Leave by country / Vietnam
Vietnam annual leave entitlement
How much paid leave people in Vietnam get, what happens to unused days, and what you owe when someone leaves — in plain English, whether you run a team there or work on one.
Vietnam guarantees 12 working days of fully-paid annual leave after 12 months with the same employer under article 113 of the 2019 Labour Code, rising to 14 or 16 days for minors, employees with disabilities and hazardous work. Article 114 adds one day for every five years of service, and article 113(3) requires untaken leave to be paid out when employment ends.
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What the law actually says
Article 113(1) gives an employee who has worked 12 months for an employer fully-paid annual leave of 12 working days in normal conditions, 14 working days for minors, employees with disabilities and those doing laborious, toxic or dangerous work, and 16 working days for particularly laborious, toxic or dangerous work. Less than 12 months of service earns leave in proportion to the months worked under article 113(2). Article 114 then adds one day for every five years with the same employer, so a normal-conditions employee reaches 13 days at five years and 14 at ten.
Worth knowing: Article 113(3) is unusually explicit for this table: an employee who has not taken, or not entirely taken, annual leave because employment ended or the job was lost must be paid in compensation for the untaken days. Article 113(6) adds a quieter benefit — where an employee travels by road, rail or water for annual leave, travel time beyond two days is added to the leave, once a year.
What happens to unused leave in Vietnam
Article 113(4) lets employee and employer agree to take annual leave in installments, or to combine it, over a maximum of three years. Vietnamese leave can therefore be banked, but not indefinitely, and the employer must set the leave timetable after consulting employees and give prior notice. Where employment ends with leave still untaken, article 113(3) converts the balance into a payment.
When employment ends, the untaken balance must be paid. This is the rule across the European Union and Australia, and it is the sharpest contrast with the United States, where whether unused time is paid out depends entirely on which state the employee works in.
If you run a team in Vietnam
- Write the entitlement into every contract. At least 12 days; more is fine, less is void. Collective agreements may add to it.
- Track accrual and carryover to the day, with a record of every approval. When someone leaves, the untaken balance is money you owe, and you will need to show how you got to the number.
- Budget for the payout. Every unused day on the books is a liability at that person's current pay rate — it does not disappear at year end.
If you work in Vietnam
- Check your contract gives at least 12 days. Anything less is unenforceable.
- Keep your own record of approved leave. Payroll systems get changed; your notes don't.
- When you leave, untaken statutory leave must be paid out. It cannot be forfeited.
Countries with the same 12-day minimum
Calculating an employee's balance
Entitlement is the starting point; the working number is what an individual has actually accrued at a given date. Our accrual calculator converts an annual entitlement into a per-pay-period figure and a current balance.
Tracking Vietnam leave correctly
Because untaken leave is money the employer owes, the balance has to be provable. Spreadsheets fail at exactly the moment they matter — when someone disputes what they were owed on their last day and nobody can reconstruct the record.
For a single-country team, Leavo handles Vietnam accrual rules, carryover and approvals with a full audit trail. If you employ people in more than one country, statutory entitlements, carryover rules and payout obligations differ in every one — that is the case for a platform like Deel that handles multi-country employment rather than leave alone. We compare the options in our leave management software guide.
Vietnam annual leave: common questions
How many paid annual leave days are employees entitled to in Vietnam?
12 working days is the statutory minimum in Vietnam, equivalent to 2.4 weeks on a five-day working week, under Labour Code 2019 (No. 45/2019/QH14), arts. 113-114. Employers and collective agreements may grant more, never less.
Must unused annual leave be paid out when employment ends in Vietnam?
Yes. Payment in lieu of untaken statutory leave is required when the employment relationship ends in Vietnam. During employment, statutory leave must be taken as time off and cannot be exchanged for cash.
Can an employer in Vietnam refuse a leave request?
An employer can usually influence when leave is taken for operational reasons, but cannot deny the entitlement itself. The right to the minimum number of days is statutory and cannot be contracted away.
Do public holidays count towards the 12-day entitlement in Vietnam?
No. Public holidays are separate from the 12-day statutory annual leave entitlement in Vietnam.
Source
Primary source: Labour Code 2019 (No. 45/2019/QH14), arts. 113-114. Statutory minimums change, and collective agreements frequently exceed them — confirm against the current text before acting. See our methodology.