Salaries in Vietnam: Best Sectors, Locations, Taxes, and more
Photo credit: pxhere
What is the Average Salary in Vietnam?
According to the latest statistics (2022), the median monthly salary in Vietnam is 6.5 million VND per month (source) or approximately $275 USD/month.
In order to contextualize the average salary in Vietnam ($275 USD/month), one must factor-in the following caveats:
- there are longer working hours in Vietnam than in most OECD countries (see below), and
- there are generous bonuses during the Lunar New Year.
LEARN MORE: Why Vietnamese salaries are so low (and why they can’t stay that way)
Salaries for ESL Teachers in Vietnam
ESL teachers in Vietnam are typically paid an hourly-rate between $13 USD/hr to $23 USD/hr. There is usually a housing allowance and a free flight home, in addition to other perks and benefits. This is true among the more reputable teaching institutions, such as ILA.
ESL teachers usually only work between 20-30 hours per week in-class, resulting in a monthly salary of $1800 USD to $2500 (this is much higher than the average Vietnamese worker — even compared to senior-level salaries, see below ). Some large institutions may demand their teachers work up-to 48 hours (i.e. a 6 day work-week), but they typically pay a lower hourly rate of ~$15 USD/hr.
ESL Teachers are not compensated for preparation time, so a teacher’s actual work-hours are much more than advertised in job adverts.
Many ESL teachers do private tutoring on the side, which is much more lucrative than in-class teaching.
Where to find ESL jobs in Vietnam?
The Vietnamese love Facebook, and a lot of jobs are posted on Facebook Groups, such as Hanoi English Teaching Jobs or English Teaching Jobs in Vietnam.
Other websites to find ESL jobs in Vietnam include VietnamWorks and Dave’s ESL Cafe.
What is a Good Salary in Vietnam? – By Field and Experience
How much is a “good salary” in Vietnam? — It varies by seniority and sector. According to a 2019 survey by the popular job-seeking website VietnamWorks.com, the best paying sectors were the following (which we’ve stratified by seniority).
For new graduates and junior associates, the top-paying sectors with the highest average monthly salaries were:
- Construction: 5.75 – 10 million VND ($256 – $444 USD)
- Information technology: 6 – 9 million VND ($267 – $400 USD)
- Engineering: 6 – 8 million VND ($267 – $356 USD)
- Electrical work: 5.7 – 8.5 million VND ($253 – $378 USD)
- Sales: 4-7 million VND ($178 – $311 USD)
For mid-career and experienced professionals (>2 year experience):
- Information technology: 9.5 – 20 million VND ($422 – $889 USD)
- Finance: 7.2 – 15.75 million VND ($320 – $700 USD)
- Construction: 10 – 15 million VND ($444 – $667 USD)
- Marketing: 8 – 15 million VND ($356 – $667 USD)
More recently, the machine learning and artificial intelligence field has posted starting salaries as high as 45 million VND/month (>$2000 USD). Some top-tier companies like VinGroup also pay their mid-tier staff in excess of 70 million VND/month, which is known to be many multiples of the sector-norm, in order to attract the country’s top-talent and encourage fierce internal competition.
For supervisory roles and middle-management:
- Information technology: 15 – 27.5 million VND ($667 – $1222 USD)
Senior management and department heads:
- 25% surveyed had over 70 million VND ($3111 USD)
- Finance: 25 – 70 million VND ($1111 – $3111 USD)
- Administration / Secretarial: 20 million VND ($900 USD)
Note: The above USD figures were calculated assuming an exchange rate of 22500 VND to 1 USD.
Which city pays the highest salaries in Vietnam?
The median salary is highest in Ho Chi Minh City at ~10 million VND/month (~$440 USD/month). This is unsurprising, given the larger concentration of high-value technology and finance companies in the city. Thereafter, Hanoi and Đà Nẵng have the second and third highest salaries.
Otherwise, the geographic distribution of salaries closely resembles the geographic pattern of cost-of-living and minimum-wage categories. In Vietnam, there is tiered-system with four zones: Zone 1 has the highest costs-of-living and highest minimum-salaries, while Zone 4 has the lowest expenses and lowest minimum-wages. The four zones are:
- Zone 1 – Large muncipalities with the highest living costs. Only 6 cities are in this category: Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, Đồng Nai, Bình Dương, Bà Rịa – Vũng Tàu, and the bustling port-city of Hải Phòng. Minimum salary: 4.42 million VND/month (~$196 USD)
- Zone 2 – Medium cities like Đà Nẵng, Ninh Bình, and Nha Trang, and suburbs of Zone 1. Minimum salary: 3.92 million VND/month (~$174 USD)
- Zone 3 – Small cities (Tuy Hòa) and towns and outskirts. Minimum salary: 3.43 million VND/month (~$152 USD)
- Zone 4 – remote mountain areas/country/agricultural outside of cities. Minimum salary: 3.07 million VND/month (~$136 USD)
The full-list of minimum-wage zones by province, municipality and district can be seen in the following table (click to expand):
What is Considered a High Income in Vietnam?
