Vietnam payroll compliance calendar for employers

Payroll compliance in Vietnam did not get harder in 2026, but three of its deadlines moved. A calendar built from a 2025 template will now put at least one filing in the wrong month. This guide sets out every statutory deadline as it stands in October 2026, who it applies to, and what each miss costs. For the wider service context, see terra.

Updated October 2026. Every rate and deadline below carries its effective date. 

Quick reference: the payroll compliance year

What payroll compliance in Vietnam covers

Payroll compliance in Vietnam covers four separate obligations that run on three different clocks: insurance contributions paid monthly to the social security agency, Personal Income Tax declared quarterly and finalised annually to the tax authority, the trade union fund paid monthly to the labour confederation, and labour reporting filed twice a year to the provincial Department of Home Affairs. They are not administered by one body and they do not share a deadline.

That split is the reason most compliance gaps appear. A company can be fully current on tax and still be three months late on the trade union fund, because nobody owns it. In most engagements we see, the first gap that surfaces during a review is the trade union fund, not insurance and not tax.

Scope note: this guide covers employer obligations for employees on Vietnamese labour contracts. Work permit renewals, visa reporting and foreign contractor withholding tax follow separate calendars and are not included here. Payroll for foreign staff carries its own additions, covered in payroll for expats in Vietnam.

The monthly payroll compliance cycle

The monthly half of payroll compliance is the easiest part to automate and the easiest part to under-fund. Two payments fall due on the last day of the month following the contribution period: compulsory insurance and the trade union fund. Both are calculated on the same salary base, and both now carry an explicit statutory deadline rather than the vaguer wording that applied before 2026.

The trade union fund is where the 2026 change bites. Decree 191/2013/ND-CP ceased to have effect on 16 May 2026 and was replaced by Decree 105/2026/ND-CP, which states the payment deadline directly instead of leaving it tied to social insurance by implication. The practical effect is small for a company whose payroll compliance was already current. For a company that treated the old wording as elastic, the new text removes the argument.

One point worth stating plainly, because it is the single most common misreading: the obligation to pay the trade union fund does not depend on whether a trade union exists at the company. An employer with no union still pays 2 percent.

What changed in 2026 that breaks last year’s calendar?

Last year a company with employees declared Personal Income Tax monthly if it passed the revenue threshold, and quarterly if it did not. From the second quarter of 2026 that choice no longer exists. Monthly Personal Income Tax declaration was abolished and all employers moved to quarterly declaration, with the deadline falling on the last day of the first month of the following quarter.

Three changes land in the same year, and they do not point in the same direction:

The minimum wage change is the one most often over-weighted in planning. Region I moved to VND 5,310,000 per month and Region IV to VND 3,700,000, an increase of roughly 7 percent, as published by the Government in Decree 293/2025/ND-CP. For a professional services employer paying well above the floor, the payroll impact is zero. For a factory with a large band sitting at or near the regional minimum, it resets the insurance floor for that band and it is worth modelling before January. The detail sits in Vietnam minimum wage: what you need to know.

Quarterly and annual deadlines

Four payroll compliance events sit outside the monthly cycle. Personal Income Tax is declared quarterly, finalised annually, and the labour usage report is filed on 5 June and 5 December using form 01/PLI. The report now goes to the provincial Department of Home Affairs following the 2025 administrative reorganisation, which is a change of recipient that catches teams still filing to the old department.

Annual Personal Income Tax finalisation is the heaviest payroll compliance task of the four in workload terms, and the one where the work has to begin well before the deadline. Collecting dependant registrations, authorisation letters and non-resident day counts in March is how finalisation seasons go wrong. The useful planning horizon is the fourth quarter of the preceding year.

A note on sequencing that matters more than it sounds: the labour usage report on 5 December and the fourth quarter payroll close fall within three weeks of each other, and both compete with annual bonus calculation. Teams that treat December as one block rather than three separate workstreams are the teams that file the report late.

What does a missed deadline actually cost?

Late insurance payment is the most expensive payroll compliance failure available to an employer in Vietnam. Under the Law on Social Insurance 2024, an employer that pays late must settle the outstanding amount in full and pay an additional 0.03 percent per day on the unpaid sum, face administrative penalty, and is excluded from emulation and commendation awards. Where the conduct is classified as evasion rather than lateness, criminal liability becomes available to the authorities.

Read those two rows on insurance together, because the gap between them is the real risk. Lateness is arithmetic and it is survivable. Evasion is a classification decision made by someone else about conduct you have already engaged in, and the line between the two is drawn by what the record shows about intent, not by how much was owed. That is the reason an under-declared insurance base is a materially worse problem than a late payment of the correct amount.

How should a finance team run this calendar?

Assign an owner per obligation, not per month. The failure mode in Vietnamese payroll compliance is rarely that a team forgot the date. It is that insurance sits with HR, tax sits with accounting, the trade union fund sits with nobody, and the labour report sits with whoever filed it last year. A payroll compliance calendar with dates and no named owner reproduces that gap in a prettier format.

Two practices separate teams whose payroll compliance stays current from teams that firefight. The first is reconciling the insurance salary base against signed contracts quarterly rather than annually, because the cost of a wrong base grows every month it survives. The second is closing the December workstreams in a fixed order: payroll close, then the labour report, then bonus, rather than running all three in parallel during the last fortnight.

If your headcount is under about 30 and payroll is one person’s part-time responsibility, a shared calendar and a quarterly reconciliation is usually enough. Above that, or across more than one province, the coordination cost is what makes payroll outsourcing worth pricing. Teams that want to test their current state first can start with a payroll audit, and the month by month mechanics are covered in the monthly payroll process.

How terra BPaaS payroll runs this calendar for you

terra delivers payroll as BPaaS, which means the software and the specialists come together rather than separately. You are not buying a licence and then hiring someone to operate it. The platform runs the calculation and the record, and a named terra team owns the filings against the deadlines on this page.

Three things change in practice when payroll compliance moves to a BPaaS model:

The reason to mention the corporate structure rather than adjectives: terra operates as Vina Payroll Outsourcing Co., Ltd., a member of the I-GLOCAL Japan group, so the payroll service sits alongside accounting, tax and audit practices that already work with foreign invested companies in Vietnam. That matters on the cases where payroll stops being a payroll question, which is usually at restructuring, at a merger, or when an inspection reopens several years of contribution base.

Where terra is not the right answer is worth saying too. A company of fifteen people on a single site, with one pay cycle and no foreign staff, can run this calendar in-house and should. The economics of outsourcing start to work when headcount crosses roughly thirty, when provinces multiply, or when expatriate payroll adds a second rulebook.

Conclusion

Payroll compliance in Vietnam moved in 2026 even though it did not get harder. Rebuild the calendar from the current documents rather than last year’s file, put a name against each obligation, and reconcile the insurance base before the year closes. Review your payroll setup with terra.

References reflect documents in force at October 2026, including the Law on Social Insurance 2024 (41/2024/QH15), Decree 293/2025/ND-CP, Decree 105/2026/ND-CP and Decree 145/2020/ND-CP. This is general guidance, not legal advice for a specific entity.