Working in Vietnam Without a Work Permit: Decree 283/2026

There is a version of this that looks harmless from the outside. You are in Saigon on a business visa, or on a tourist visa you keep topping up with Moc Bai runs, and you have picked up paid work. A few classes a week. Social media for a local cafe. A website build for a Vietnamese client. Nobody stops you, and months go by.

Then the arithmetic changed. Decree 283/2026/ND-CP took effect on 10 September 2026 and rewrote the penalty schedule for foreign workers and for the companies that employ them. Working without a permit in Vietnam now carries a fine of 15 to 25 million VND for the foreigner, and deportation is available as an additional sanction. The employer is fined separately, per head, at rates that start at 30 million VND.

Three different consequences get mixed together when people talk about this, so it is worth pulling them apart before anything else:

• A labour fine. An administrative penalty under Decree 283, issued by a labour inspectorate or the police.
• Deportation. A separate decision ordering you out of Vietnam, following the procedure in Decree 59/2026.
• An entry ban. Once a deportation decision is on your record, you cannot be admitted for the period that decision names, and the entry and exit law caps it at three years.

The fine is the cheapest part of the three. For anyone planning to stay in Vietnam, or to keep running to Moc Bai every 90 days, the third one is what ends the plan.

What changed on 10 September 2026

The decree was signed on 15 July 2026 and took effect on 10 September 2026, replacing Decree 12/2022/ND-CP, the framework that had governed labour and social insurance penalties since early 2022. Its official scope is wide, covering labour relations, social insurance and Vietnamese workers going abroad under contract, but the part that matters to foreigners is the work permit chapter.

Two things are worth being clear about. First, Decree 283 did not invent a new permit system. The requirement to hold a work permit, and the exemption certificate route, come from Decree 219/2025/ND-CP, in force since 7 August 2025. What Decree 283 does is attach the penalties, and align them with that newer regime. Second, it is not a small adjustment to the old numbers. The main fine bands are similar in size, but the list of things you can be fined for is longer.

The specific additions

• Notification duties now carry a fine. Under Decree 219, certain categories of foreign worker can be exempt, including people working fewer than 90 days in a calendar year, but the employer has to notify the labour authority at least three working days before the work starts. Until now nothing in the penalty schedule punished a missed notification. From 10 September, something does.
• Working outside what your permit actually says is separately punished. An employer who uses you in a role or at a location that does not match the approved permit or exemption certificate is fined per worker.
• Paperwork has deadlines with teeth. Employers must recover an invalidated permit or exemption certificate and return it to the issuing authority within 15 days after it stops being valid, or return it when the authority orders a revocation.
• Falsified or altered application documents are a distinct offence, and are the most expensive employer conduct in the foreign worker chapter, well apart from the headcount bands.

One transition rule catches people mid-stream: a violation that started before 10 September and continues afterwards is handled under the new decree rather than the old one.

The fines, worker and employer

The two sides of the desk are fined separately. The headcount bands below apply to the employer only.

Two details in there decide how much a case actually costs. Under Article 7 of the decree an organisation pays twice the fine that applies to an individual for the same offence, so the headline bands for an employer run to 150 million VND for the largest headcount cases, and 120 million VND for falsified documents. And an expired permit is treated exactly like never having had one. There is no gradation for the person who had a permit last year and is waiting on a renewal.

The employer bands scale with headcount, which is why this stopped being a formality for anyone hiring foreign staff. One unauthorised worker is a 30 to 45 million VND fine. Six is the same band. The interesting number is what a company with a mixed workforce exposes itself to, and that is the reason compliance teams spent August 2026 auditing permits rather than waiting for an inspection.

For the individual worker the shape is different. The fine is a fixed 15 to 25 million VND whatever the circumstances, whether you are a construction worker with no permit at all or a manager whose renewal lapsed by a month. What varies is everything around it: whether the employer is fined too, whether the case ends in a deportation decision, and how the officer treats it when they find out.

