Vietnam Company Registration Cost: 2026 Breakdown

Quotations for a Vietnamese company arrive as a single number, usually somewhere between one and five thousand dollars, with no breakdown.

The number is almost entirely professional fees. The Vietnamese state charges around four dollars to register a company, and that figure is published.

This page separates what the government charges from what firms charge, and then does the part most quotations leave out: what the company costs to hold for a year.

VND 100,000the compulsory state charge, roughly four dollars

VND 0annual business licence fee, abolished on 1 January 2026

USD 1,500+annual audit, compulsory for every foreign owned company

What the state actually charges

Two things follow from this table, and both are uncomfortable for the way the market prices this work.

• Filing online removes the registration fee entirely, so the paper route costs more for no benefit.
• The publication charge is the only unavoidable state payment, and it is fixed rather than scaled.
• No official fee for the investment certificate appears in published sources, so any figure you are quoted for it is a service charge until proven otherwise.
• Provincial variation is small in absolute terms, a few dollars, and is not worth optimising.

The line that disappeared on 1 January 2026

Until the end of 2025, every Vietnamese company paid an annual business licence fee of VND 2 to 3 million, roughly USD 80 to 120, for the life of the company.

Resolution No. 198/2025/QH15 ended it. From 1 January 2026, enterprises and household businesses no longer declare or pay the fee, nationwide and without a size test.

If a quotation or a budget you are working from still carries an annual licence fee line, it was built before 2026. That is a useful test of how current the rest of the document is.

The costs the fee schedule does not contain

This is where a Vietnamese budget goes wrong, because none of these appear on any government list and most are compulsory in practice.

The lease is the one that surprises founders, because it has to exist before the company does. You are committing to premises to obtain the entity that would otherwise sign the lease.

The annual audit, which has no small company exemption

This is the single largest recurring cost of a Vietnamese entity, and it is the least discussed.

State charges, setupUSD, indicative5

Bookkeeping, year oneUSD, indicative300

Statutory audit, year oneUSD, indicative1,500

Statutory audit, upper rangeUSD, indicative3,000

Under Article 37 of the Law on Independent Audit 2011 and Decree 17/2012/ND-CP, every foreign invested enterprise must have its annual financial statements audited by a licensed independent Vietnamese audit firm.

• There is no exemption by size, revenue, profit or activity. A dormant foreign owned company is audited.
• The auditor must be a firm legally operating in Vietnam, working to Vietnamese Standards on Auditing.
• Indicative cost is USD 1,500 to 3,000 a year for a small company, and rises with transaction volume.
• Audited statements are due within 90 days of the financial year end.
• They go to several recipients: financial authorities, the tax authority, the statistics office, the business registration agency and the parent company.

A domestic Vietnamese company of the same size and activity usually escapes this. The obligation attaches to foreign ownership, which means it is a cost of being foreign rather than a cost of being small.

What a year of holding the company costs

The pattern is the opposite of the setup picture. Registration is close to free and the year is not, which is why comparing jurisdictions on formation cost alone produces the wrong answer for Vietnam.

• Statutory auditUSD 2,000
• Formation and advisoryUSD 1,500
• Legalisation and translationUSD 600
• Bookkeeping and chief accountantUSD 500
• State chargesUSD 5

Charter capital is not a cost

It is the largest number in most Vietnamese quotations and it is not an expense at all.

• Charter capital stays in the company and funds its operations.
• There is no general legal minimum, though specific regulated sectors set their own floors.
• It must be funded within 90 days of the enterprise registration certificate, with an extension for assets in transit.
• It has to arrive through the designated capital account to be recognised as a contribution.
• Under funding is expensive in a different currency, because it can remove limited liability from a single member company.

The structural consequences of the figure you choose are set out in Vietnam company types.

How to read a Vietnamese quotation

Because the state charge is negligible, comparing quotations is a comparison of scope, not of price. Two firms quoting the same total can be selling very different things.

The questions that reveal the most are about exclusions.

• A low headline price usually excludes the audit, which arrives in month twelve rather than month one.
• Legalisation quoted as one line hides a per document cost that scales with a corporate shareholder.
• An address bundled for the first year creates a renewal cost that lands with the audit.
• A price covering only the enterprise certificate leaves the investment certificate unpriced, which matters if you take that route.

A useful discipline is to ask for a two year total rather than a setup price. It puts the audit inside the comparison and removes most of the difference between quotations.

What makes it more expensive

• A corporate shareholder rather than an individual, because of the document chain and the additional legalisation.
• Documents from Germany, Austria or the Czech Republic, which still need consular legalisation after Vietnam's apostille accession takes effect.
• A conditional activity, which adds a sector licence on top of the general registration.
• A capital contribution in equipment, which adds import, valuation and transfer costs.
• Higher transaction volume, which moves the audit toward the upper end of its range.
• Employees, because payroll, social insurance registration and the filings that follow them are a separate monthly workload from bookkeeping.
• A second location, since a branch or additional business location is its own registration with its own address requirement.
• A December financial year end, which puts your audit into the busiest quarter for Vietnamese audit firms and tends to price accordingly.
• A late start on bookkeeping, because reconstructing a year of records for the auditor costs more than keeping them.

Two of these deserve numbers rather than adjectives.

• Legalisation and translation scale with the shareholder. An individual investor legalises a passport. A corporate investor legalises incorporation documents, accounts, a board resolution and a power of attorney, each separately and each translated.
• A conditional activity adds a second process, with its own dossier, its own review period and its own advisory cost, after the general registration is complete.

The exit cost, which almost no budget contains

The cheapest part of a Vietnamese company is opening it. The most expensive part is closing it, and that number never appears in a formation quotation.

Two features of this make it worse than the headline figures suggest.

• A foreign invested company has an extra step. It must terminate the investment project under investment law before it can dissolve like a domestic company.
• The quoted range excludes severance and any tax penalty, which are the two lines most likely to move the total.
• Accounting records must be kept for ten years from deregistration.
• Tax authorities can audit a dissolved entity within that period, so closing the company does not close the exposure.

Read against the setup figure, the arithmetic is uncomfortable and worth confronting early: entering Vietnam costs four dollars in state charges, and leaving it costs several thousand in professional fees and the better part of a year.

That asymmetry is the strongest argument for getting the sector and structure right before incorporating rather than treating a Vietnamese entity as a cheap experiment.