunderstood. The choice determines your cost, your speed, your liability and whether the team is genuinely yours.

1. Direct Hiring Through Your Own Entity

You register a Vietnamese company and employ people directly. Maximum control, lowest cost per head at scale, and the only model where the team is unambiguously yours.

The trade-off is setup and ongoing administration, covered in detail below. This makes sense once Vietnam is a committed market with a team of meaningful size, not for your first two hires.

2. Representative Office

Rarely discussed and frequently misunderstood, so worth stating precisely. A representative office, governed by Decree 07/2016/ND-CP, can legally employ staff in Vietnam, both local and expatriate, with no statutory cap on headcount. What it cannot do is generate profit, enter into contracts directly, issue invoices, or buy and sell.

In practice that makes it a workable vehicle for a captive back-office or engineering cost center that serves only your parent company, and completely unworkable for anything revenue-facing. Setup typically runs six to eight weeks and the licence is valid five years, renewable.

3. Employer of Record

An EOR legally employs your chosen person in Vietnam through its own entity, holding the employment contract, running payroll, remitting social insurance and tax, and carrying the compliance liability, while you direct the work day to day. See what is an employer of record for how the model works generally.

For most companies making their first hires in Vietnam this is the right answer: days rather than months, no entity, no misclassification risk, and a Vietnamese-law employment contract with proper intellectual property terms. It also solves a problem many companies discover late, namely that a foreign company with no Vietnamese entity has no mechanism to pay Vietnamese social insurance contributions. See employer of record Vietnam and EOR services in Vietnam.

4. Outsourcing, BPO and Vendor-Supplied Teams

A Vietnamese provider delivers a function or a dedicated team using its own employees. You buy an outcome or a seat count rather than specific individuals, and the provider handles recruitment, employment and facilities.

This suits defined, process-driven work and gets you running fastest of any model. The trade-offs are that the people are the provider’s employees rather than yours, retention is outside your control, and exit terms matter a great deal. See our guide to top BPO companies in Vietnam.

5. Contractor Engagement

Fast and flexible for short, defined pieces of work. The risk is misclassification: Vietnamese authorities assess the substance of the working relationship rather than the label, so a contractor working set hours under your direction with no other clients is likely to be treated as an employee. It also weakens your intellectual property position, for reasons set out below. See hiring independent contractors vs employees.

The Models Compared

	Own entity	Rep office	EOR	Vendor team	Contractor
Time to first hire	Months	6 to 8 weeks plus hiring	Days	2 to 4 weeks	Days
Can bill customers in Vietnam	Yes	No	Not applicable	Not applicable	Not applicable
Whose employees	Yours	Yours	The EOR’s, your team	The vendor’s	Independent
Who carries employment liability	You	You	The EOR	The vendor	You, if misclassified
Cost per head at scale	Lowest	Low	Moderate	Higher	Varies
Best for	20+ people, committed market	Captive cost center	First hires, 1 to 20 people	Defined process work	Short projects

“Offshore Development Center” Is Not a Legal Structure

This deserves its own section because the entire category is built on a term with no legal meaning in Vietnam. There is no ODC licence, no ODC entity form and no statutory ODC regime. It is a commercial label, and every real ODC resolves to one of the models above.

In practice an ODC arrangement is usually one of three things:

• A managed team under a services contract. A Vietnamese vendor recruits, employs and operates a dedicated team working only on your roadmap. Legally this is a vendor relationship. The people are the vendor’s employees.
• Your own foreign-owned company, which happens to be described as an ODC in marketing material. Legally this is direct hiring through an entity.
• A Build-Operate-Transfer arrangement, where a vendor stands the team up, runs it for an agreed period, then transfers it, usually into a newly formed entity of yours.

Why this matters: these three have completely different answers to who employs your people, who owns the output, what happens if you want to leave, and what you are actually buying. If a provider offers you an ODC, the useful question is which of the three it is. BOT in particular deserves scrutiny, because the transfer terms, the trigger conditions and the cost of transfer are where the value sits, and they are frequently left vague at contract stage.

Setting Up Your Own Entity in Vietnam

If direct hiring is the right model, here is what the process actually involves. Almost no competing guide covers this.

