Work Permit & Immigration Vietnam

Three approvals, in sequence: a work permit — issued under Decree 219/2025/ND-CP, with applications filed with the provincial Department of Home Affairs — an LĐ2 work visa, and, for stays of a year or more, a Temporary Residence Card, issued only against LĐ2 or TT visas for up to two years. The work permit must be in place before work begins. For each, we prepare and file applications, manage renewals ahead of expiry, and coordinate cancellations on departure.

Since August 2025 the application runs as one consolidated online dossier, and the criminal record certificate can be applied for in the same submission through the National Public Service Portal — both are returned electronically together. If the assignment totals under 90 days in a calendar year, a work permit exemption applies instead — see below.

The employing company must be a Vietnam-incorporated entity, and it remains the sponsor throughout — work permits attach to a direct employment relationship, and Vietnamese law does not permit an agency or EOR arrangement to stand in for it. Beyond that, the dossier must evidence role justification and the candidate's qualifications, legalised and translated to current standards.

We review your entity profile and the candidate's documents against these criteria before any application is filed — and tell you plainly if the sponsorship base isn't there yet, with options to strengthen it before submission rather than after a rejection.

If your filing volume is high enough that bundling makes sense, or if you want work permit administration combined with broader HR function outsourcing under one retainer, see our HR Shared Services page — that's the right framing for those engagements.

Not if the work totals under 90 days in a calendar year — that is one of the 15 exemption categories set out in Decree 219/2025. Exemption is not a free pass: the employer must still notify the competent authority in writing at least three working days before the person starts, and getting that notice wrong is one of the more common compliance gaps we're asked to clean up.

We assess upfront whether an exemption genuinely applies, prepare the written notification where it does, and file the full application where it doesn't — with honest advice on which side of the line an assignment sits.

The statutory turnaround is 10 working days from a complete dossier — Decree 219/2025 combined the old two-step flow of labour-demand approval and permit application into a single online procedure, filed directly with the provincial Department of Home Affairs since 20 June 2026. In practice, document collection, legalisation, and translation usually take longer than the official window, so the timeline is driven by how quickly the dossier comes together.

One 2026 change worth planning for: anyone who entered on a DN1, VR, or e-visa before their work permit was approved must complete a visa-conversion step before applying for a Temporary Residence Card, which adds roughly two weeks. Where timing matters, entering on the right visa class from the outset avoids it — when you engage us for a filing, we share current expectations for your specific filing type and flag any unusual queue behaviour we're seeing.

Yes. The spouse and children of a work permit holder can apply for dependant TT visas, linked to the primary applicant's status, and for Temporary Residence Cards on the same basis. A dependant TT visa does not carry work rights — if a spouse intends to work in Vietnam, they need their own work permit and LĐ2 visa sponsored by their own employer.

We coordinate dependant filings in parallel with the primary application — relationship documentation, legalisation, and residence applications aligned to the primary holder's dates — so the family relocates on one timeline. One passport rule to plan around: a Temporary Residence Card requires at least 13 months' remaining passport validity, and the card must expire at least 30 days before the passport does.

A Vietnamese work permit is valid for a maximum of two years and may be renewed once for a similar period — a four-year ceiling. When the renewal expires, continuing the employment relationship means running the full application again from the start, so we plan renewals well ahead of expiry rather than in the final weeks. The LĐ2 visa or Temporary Residence Card runs on its own dates alongside the permit, and departures require work permit cancellation. We track these cycles for every filing we manage.

If you'd rather have renewals, reporting, and the broader HR function — payroll, employee lifecycle, statutory filings — handled under one retainer, see our HR Shared Services page. Standalone per-application engagement remains the right fit for employers who only need the immigration filings themselves.