Vietnam Public Holidays: 2026 Dates and Pay Rules

You’ve done the research on Vietnam. The talent pool is strong, the manufacturing base is deeply established, and global employers keep showing up for good reason—the market rewards the ones who move with intention.

But once you start building out your hiring plan, the operational questions come fast. Which public holidays require paid time off? What’s owed when someone works one of those days anyway? And when a substitute day shifts the calendar, how does that ripple through your payroll?

That’s where things can get tricky if you’re figuring it out on the fly. The good news is that Vietnam’s holiday rules are manageable once you understand the basics. You just need a clear view of the dates, the pay rules, and the planning points that matter most around Tết.

What counts as a public holiday in Vietnam?

Under Vietnam’s Labor Code, employees get fully paid time off on official public holidays. That includes fixed-date holidays like New Year’s Day, Reunification Day, and International Workers’ Day, along with lunar-calendar holidays that move each year, such as Tết and Hùng Kings Commemoration Day.

There is one more detail worth knowing early. Foreign employees working in Vietnam also get one traditional holiday and one National Day from their home country, on top of Vietnam’s statutory holidays.

On paper, that’s straightforward. In practice, a few dates shift each year, and longer official breaks can affect staffing, payroll timing, and local operations.

In 2026, the Vietnamese Government announced a nine-day Tết break and a five-day National Day break for public employees. Even if your private-sector schedule doesn’t mirror that exactly, those closures still shape how work gets done locally.

Official public holidays in Vietnam

Here’s the core list you should know if you’re hiring in Vietnam or managing a team there.

How holiday pay works in Vietnam

This is the part you really want to get right.

If your employee does not work on an official public holiday, you still pay their normal salary for that day. Public holidays are paid time off.

If your employee does work on a public holiday, that work counts as overtime. Under Article 98 of the Labor Code, holiday overtime pay must be at least 300% of the normal pay rate for the hours worked, not counting the paid holiday pay the employee already receives for that day. If the employee works at night, extra night-work pay rules apply on top of the holiday premium.

That can change your labor costs fast. So holiday coverage is not something you want to handle casually the day before payroll closes.

A simple rule of thumb helps.

• No work on the holiday. Pay the employee their normal salary for the day.
• Work on the holiday. Pay at least the statutory holiday overtime premium, and check whether night-work premiums also apply.
• Holiday lands on a weekly rest day. Give the employee a compensatory day off on the next working day.

What about substitute days?

Vietnam’s Labor Code includes a substitute-day rule that catches plenty of foreign employers the first time around. If a public holiday falls on an employee’s weekly rest day, the employee gets a compensatory day off on the next working day.

The ripple effect is what catches most employers off guard. A holiday that falls on a Sunday doesn’t just disappear—it typically shifts to Monday, which means adjusted staffing, moved payroll cutoffs, and approval timelines that need to shift with it.

Spread that across a global team, and the confusion compounds quickly. Your headquarters calendar reflects one reality, while your Vietnam employees are legally entitled to another. Getting ahead of it is straightforward: publish the Vietnam holiday calendar early, spell out how substitute days work, and build those dates into manager planning before the year fills up.

Tips and resources for successful compliance

You don’t need a giant compliance manual to handle the Vietnamese public holidays well. You need a few basics locked in before the year gets busy.

• Start with a written holiday calendar that covers statutory holidays, likely substitute days, and the points where Tết could affect approvals, payroll processing, or employee availability.
• Then make sure your payroll workflow clearly separates regular hours, holiday hours, and any holiday night work. When those categories blur together, mistakes show up fast.
• Keep the right resources close. The ILO’s NATLEX version of the Labor Code is useful for checking the statutory holiday framework, while your internal payroll calendar, employee handbook, manager guidance, and country-specific hiring process matter just as much in day-to-day execution.

A few habits go a long way.

• Share the Vietnam holiday calendar internally so managers, payroll, and employees are working from the same dates.
• Treat public-holiday work as overtime and apply the right statutory multipliers, including extra night-work pay where required.
• Pressure-test payroll timing around Tết and other longer closures so approvals and payments do not get stuck.

If you’re building a broader process around global hiring, it also helps to map holidays into onboarding, payroll cutoffs, and manager guidance instead of treating them as a one-off payroll issue.

Getting support from EOR providers

If you’re hiring in Vietnam from abroad, an Employer of Record (EOR) can take a lot of operational pressure off your team.

An employer of record is a provider that legally employs your worker in the country where they are based. You still manage the person’s day-to-day role. The EOR handles the local employment side of things.

In Vietnam, that support matters because public holidays connect directly to paid time off, premium pay, substitute days, and payroll timing. An EOR helps you apply those rules correctly without asking your finance team to decode labor law or your managers to make judgment calls on the fly.

If you need a partner that can support holiday rules as part of a bigger employment setup, global EOR services and global HR compliance services can help you connect payroll, contracts, and local labor requirements in one process.

Partnering with Pebl: Streamlined and compliant public holiday management

The smartest way to handle Vietnam’s public holidays is not to memorize every rule. It’s to build a setup that makes the rules easier to follow.

You want to know which holidays are paid, when premium pay applies, how substitute days work, and where Tết could slow approvals or payroll timing. Once those pieces are in place, public holidays stop feeling like a compliance trap and start feeling manageable.

That’s where Pebl can help. Our EOR in Vietnam helps you connect local employment rules to the bigger picture—from onboarding and payroll to day-to-day compliance support. You get practical guidance that helps you move faster without losing the local detail that keeps your team on solid ground.

Our global EOR services are also available in over 185 countries and managed on a single AI-first platform. Get in touch, and we’d be happy to show you how our platform and our people can help you hire a single employee in Vietnam or an entire distributed team around the world.

This information does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal or tax advice and is for general informational purposes only. The intent of this document is solely to provide general and preliminary information for private use. Do not rely on it as an alternative to legal, financial, taxation, or accountancy advice from an appropriately qualified professional. The content in this guide is provided “as is,” and no representations are made that the content is error-free.

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