• Foreign ownership. One hundred percent foreign ownership of a Vietnamese software services company is permitted. The transitional restrictions in Vietnam’s WTO accession schedule expired long ago and are not current limits, despite still appearing in some published guidance.
• Two certificates. You need an Investment Registration Certificate and then an Enterprise Registration Certificate. Statutory processing times run from the date of a complete and valid dossier, which is not the same as the date you start.
• No minimum capital for IT services. Unlike banking, insurance or payment intermediaries, software and IT services carry no statutory minimum capital. Licensing authorities instead apply a sufficiency test to the charter capital you declare, judging whether it is credible for the business you describe.
• The 90-day rule. Whatever charter capital you declare must be fully contributed within 90 days of the Enterprise Registration Certificate being issued. The number you put on the form becomes a hard cash obligation on a short clock, which is the most common planning mistake at this stage.

One significant change to be aware of: a new Law on Investment, Law 143/2025/QH15, is reported to take effect from 1 March 2026, restructuring foreign investment entry, decentralising approval to provincial level and allowing enterprise registration to begin before investment approval completes. We have seen this from a single source at the time of writing, so treat it as a prompt to check current procedure with local counsel rather than as settled detail.

On timelines: we are deliberately not publishing a total setup figure. Statutory day-counts apply only to complete dossiers, and the real sequence includes document legalisation, proof of address, the two certificates, company seal, tax code, bank accounts and capital contribution. Figures circulating online are mostly unattributed. Ask your corporate services provider for a timeline against your specific circumstances.

Work Permits for Foreign Staff: What Changed in August 2025

If you plan to send a technical lead, country manager or founder to Vietnam, this section matters, and almost everything published before August 2025 is now wrong.

Decree 219/2025/ND-CP, effective 7 August 2025, replaced both Decree 152/2020/ND-CP and Decree 70/2023/ND-CP. If a guide you are reading cites either of those as current, it is out of date. The main changes:

• Processing is now 10 working days from a complete dossier, with the authority assessing labour demand and issuing the permit in a single window.
• The separate job-posting and labour-demand approval step was abolished. Employers can advertise roles on public platforms or their own website rather than the official portal.
• Expert thresholds relaxed. The old three-year experience requirement is gone, replaced by a bachelor’s degree plus two years of relevant experience, reduced to one year in priority sectors including technology, innovation and digital transformation. Technician thresholds fell to two years of relevant work or three years professional experience.
• Validity is up to two years, extendable once by up to two more, giving a four-year ceiling, with duration tied to the documented contract term.
• Exemption categories expanded from 14 to 15, with the new one covering priority sectors. The short-stay exemption for under 90 days in a calendar year requires notification at least three days before work starts.
• Authority decentralised to provincial People’s Committees, with online processing through the National Public Service Portal, including simultaneous work permit and criminal record certificate applications.

One structural point that follows from this: a work permit application must be filed by a Vietnamese entity. A foreign company with no presence in Vietnam cannot place a non-Vietnamese employee there at all. If you need expatriate staff on the ground, you need either your own entity, a representative office, or an EOR that can sponsor.

Employment Law: Hours, Termination and Severance

The following comes from the Labour Code 2019, Law 45/2019/QH14, and Decree 145/2020/ND-CP.

Hours, Contracts and Probation

• Working hours are capped at 8 per day and 48 per week, with overtime capped at 200 hours a year, extended to 300 in specified cases.
• Probation is capped at 60 days for roles requiring a university degree and 180 days for executive and managerial roles.
• Written contracts are required for engagements over one month, in fixed-term or indefinite-term form.
• Minimum wages rose from 1 January 2026 under Decree 293, with Region 1 at 5,310,000 VND a month and an average increase of about 7.2 percent. This is well below developer salary levels but affects your statutory floor calculations.

Notice Periods

For unilateral termination by the employer: 45 days on an indefinite-term contract, 30 days on a fixed-term contract of 12 to 36 months, and 3 working days on a contract under 12 months. No prior notice is required where termination follows structural or technological change, economic reasons, or a merger or consolidation.

A point worth understanding before you plan any exit: Vietnam is a statutory-grounds jurisdiction. An employer may only terminate unilaterally on an enumerated ground. Underperformance is available as a ground only where the employer has a written performance evaluation regulation, issued after consultation with the employee representative body. Without that document in place in advance, a performance dismissal can be unlawful regardless of how much notice you give. If you plan to manage performance out, put the regulation in place at the start, not at the point you need it.