What actually counts as working without a permit

Article 13 of the decree lists the conduct. For the foreign worker there are three, and they are blunt:

• Working in Vietnam without a work permit, where one is required.
• Working without a certificate confirming you are not subject to the work permit requirement, where that certificate is required.
• Continuing to work on a permit or a certificate that has expired.

The list of who needs which document comes from Decree 219/2025/ND-CP, not from this decree. It sets out the cases that need a work permit, the cases that need an exemption certificate instead, and a narrow set of cases that need neither. The one people quote most is the short-stay exemption: a foreign national working in Vietnam for less than 90 days in a calendar year can fall outside both document requirements. That exemption is not self-executing. The employer still has to file a notification with the labour authority at least three working days before the work begins, which is now a penalised duty of its own.

On the employer side the decree adds a mismatch offence. Holding a valid permit is not the end of the story if the work you are actually doing does not match what the permit or exemption certificate says: a different job title, a different location, a posting that was never filed. That mismatch is fined per worker, capped at 75 million VND for an individual employer.

What does not protect you

A few beliefs come up again and again in expat groups, and none of them is a defence.

• A valid visa is not work authorisation. Immigration and labour are two separate systems with two separate sets of rules. Your visa decides whether you may enter and stay. The work permit regime decides whether you may take employment in Vietnam. One does not answer the other, and Decree 59/2026 lists misuse of visa purpose among the violations that can end in deportation.
• An application in progress is not a permit. Being told the file is with the labour authority does not authorise you to start. The document exists or it does not.
• A permit for a different role does not cover the job in front of you. This is the mismatch offence, and it is the one that catches people who are technically legal but working somewhere the paperwork never mentioned.
• An expired permit is not a grace period. The decree puts it in the same sentence as never having held one.

There is a second consequence worth knowing if documents were falsified at application stage. The labour fine under Decree 283 is one thing. Separately, Article 6 of the Law on Entry, Exit, Transit and Residence of Foreigners in Vietnam allows the authorities to revoke entry, exit and residence papers where the holder forged papers or made a false declaration to obtain them. That is the provision behind the warnings in law firm guidance that altered certificates can cost you the visa as well as the fine.

Deportation and the three-year entry ban

The fine is one sanction. Expulsion is the other, and it is the one with a long tail.

The decree provides deportation as an additional sanction for the foreign worker caught without valid authorisation. Guidance published by the immigration management side states that outcome flatly, while law firm summaries of the same decree are more cautious and say expulsion may be imposed depending on the case. Either way it is on the table for an unauthorised-work finding, and it is not a worst-case hypothetical you can discount.

How a deportation actually runs is set by Decree 59/2026/ND-CP, effective 1 April 2026, which replaced the older expulsion provisions. It governs the decision, any temporary detention, the escort and the management of the person while the case is pending. It also digitalised the process, named which officials can sign a deportation decision (the Director of the Immigration Department, provincial police chiefs and heads of immigration divisions), and gave the person on the receiving end real rights: to be told the reasons, to receive the decision at least 48 hours before it is enforced, to contact their consulate, and to have a lawyer or legal aid and an interpreter.

The detail that matters most is a small one buried in the middle of that decree. If you cannot pay the administrative fine, the authorities can deport you immediately, with enforcement of the financial penalty suspended rather than cancelled. The old arrangement, where not paying kept you in the country, is gone.

Then comes the record. Article 21 of the Law on Entry, Exit, Transit and Residence of Foreigners sets out who can be refused entry, and two clauses there are the ones a work permit case lands on. Anyone deported from Vietnam within the previous three years falls under it. Anyone compelled to leave within the previous six months falls under it too. Those are the numbers to keep in your head: a deportation decision buys you three years outside, a forced exit six months.

The ban period itself is written into the decision letter, so read the letter rather than relying on any general rule of thumb. Applications filed inside the ban period are rejected automatically, which is why the decision document is the single most useful piece of paper you hold after a case closes.

Separately from all of this, the entry and exit law also caps a temporary exit suspension at three years, extendable. That is the mechanism the tax authority uses, and it is a different thing from a re-entry ban: one stops you leaving, the other stops you coming back.

