If you are paid a salary in Vietnam, your tax bill went down in January 2026. Many reports say the change starts in July, and for salary income that is wrong.

On a ₫30,000,000 salary with no dependants, the monthly tax fell from ₫1,085,000 to ₫635,000. That is ₫450,000 a month back in your pocket, or ₫5.4 million over the year.

The date that everyone reports differently

Law 109/2025/QH15 was passed in December 2025. Its stated effective date is 1 July 2026. But its provisions on salaries and wages apply to the tax period beginning 1 January 2026.

Both dates are real and they mean different things. Coverage that mentions only July implies the first half of 2026 runs on the old seven brackets and the old deduction. It does not. For salary income the new rules apply to the entire 2026 tax year.

What actually changed

                        before          from 2026
tax brackets            seven           five
top rate                35%             35%
personal deduction      ₫11,000,000     ₫15,500,000  a month
dependant deduction     ₫4,400,000      ₫6,200,000   a month

The personal deduction is what changes the numbers most. It is the slice of your income tax is not applied to, and it grew by ₫4.5 million a month. Each dependant you register adds a further ₫6.2 million.

The five brackets, applied to what is left after insurance and deductions:

monthly taxable income          rate
up to ₫10,000,000                5%
₫10,000,000 – ₫30,000,000       10%
₫30,000,000 – ₫60,000,000       20%
₫60,000,000 – ₫100,000,000      30%
above ₫100,000,000              35%

These are progressive. Crossing into the 20% band does not tax your whole salary at 20% — only the part above ₫30,000,000.

Compulsory insurance comes out first

Three compulsory insurance contributions come out of your gross salary before any tax is calculated, and they are yours to pay:

social insurance          8.0%
health insurance          1.5%
unemployment insurance    1.0%
                         ─────
                         10.5%

Your employer pays a further share on top, which is their cost and should never appear as a deduction from you.

Social and health insurance are capped. They stop rising once your salary reaches twenty times the base salary — ₫46,800,000 a month at the current base of ₫2,340,000 — which is why the deduction column in the table below eventually flattens out.

At what point do you start paying tax at all?

Between insurance and the deductions, you pay no tax at all until your salary crosses a threshold:

no dependants        ₫17,000,000 a month
one dependant        ₫24,000,000 a month
two dependants       ₫31,000,000 a month

Earn at or below those and your income tax is zero. These are not round numbers someone chose — they fall out of the arithmetic. On ₫17,000,000, insurance takes ₫1,785,000, leaving ₫15,215,000, which is just under the ₫15,500,000 personal deduction. A million dong more and you owe ₫30,500.

What it looks like across salaries

gross          insurance      taxable          tax           net      kept
₫10,000,000    ₫1,050,000           ₫0           ₫0    ₫8,950,000    89.5%
₫17,000,000    ₫1,785,000           ₫0           ₫0   ₫15,215,000    89.5%
₫20,000,000    ₫2,100,000   ₫2,400,000     ₫120,000   ₫17,780,000    88.9%
₫30,000,000    ₫3,150,000  ₫11,350,000     ₫635,000   ₫26,215,000    87.4%
₫50,000,000    ₫4,946,000  ₫29,554,000   ₫2,455,400   ₫42,598,600    85.2%
₫80,000,000    ₫5,246,000  ₫59,254,000   ₫8,350,800   ₫66,403,200    83.0%
₫150,000,000   ₫5,946,000 ₫128,554,000  ₫30,493,900  ₫113,560,100    75.7%

All figures assume no dependants. Each one you register removes ₫6,200,000 a month from your taxable income, which in the 20% band is a saving of ₫1,240,000 a month.

What to do about it

Register your dependants. The deduction is not automatic. A child, a parent you support, a spouse who cannot work — each has to be registered with the tax authority through your employer, with documents. It is the single largest lever most people have and the one most often left unused.

Check your payslip against the new deduction, not the old one. If your employer's payroll is still withholding on ₫11,000,000, you are overpaying every month. It comes back at the annual finalisation, but a year is a long time to lend money interest-free.

Do not read a bracket as your tax rate. "I am in the 20% bracket" describes the tax on your top slice, not on your salary. On ₫50,000,000 the tax is ₫2,455,400 — under 5% of gross.

Where these figures come from, and what they do not cover

The rates and thresholds are those of Law 109/2025/QH15 as reported since its passage in December 2025. Every figure in the tables is computed from those rules rather than copied from another article.

The model is checked against numbers it did not produce. The three tax-free thresholds above are widely published figures this calculation was never given. It reproduces all three exactly, and produces tax on salaries a million dong above each of them, which is a reasonable sign the insurance and deductions are being applied in the right order.

Unemployment insurance has a regional cap this ignores. That contribution is capped at twenty times the regional minimum wage, which varies across Vietnam. The tables apply it uncapped, so the total deduction shown for very high salaries is slightly overstated.

Regular salary only. Bonuses, thirteenth-month pay, allowances and overtime have their own treatment, and some allowances are exempt within limits.

This is monthly withholding, not your final bill. Vietnam settles personal income tax at an annual finalisation, where dependants, changes of employer and any months of unemployment are reconciled. Withholding is an instalment.

Check anything you are about to act on. Tax rules move, and this one moves again — the law's own effective date is still ahead, in July 2026. Confirm with your employer's payroll or the tax authority before making a decision on these numbers.