Severance, and Why Your Exposure Is Smaller Than You Think

This is the most useful thing in this guide and no competing article covers it.

The statutory severance allowance under Article 46 is half a month’s salary per year of service, calculated on the average salary of the six consecutive months before termination, for employees with at least 12 months of regular service. Part-years of six months or more round up to a full year; less than six months rounds to half a year.

The carve-out that changes everything: qualifying service time excludes any period during which the employee participated in unemployment insurance. Unemployment insurance became mandatory in 2009. For an employee hired after 2009 and properly enrolled throughout, the countable service period is close to zero, and so is your severance liability. Your real exposure is any pre-2009 service plus any gaps where contributions were not made.

This is why severance accrual is absent from the cost table earlier in this guide. It also means that if a provider quotes you a severance accrual as a standing line item, it is worth asking them to explain the basis.

Redundancy is different and costs double. The job-loss allowance under Article 47 is one month’s salary per year of service, with a minimum of two months, triggered by restructuring, technological change, economic reasons or merger. Same 12-month eligibility, same unemployment insurance exclusion. The gap between an ordinary exit and a redundancy is the number to model.

Final payments are due within the statutory deadline following termination, which the Labour Code sets at 14 working days, extendable to 30 in defined circumstances. Published figures vary, so confirm the current position for your situation. Our guides to EOR compliance and global payroll compliance cover the recurring obligations.

Who Owns the Code? Intellectual Property Under Vietnamese Law

Every competing page says some version of “we protect your IP” and stops. Here is what Vietnamese law actually does, because the answer is more reassuring than most buyers expect and more conditional than most providers admit.

The default is good. Under Article 39 of the Law on Intellectual Property, where an organisation assigns the task of creating a work to its employee, that organisation is the copyright owner unless otherwise agreed, holding the economic rights. So you are not starting from zero and you do not need an assignment clause to own anything at all.

But three qualifications matter, and none of them appear in competing guides:

• Default vesting only covers assigned duties. Article 39 vests ownership in work the employer assigned. Code written outside the assigned scope is not captured. That makes the employment contract and the job description the load-bearing documents, and a thin scope clause creates a genuine ownership gap.
• “Work made for hire” is not a Vietnamese legal concept, and importing the US clause is actively risky. Under Vietnamese law only individuals can be authors, and a transplanted US-style clause can simply fail to do what you think it does. Use a Vietnamese-law drafted assignment, not a translated template from your home jurisdiction.
• Moral rights are inalienable. The author retains the rights to title, to attribution and to the integrity of the work, perpetually and non-transferably. Only the publication right can move. You can own every economic right and still face an attribution or integrity claim from a former developer.

Assignment contracts also have prescribed content requirements under Article 46 of the same law, including party details, grounds, payment terms, obligations and breach liability. Practical controls matter alongside the paperwork: scoped repository access, no production data in development environments, and offboarding that actually revokes credentials.

This is also the strongest argument against engaging core product developers as contractors. Article 39 vests ownership in an employment relationship. A cross-border contractor agreement is a weaker instrument and leaves you relying entirely on contract drafting rather than on a statutory default working in your favour.

Tax Incentives Worth Knowing About

Vietnam actively subsidises software work, and the terms are more generous than most guides acknowledge.

• Corporate income tax on software production. Qualifying software production has attracted a preferential rate of 10 percent for 15 years, with four years of full exemption followed by nine years at a 50 percent reduction, against a standard rate of 20 percent. Vietnam overhauled its corporate income tax regime in 2025, so confirm the current schedule against Decree 320/2025/ND-CP before building a model on it.
• What counts as software production. The incentive applies to production, not to reselling or trading existing software, and generally requires at least three of the defined stages, which include requirement determination, analysis and design, and coding.
• Personal income tax exemption for high-tech workers. Under the new Personal Income Tax Law, Law 109/2025/QH15, a five-year personal income tax exemption on salary and wages applies to high-tech professionals and high-quality digital technology industry workers. The same law cuts the bracket count from seven to five and raises the personal deduction from 11 million to 15.5 million VND a month, with salary provisions applying from January 2026.

That PIT exemption is a genuine, quantifiable recruitment argument that no competing page is using. If it applies to your roles, it raises take-home pay without raising your cost.

