Returning your work permit and residence card in Vietnam: who does what

Updated September 2026. Returning your work permit and residence card in Vietnam is one of the few exit tasks with a hard deadline attached, and it is the one most often discovered late. Decree No. 219/2025/ND-CP, issued and in force from 7 August 2025, gives the employer or the foreign employee 15 days from the date the work permit stops being valid to hand it back to the authority that issued it. Miss that and the authority issues a revocation decision instead. This guide from terra separates the employer’s duties from the employee’s, covers the residence card, and sets out the order that keeps an exit clean.

Who has to return the work permit, and when?

Either the employer or the foreign employee, within 15 days of the work permit ceasing to be valid, to the authority that issued it. That is the rule in Decree No. 219/2025/ND-CP, and the consequence of ignoring it is that the issuing authority makes a revocation decision of its own.

The wording matters here. The duty is expressed as falling on the employer or the employee, which in practice means neither assumes it and both discover it afterwards. Decide explicitly, in the exit conversation, who is physically handing the document back, and write it down. That one sentence in an offboarding email prevents most of the problems in this article.

My view, and HR teams that have never had a problem will disagree: the employer should own this every time, even though the law allows either party. The employee is boarding a flight and the company is still here when the paperwork is checked. There is no version of this where a departed employee is the more reliable party to a Vietnamese administrative deadline.

What Decree 219/2025 changed

Decree No. 219/2025/ND-CP replaced Decree No. 152/2020/ND-CP and took effect on 7 August 2025. It governs the conditions and procedures for granting, reissuing, extending and revoking work permits and the certificate confirming exemption from the permit requirement, so it is the document to check rather than any guide written before that date.

Two points of substance for an exit. First, the return obligation with its 15 day window, and the revocation decision that follows if nothing is returned. Second, a permit can also be revoked where the holder works in a position, job title or working arrangement that differs from the one written on it, which is worth reading as a warning about role changes during employment rather than only about departures.

A practical note on where documents go. Administrative bodies were reorganised during 2025, so the office that issued a permit two years ago may now sit under a different department name. The safe instruction is the one the decree uses: return it to the authority that issued it, and confirm the current name of that office before you send anything.

The employer’s side

Four things, and only the first has a number attached in the work permit rules.

1. Collect the permit and return it within fifteen days of the date it stops being valid, to the issuing authority.
2. Notify immigration that sponsorship has ended. A company that sponsored a temporary residence card remains the guarantor until it tells the immigration authority in writing that it no longer sponsors the person. Doing this late, or not at all, leaves the company carrying a responsibility for someone it no longer employs.
3. Issue the termination decision in writing. It is the document the employee will need for several later procedures, and it is difficult to obtain once the file is closed. It also sits alongside the other entitlements an employee is owed on termination.
4. Complete the Social Insurance side within 14 working days, under Article 48, Clause 3 of the Labor Code 2019. That deadline runs in parallel with the work permit one and is separately enforceable.

If the employee will not cooperate, for example by keeping the card, document the attempt in writing to the immigration authority rather than letting the file go quiet. The point is to establish that the sponsorship relationship has ended.

The employee’s side

Shorter, and mostly about not creating a gap. Hand the original permit to HR rather than keeping it as a souvenir, confirm in writing who is returning it, and get a copy for your own records before you do. A copy of an expired work permit is a useful piece of evidence in later procedures and costs nothing today.

The one thing genuinely at your own risk is residence. Your permission to stay was tied to a sponsor that is about to stop sponsoring you, so if you intend to remain in Vietnam after the job ends you need a different basis to do it, arranged before rather than after. Waiting to see what happens is the expensive option.

The boundary this article does not cross: whether you personally qualify for a new permit or a different residence status depends on facts specific to you, and this is general information rather than advice on an individual case.

What happens to the residence card

The temporary residence card was issued on the strength of an employer’s sponsorship, so when the employment ends the basis for it ends too. The sponsoring company notifies the immigration authority that it no longer guarantees the person and asks for the card to be cancelled or withdrawn, under the framework of the Law on Entry, Exit, Transit and Residence of Foreigners (No. 47/2014/QH13, as amended).

Three situations follow from that, and they are not equally urgent.

The middle row is where people lose time. A new work permit is not instant, and a residence card follows the permit rather than the other way round, so the gap between jobs is the thing to plan around rather than the paperwork itself.

In what order to return the work permit and residence card?

Start with the documents the employee will need later, then the ones with deadlines, then the notifications. That order is deliberate: the first group becomes hard to obtain once the file closes, while the second and third are simply administrative while the company still exists.

1. Before the last working day: issue the termination decision, take a copy of the work permit and residence card for both sides, and agree in writing who returns what.
2. On the last working day: collect the original work permit and residence card.
3. Within 14 working days: confirm the Social Insurance contribution period and return the book with the originals the company holds.
4. Within 15 days of the permit ceasing to be valid: return it to the issuing authority.
5. Promptly: notify the immigration authority that sponsorship has ended.

Step three is the one that reaches furthest into the employee’s future, because the closed Social Insurance book is what a departing foreign employee needs in order to claim their one-time Social Insurance payment. It is worth doing on time for that reason alone, quite apart from the deadline attached to it.

What it costs to skip a step

Nothing dramatic happens on day sixteen, which is precisely why these obligations slip. The costs arrive later and land on the party that is still in the country.

An unreturned work permit is revoked by decision of the issuing authority, which is a record of non-compliance attached to the employer rather than to the person who has left. A sponsorship that was never formally ended leaves the company as guarantor for someone it cannot locate. A residence card that was never cancelled can complicate the individual’s next application. And a Social Insurance book that was never closed produces a claim the former employee cannot complete, which is how a routine departure turns into correspondence eighteen months later.

None of these is expensive on its own. Together they are the reason foreign-invested companies with steady expatriate turnover end up with a file of unfinished exits that nobody owns.

What to do next

Put the five steps above into your offboarding checklist with the deadline written next to each, and name an owner for each line. Returning your work permit and residence card in Vietnam is not complicated work, it is work with dates on it, and the only reliable way to meet dates is to decide in advance who is responsible. For the employee side of the same two months, see the exit procedures for foreign employees in Vietnam.