What hiring employees in Vietnam actually requires after registration

Getting the ERC is the easy part, oddly enough. The moment a newly registered company tries to set up company in Vietnam and bring on its first staff member, a second layer of paperwork shows up.

That layer has nothing to do with business licensing. It's labor compliance. Hiring employees Vietnam style involves several separate registrations that have to happen in sequence, and missing one tends to surface later, usually during an inspection or a payroll audit, rather than at the moment it should have been caught.

Start with the labor contract, not the job posting

Contract types and probation caps

Vietnamese labor law recognizes a narrow set of contract types. Indefinite-term contracts and definite-term contracts, capped at 36 months, cover almost every hire.

Probation periods are capped too, and the cap depends on the role: up to 6 days for unskilled work, 30 days for jobs requiring intermediate vocational qualification, 60 days for roles requiring a college degree or higher, and up to 180 days specifically for enterprise manager positions as defined under the Law on Enterprises. Companies that borrow a generic flat probation period from another jurisdiction, or apply the 60-day cap to a general manager hire instead of the 180-day one, are, without realizing it, either drafting an unenforceable clause or leaving useful evaluation time on the table.

Keep the paperwork in Vietnamese

There's also a documentation habit worth building early: every contract, offer letter, and internal policy that touches pay or termination should exist in Vietnamese, or in a bilingual format with the Vietnamese version controlling. Labor inspectors work from the Vietnamese text, and disputes get resolved against it too.

Register for social insurance within 30 days

Once a labor contract of one month or longer is signed, the employer has 30 days to register the employee for compulsory social, health, and unemployment insurance. This isn't optional, and it isn't scaled by company size. A three-person startup and a 300-person factory follow the same clock.

Missing that window doesn't just risk a fine. It creates a retroactive contribution gap that has to be paid later, with interest, and it can complicate an employee's ability to claim benefits down the line. Insurance authorities have gotten noticeably faster at flagging these gaps through cross-checked payroll data, so "we'll catch up next quarter" rarely works as a strategy anymore.

Get the personal income tax code sorted before the first payroll run

Every employee needs a personal income tax code registered with the tax authority, tied to the employer, before their first salary payment. For a domestic hire, this is usually quick.

For a first-time hire at a brand-new company, though, the employer's own tax registration sometimes hasn't fully synced with the payroll system yet. That can stall the employee's PIT code request by a week or two if nobody checks in advance.

A useful practical move: request the PIT code registration in the same week the labor contract is signed, not after the first payday is already looming.

Domestic hiring versus hiring a foreign employee

Here's where the process forks, and where a lot of confusion sets in for foreign-invested companies.

The domestic track

Hiring a Vietnamese national follows the sequence above: labor contract, social insurance, PIT code. Straightforward, and usually fast.

The foreign-hire track

Hiring a foreign national adds a work permit requirement, unless the individual falls under a specific exemption category, such as intra-company transferees meeting certain conditions or short-term experts under a defined threshold.

The work permit application needs a police clearance certificate, a health check from an approved facility, and often notarized, consular-legalized copies of the individual's qualifications. None of that happens quickly. Realistic timelines run 4 to 8 weeks once every document is in hand, longer if anything needs re-legalization.

Two situations that illustrate how this plays out

A trading company hired its first local sales staff two weeks after receiving its ERC. Straightforward Vietnamese hires, contracts signed, social insurance registered within the 30-day window, PIT codes issued without incident. Payroll ran cleanly from month one.

A manufacturing FDI company, by contrast, wanted its Japanese technical director in place before the factory line even started testing. The work permit application stalled for three weeks because the health check certificate had been issued by a clinic not on Vietnam's approved list.

It had to be redone at a recognized facility. What should have taken 6 weeks took closer to 10, and the factory's commissioning schedule shifted to match.

A smaller but telling case: a services company assumed a one-month contract with a part-time assistant sat below the threshold for compulsory insurance. It didn't. The 2025 rule change brought even short fixed-term contracts into the mandatory system, and the company only found out during a routine payroll review, months after the fact.

Building the hiring checklist into your setup timeline

Companies that treat hiring as something to figure out after the office is furnished tend to lose weeks they didn't budget for. It works better the other way around: map out headcount needs, contract types, and whether any hires will be foreign nationals, while still finalizing the company setup, so labor registrations aren't an afterthought bolted onto an already-tight launch schedule.

For companies planning to bring in foreign specialists early, it's worth reviewing the work permit requirement guide in detail, since the document checklist there determines whether that 4-to-8-week estimate holds or stretches into a quarter.

None of these steps are individually complicated. What trips people up is the sequencing, and the fact that each one runs on its own clock rather than a single unified timeline.

A last word on getting the sequence right

Hiring in Vietnam rewards employers who plan the paperwork alongside the org chart, not after it. Get the contract type right, register insurance inside the 30-day window, sort the PIT code early, and start the work permit clock the moment a foreign hire is confirmed rather than the week they're supposed to start.

If your team is building out headcount and wants the labor compliance side handled correctly from the first hire, LHD Law Firm advises foreign-invested companies on contracts, insurance registration, and work permits across Ho Chi Minh City, Ha Noi, and Da Nang.

LHD Law Firm contact details:

Ho Chi Minh City: HP Tower, 60 (Floor 7) Nguyen Van Thu Street, Tan Dinh Ward, HCM City, Vietnam. Tel: +842822446739. Email: all@lhdfirm.com

Ha Noi: Anh Minh Tower, 36 (Floor 4) Hoang Cau Street, O Cho Dua Ward, Ha Noi City, Vietnam. Tel: +842462604011. Email: hanoi@lhdfirm.com

Da Nang: No. 71 Ly Tu Trong Street, Thach Thang Ward, Da Nang City, Vietnam. Tel: +840905987929. Email: danang@lhdfirm.com