How visa runs fit in, and where they do not

Most of the people reading this are not on a work permit and are not trying to get one. They are doing 90-day runs to Moc Bai, working remotely for clients outside Vietnam, and the work permit rules never enter the conversation. That is a reasonable place to be, and this page is not aimed at you.

It is aimed at four patterns that do cross the line, and every one of them is common in Saigon.

• The runner who took a local client. A website build for a Vietnamese company, a social media retainer, a few English classes a week. Paid work for a Vietnamese entity is where the work permit regime starts, and it does not matter that the arrangement is small, informal or paid in cash.
• The business visa doing the job. A business visa gets you in to work with a Vietnamese enterprise. The permit is a separate document, and at smaller companies it often never gets filed, because the visa looked like enough.
• The lapsed renewal. You held a permit, it expired, the renewal is somewhere in the system, and you kept working. Since 10 September that is the same offence as never having held one.
• The one who never asked. Teaching, bar work, a hostel shift on a tourist entry. Four runs later, still no permit, now with a stamp history that shows the stays were continuous.

Here is the part worth being blunt about. A Moc Bai run resets your visa. It does not touch your work status. Running to the border and back does not create a permit, cannot revive an expired one, and does not fix a role that never matched the paperwork. All it does is buy you another window of legal stay.

That is not nothing. A valid stay is the condition for fixing anything else without a removal decision landing on top of you. But the run is a delay, not a solution, and treating it as a solution is how people end up four runs deep with an undeclared job.

There is a second reason the delay gets shorter every year. Decree 286/2026, in force since 15 September 2026, tightened e-visa management and requires the immigration database to sync in real time between the agencies that hold pieces of your file. The record of your entries and exits and the record of a work permit or a labour inspection now sit in the same network rather than in different filing cabinets. If a labour case is opened against your employer, your own travel history is easy to pull.

So if you are going to run anyway, run with the work question already answered. Two things are true at once: a border run is the fastest legal way to reset 90 days, and it is useless as cover for a job you are not authorised to do.

Fixing your status before someone else gets to it

If any of the four patterns above is you, the useful sequence is short and most of it is free.

Stop working, or at least stop the count

An unauthorised-work finding is a finding about work performed. Every day you keep at it after 10 September 2026 adds to a violation that the decree handles under the new rules rather than the old ones. If the job can pause while the paperwork catches up, pausing is the cheapest thing you will do all year.

Find out what you actually hold

Ask your employer, in writing, for the work permit or the exemption certificate that covers you. Then read three fields rather than glancing at the frame: the expiry date, the job title or position, and the location. A permit that expired, or that describes a job you are not doing, is the mismatch case. Ask also whether the certificate is being returned to the labour authority, because the decree gives the employer 15 days to hand an invalidated document back. That is a question your employer has to be able to answer, and asking it puts the compliance conversation on the record.

The permit route runs through your employer, not you

You cannot apply for your own work permit as an individual. The application is filed by the employer with the labour authority, and the permit is tied to that employer and to the position that was approved. This is why the informal arrangement is the dangerous one: if your job exists on a handshake, there is nobody with standing to file for you, and nobody to blame when an inspection arrives.

If it cannot be fixed quickly, leave on your own terms

This is the part people get wrong, and the difference is large. The entry and exit law treats three situations very differently:

• You leave Vietnam on your own initiative. No re-entry bar attaches to the departure itself.
• You are compelled to leave by an order. Suspension from entry applies for six months.
• You are deported. Suspension from entry applies for three years.

An exit you book yourself, on your own ticket, at a time you choose, sits in the first category. That is worth a lot compared with waiting for an inspection to decide it for you. If a permit is weeks or months away and no interim arrangement exists, an orderly departure followed by a clean application from outside is usually the better trade, and it keeps the three-year outcome off your record entirely.

Take advice on the immigration side from a licensed Vietnamese lawyer rather than from the same person who arranged the job. And if the file is already open, ask what sanctions are actually being proposed before assuming the worst: the decision letter states the outcome, including any ban period.

Frequently Asked Questions