What Changed in 2025 and 2026

A short reference list, because the pace of change is the main reason published guidance on Vietnam goes stale.

Instrument	Effective	What it does
Law on Social Insurance 41/2024/QH15	1 July 2025	Foreign employees on contracts of 12 months or more join mandatory social insurance; new covered groups added; late payment penalty set at 0.03 percent per day
Decree 219/2025/ND-CP	7 August 2025	Replaces Decree 152/2020 and Decree 70/2023 on foreign worker permits
Decree 293 (minimum wage)	1 January 2026	Regional minimum wages up about 7.2 percent on average
PIT Law 109/2025/QH15	Wages from 1 January 2026	Five-year PIT exemption for high-tech and digital technology workers; brackets cut to five; deductions raised
Law on Investment 143/2025/QH15	Reported 1 March 2026	Restructures foreign investment entry and decentralises approval. Single-source at time of writing, verify locally

One further item to watch: Vietnam’s personal data protection framework is developing beyond Decree 13/2023/ND-CP. If your offshore team will handle customer data, confirm the current position before you design your data flows.

Best Practices for Successful Offshore Hiring

Once the structure is right, these are the things that determine whether the team lasts.

• Build a real employer brand. Vietnamese engineers research employers carefully and the market is competitive at senior level. A thin careers presence costs you candidates.
• Invest in onboarding. With roughly 30 percent of graduates immediately job-ready, structured onboarding pays for itself. Assign a named buddy, document your architecture properly, and set explicit 30, 60 and 90 day expectations.
• Leverage local expertise. The compliance detail in this guide is cheap to get right with local knowledge and expensive to discover afterward.
• Establish clear communication norms. Vietnamese workplace culture tends toward deference to seniority, which can mean problems surface late. Ask direct questions rather than open ones, write decisions down, and make it visible when someone flags an issue early.
• Be explicit about working hours before the offer. Candidates will often agree to difficult hours during a process and disengage months later. That shows up as attrition rather than as a conversation.
• Give the team ownership, not tickets. Offshore teams that only receive tasks disengage. Teams that own a product area stay. If you want the retention numbers to work, the work has to be worth staying for. Our guide to hiring a remote development team covers how to structure the work.
• Plan the graduation path. If the team grows, you will eventually want your own entity. Ask any provider early what transferring employees onto your entity involves and what it costs, rather than discovering a switching cost later.

Our guides to building efficient global teams in APAC and best practices for hiring offshore tech talent in Southeast Asia go deeper on the operational side.

Why Partner with TalentHero?

TalentHero is an Asia Pacific specialist that both recruits and legally employs, with an owned entity in Vietnam. That combination matters here because the two halves of offshore hiring, finding the right people and employing them compliantly, are usually sold by different companies, leaving you to manage the gap.

• Employer of Record. We employ your chosen hires through our own Vietnamese entity, handling local-law contracts, social insurance registration, payroll, tax withholding and intellectual property assignment drafted under Vietnamese law. See our employer of record services.
• Recruitment on Demand. Our recruiters source and screen across Vietnam, including passive candidates who are not on the job boards. See recruitment services in Vietnam.
• Global Payroll. Accurate, on-time payroll with statutory calculations kept current, including the 2025 and 2026 changes set out above. See how to pay international employees.
• Contractor Management. Compliant engagement for genuine contractor relationships, with the classification question handled properly.
• Visa and Immigration, Equipment Procurement and Office Space. The practical pieces of standing up a team, in one relationship.

When Another Model Is the Better Choice

• Large-scale, process-driven volume work. A BPO provider will deliver it more cheaply than an EOR arrangement.
• A committed team of twenty or more in Vietnam long term. At that scale your own entity is cheaper and you should be planning the transition.
• A short, defined project. A vendor team or a properly structured contractor engagement is simpler.

Ready to Build Your Offshore Team in Vietnam?

Decide the model before the provider. If you want specific people who are genuinely your team and you have no Vietnamese entity, an EOR is the structure. If you want an outcome delivered, that is a vendor relationship. And if Vietnam is already a committed market at scale, start the entity conversation.

Connect with TalentHero and we will tell you which fits, including when the answer is a model we do not sell.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is offshore hiring in Vietnam and why is it popular?