For young persons who must rent an apartment or mortgage a home, a high-income is considered anything above 50 million VND/month (~$2220 USD/month). Such a salary places them in the 2nd-largest tax-bracket. Only workers who occupy senior-leadership positions or departmental-heads can expect to make such a salary (although there are some expections for high-prestige employers like VinGroup or VinFast).
Work Hours in Vietnam
The standard work-week in Vietnam is 48 hours/week, or 6 days a week, after which over-time rates apply. In Vietnam, it is normal to work Saturdays, and it is relatively rare to get two full-days off a week.
In some nice workplaces, employees get every-other Saturday off, or only have to work 4 hours on Saturday, but these are rare outside of Western companies/NGOs or highly-competitive sectors.
The Vietnamese government is considering whether to reduce the official work-week to just 40 hours/week. However, large companies like Nike are lobbying against the change.
Compared to the West, Vietnamese employers and managers are much more likely to contact their employees outside of working-hours. Such communications are usually just minor texts and questions, but they can also be requests to do small errands for the boss: Vietnamese workers are basically always “on call”. Overall, this leads to much less work-life balance in Vietnam compared to the West. You can read more about the differences in work-culture and work-climate between Vietnam and the West in our post dedicated to the topic: Vietnamese Work Culture.
Tet Bonus Pay – Vietnamese Get Paid for 13 Months
In order to annualize a Vietnamese monthly salary, you must factor-in the one-month of extra salary that employees receive as a bonus for Tet, aka Lunar New Year Festival. Some high-paying jobs provide two or three months of extra salary! This is why jobs can be advertised as “13 months of pay” or “15 months of pay”.
This is ostensibly a “bonus”, but almost every worker receives it regardless of performance — Vietnamese people depend on the Tet “bonus” to meet their gift-giving and feasting obligations during the New Year celebration. This extra money is unlike the bonuses in the West, where such bonuses are only common among high-paying jobs, or are discretionary and performance-based.
One exception is for new employees: they do not get a full Tet-bonus. Their bonus will be pro-rated based on the length of time they have been at the company.
Worker Benefits in Vietnam
Employee benefits are not as generous as in Western countries: there is no mature system of 401K contributions/superannuation, nor do employees typically receive shares or get stock-options. However, Vietnamese jobs usually do include a long maternity-leave, extra private health insurance, life insurance, and perhaps retirement benefits to top-up the government-provisioned benefits.
Other common benefits, like dental-care and basic health services, are provided to everyone as part of the socialized government-run system. To pay for these services, Vietnamese employees get 10.5% of their gross salary deducted (not including tax — see below), while employers pay and additional 21.5%.
Government workers get the most benefits — some even get free things like new condominiums! However, they get paid less on average than private-sector workers.
TIP: Theoretically, labour laws are stronger in Vietnam, thanks to its socialist origins: on paper, there are strong policies like high severance and mandatory government approval before an employee can be fired.
However, in actuality, hiring and firing are much more cavalier in Vietnam than in many Western capitalist countries — read more about labour legal issues in our post about Business Legal Issues and Compliance.
Many Vietnamese work-places provide free home-cooked meals! We’re not talking about leviathan tech companies like Google, but small 10-40 person operations, usually depending on whether the workplace is a retrofitted house with a proper kitchen. Such a benefit is possible because the price of food and hiring a part-time cook is very cheap in Vietnam — probably less than the cost of office-coffee in Canada!
Income Taxes in Vietnam
Vietnam has a progressive system of income tax whereby the percentage of tax deducted from income increases as one’s salary increases, according to the following brackets:
| Income Bracket (VND/month) | Tax Rate | Max Tax Deducted (VND/month) | Cumulative Tax Deducted (VND/month) |
| up to 5,000,000 | 5% | 250,000 | 250,000 |
| 5,000,001- 10,000,000 | 10% | 500,000 | 750000 |
| 10,000,001 – 18,000,000 | 15% | 1,200,000 | 1,950,000 |
| 18,000,001 – 32,000,000 | 20% | 2,800,000 | 4,750,000 |
| 32,000,001 – 52,000,000 | 25% | 5,000,000 | 9,750,000 |
| 52,000,001 – 80,000,000 | 30% | 8,400,000 | 18,150,000 |
| >80,000,001 | 35% | >>8,400,000 |
The above table displays the gross tax-rate. The final deduction includes offsets such as: a 11 million VND/month personal deduction, and extra deductions for children.
In USD terms, Vietnamese will hit the top tax-rate of 35% with approximately $3,500 USD/month of income.