It means employing people in Vietnam to work for a company based elsewhere. Vietnam is popular because of cost, a large and growing technology workforce, and strong third-party standing, including 7th place of 78 countries in Kearney’s 2023 Global Services Location Index. The country’s digital technology industry reported roughly 198 billion US dollars in revenue in 2025 across more than 80,000 firms.

2. Do I need a legal entity to hire in Vietnam?

No. An Employer of Record can employ people in Vietnam on your behalf, usually within days. This matters more than it sounds, because a foreign company without a Vietnamese entity has no mechanism to pay Vietnamese social insurance contributions, and cannot file a work permit application for an expatriate employee.

3. What does an offshore employee in Vietnam actually cost?

Gross salary plus 23.5 percent in employer contributions: social insurance 17.5 percent, health insurance 3 percent, unemployment insurance 1 percent and the trade union fund 2 percent. On a mid-level developer at the ITviec median of about 30.1 million VND a month, that totals roughly 37.2 million VND, around 1,430 US dollars, before any EOR fee or vendor margin. Budget a 13th month salary on top, since it is customary and expected.

4. How much severance will I owe if it does not work out?

Probably far less than you expect. The statutory rate is half a month’s salary per year of service, but service covered by unemployment insurance is excluded, and unemployment insurance has been mandatory since 2009. For a properly enrolled post-2009 hire, countable service is close to zero. Redundancy is different and costs double, at one month per year with a two-month minimum.

5. Who owns the code my Vietnamese team writes?

By default you do, under Article 39 of the Law on Intellectual Property, which vests work an employer assigns to an employee in that employer unless agreed otherwise. Three qualifications apply: it covers only assigned duties, so the job description matters; moral rights such as attribution and integrity never transfer; and US work-made-for-hire clauses are not a Vietnamese legal concept and can fail. Use a Vietnamese-law drafted contract.

6. What is an offshore development center, legally?

Nothing. ODC has no definition in Vietnamese law. In practice it means one of three things: a managed team under a services contract with a Vietnamese vendor, your own foreign-owned company, or a Build-Operate-Transfer arrangement. These differ completely on who employs the people and what happens if you leave, so ask which one you are being offered.

7. Can a representative office employ staff in Vietnam?

Yes, both local and expatriate, with no statutory cap on headcount. What it cannot do is generate profit, sign contracts directly, issue invoices or trade. That makes it viable for a captive back-office or engineering cost center serving your parent company, and unworkable for anything revenue-facing. Setup runs roughly six to eight weeks.

8. What are the current work permit rules for foreign staff?

Decree 219/2025/ND-CP has applied since 7 August 2025, replacing Decree 152/2020 and Decree 70/2023. Processing is 10 working days from a complete dossier, the separate labour-demand approval step is gone, expert eligibility is a degree plus two years of relevant experience or one year in priority sectors including technology, and permits run up to two years, extendable once.

9. Can I hire Vietnamese staff as contractors instead?

For genuinely independent, project-based work, yes. If the person works set hours under your direction with no other clients, authorities will assess the substance rather than the label, exposing you to back contributions and penalties. It also weakens your IP position, since the statutory default that favours employers applies to employment relationships rather than contractor ones.

10. How long does it take to build an offshore team in Vietnam?

Through an Employer of Record, onboarding a selected candidate takes days, with the search itself typically three to six weeks for mid-level roles and longer for scarce specialisms such as data engineering or machine learning. A vendor-supplied team can often be live in two to four weeks. Setting up your own entity is a months-long project and should not be on the critical path for your first hires.

11. Are there tax incentives for software work in Vietnam?

Yes. Qualifying software production has attracted preferential corporate income tax of 10 percent for 15 years with four years exempt and nine at half rate, against a 20 percent standard rate, though the regime was overhauled in 2025 so confirm the current schedule. Separately, the new Personal Income Tax Law grants a five-year PIT exemption on salary for high-tech and digital technology workers, with salary provisions applying from January 2026.

12. How do I manage an offshore team across the time zone gap?

Vietnam is UTC+7 with no daylight saving, so you share a working day with Australia and Singapore, get a three to four hour afternoon overlap with Europe, and have no natural overlap with the United States. For US teams, choose deliberately between disciplined asynchronous working with a documented handoff and an agreed standing window on one side. Set the expectation in the job description rather than after the hire.