The above table does not include deductions for government benefits and insurance, such as: 1.5% for health insurance (maximum of 28.9 million VND; 8% for social insurance to (max 28.9 million VND); and 1% for unemployment insurance (max 88 million VND).
Many foreigners receive tax-preferential gifts like housing, education and flight allowances. These benefits incentivize ESL companies to offer such benefits in lieu of monetary compensation.
Late Pay in Vietnam
Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to be paid late in Vietnam. Worse, some employers resort to skipping payments altogether, especially if a company is going out of business or they are angry at an employee.
Another illegal and common tactic is for employers to withhold an employee’s pay-cheque as a bargaining chip to compel the employee to do something. For example, when an employee wants to quit, the employer may threaten not to pay them for last month’s wages if they don’t continue working.
It’s not something we’ve personally experienced, but it happens all too often.
How do Vietnamese Salaries Compares to Chinese Salaries?
Stat: The wages in Vietnam are between 48% to 75% cheaper than in China, between comparable regions.
As more international companies seek to diversity away from the increasingly difficult business environment in China, many are looking to Vietnam as an alternative for thei base of manufacturing (see our list of popular brands that have much or most of their manufacturing in Vietnam).
A key attractor is Vietnam’s highly skilled and intelligent workforce — but also the wage differential between Vietnam and China.
How do Vietnamese wages compare to China? Since the 2020/21 boast in Chinese minimum wages (source), the range in Chinese provincial minimum wages are RMB 2,590 (~$400 USD/month) in Tier 1 municipalities like Shanghai and Beijing, to RMB 1,340 (~$212 USD per month) in the cheapest places like Yunnan, Hunan and Anhui. These Chinese wages equate to a 1.55 to 2x multiple compared to respective wage-tiers in Vietnam.
The Dezan Shira consultancy group makes an illustrative comparison between two port- and manufacturing-regions of Vietnam and China: Quảng Ninh vs Guangdong. In China’s Guangdong, the 2022 minimum monthly wages are RMB 1,620 to 2,300 ($254 to $362 USD); whereas in Quảng Ninh, the minimum wages range from ~$152 USD to $174 USD, or a factor of 0.6 to 0.48 (source).
Why Are Salaries So Low in Vietnam?
There are three main reasons why Vietnamese salaries are much lower than other advanced Asian countries: i) the great economic “catch-up” since the Doi Moi reforms; ii) no mortgages for older generations; and iii) reliance on “informal charges”.
i) Doi Moi Reforms
Since the late 1990s, after the Doi Moi transition to a free-market economy, Vietnam’s GDP grown rapidly compared to its Asian neighbours. The faster growth is a consequence of an economic “catch-up”: a return-to-normal after a stagnant no-growth period under the former command-and-control system prior to 1986. The catch-up has meant that, having re-ignited its free-market system from low-levels, the current salaries are much depressed compared to Asian countries who didn’t stymie their economy with command-and-control collectivization.
ii) No Mortgages; Low Expanses
Many of Vietnam’s the older generation of workers were able to survive and prosper on low salaries, thanks to a low-cost of living — especially having the luxury of home-ownership without mortgages. Instead of having to finance a house, they were given houses from the Vietnamese government. This happened during the end of the collectivist “Subsidy Era”, prior to which there was no such thing as private property. The occupants of the social-housing were grandfathered-in as household owners — but without the burden of a mortgage.
READ MORE: Why Vietnamese salaries are so low (and why they can’t stay that way)
These Vietnamese land reforms represented a one-time transfer-of-wealth that subsequent generations do not enjoy. Instead of being gifted deed-and-title of once-socialized housing, today’s younger generation must purchase new properties at market-rates and pay high mortgage rates — and there is no way they can do so at the low wages of their parents.
iii) Informal Wages
“Informal charge” is a euphemism for any monetary benefit extracted from customers/clients, but is not part of the official advertised price and/or fees, such as tips and gifts. In the past, it was a cliche that many occupations could only be sustained through such informal charges, thereby depressing free-market salaries.
Presently, there is promising year-by-year reduction in informal charges throughout Vietnam, as documented by the Provincial Competitiveness Index. The Index measures the ease of starting and conducting business in Vietnam’s 63 provinces, including whether informal fees are low. Regional leaders are incentivized to rank high on the PCI in order to attract foreign investment, which means increasing the transparency of fees and prices.
Resources to Learn About Salaries and Tax in Vietnam
- Acclime blog and podcast – good insights about tax and accounting in Vietnam, from the prespective of a business-formation consultant.
- KPMG provides a digital-handbook about Vietnam’s taxation, labour laws, and more.
- PCI blog – the Provincial Competitiveness Index ranks Vietnamese provinces according to the ease of starting and conducting business in each province. The PCI blog is valuable to learn about news and reforms pertaining to business and labour.
- Vietnam Briefing – A consultancy for FDI within Asian, Vietnam Briefing provides valuable news and insights into the economy and labour iissues in Vietnam.
