Vietnam Withholding tax rates
Vietnam Withholding tax rates: no single figure applies. The reason is set out below, cited to the governing instrument. Last checked against the official source on 11 Aug 2026.
Vietnam has no classical dividend/interest/royalty withholding tax statute; cross-border payments to foreign entities are instead taxed through the Foreign Contractor Tax (FCT) regime of Circular 103/2014/TT-BTC, a combined VAT + CIT levy withheld by the Vietnamese payer. Dividends to foreign corporate shareholders bear no tax at all; loan interest and royalties bear only the CIT component (5% and 10%). Administered by the General Department of Taxation under the Ministry of Finance.
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| Current value | structured — see the API |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2014-10-01 |
| Official source | Thông tư số 103/2014/TT-BTC (Bộ Tài chính, 6 August 2014, in force 1 October 2014), as published in the Vietnamese Official Gazette (CÔNG BÁO số 785 + 786, 26 August 2014). Điều 13.2(a), CIT-percentage-on-revenue table: row 2 'Dịch vụ, cho thuê máy móc thiết bị, bảo hiểm, thuê giàn khoan' - 5; row 7 'Lãi tiền vay' - 5; row 8 'Thu nhập bản quyền' - 10. Điều 12.2(a), VAT-percentage-on-revenue table: row 1 'Dịch vụ, cho thuê máy móc thiết bị, bảo hiểm; xây dựng, lắp đặt không bao thầu nguyên vật liệu, máy móc, thiết bị' - 5. |
| Last verified | 2026-08-11 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
THERE IS NO SINGLE WITHHOLDING TAX RATE, WHICH IS WHY value IS NULL. Vietnam applies different percentages per payment type - 0 on corporate dividends, 5 on loan interest, 10 on royalties - and a caller wanting a number must name which payment type; read withholding_rates rather than expecting a headline figure. STRUCTURAL HONESTY: these are NOT rates of a discrete withholding-tax statute. The Foreign Contractor Tax under Circular 103/2014/TT-BTC is a combined levy of VAT (Article 12) plus CIT (Article 13), each computed as a percentage of taxable revenue and withheld by the Vietnamese payer under the deemed ('direct') method. The rates served here are the CIT component only, which is the economic analogue of a withholding tax. Pure loan interest and royalties are generally not subject to the VAT component (interest is a VAT-exempt credit activity; technology-transfer royalties are VAT-exempt), but general SERVICE fees attract 5% VAT on top of 5% CIT - roughly a 10% combined burden. The English text quoted is an unofficial translation of the Vietnamese circular; the operative instrument is the Vietnamese original. ALL RATES ARE DOMESTIC STATUTORY RATES, BEFORE TREATY RELIEF. A double-tax agreement can reduce or eliminate the CIT component (never the VAT component), and relief requires an application to the Vietnamese tax authority. We do NOT serve treaty rates: they are bilateral, run to thousands of country pairs, and applying one is a legal determination rather than a lookup. CITATION UPGRADE (11 August 2026): every rate is now cited to the Vietnamese ORIGINAL as published in the Official Gazette (CÔNG BÁO số 785 + 786 of 26 August 2014, hosted by the Government Portal congbao.chinhphu.vn), replacing the unofficial English translation on a law-firm website (mplaw.vn) that previously carried the whole series, and replacing PwC on the dividends entry. The Điều 12 and Điều 13 percentage tables were read directly from the gazette text. Note that vbpl.vn, the Ministry of Justice national legal database, refuses requests from outside Vietnam (HTTP 403), so congbao.chinhphu.vn is the working official route. The dividends entry is still a zero established by the ABSENCE of a charging provision rather than by an express zero rate, but it now rests on Circular 186/2010/TT-BTC - the instrument that actually governs remittance of profits abroad and imposes no levy on it - rather than on a practitioner summary.
Get it programmatically
curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/vn/withholding-tax
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/vn/withholding-tax/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/vn/withholding-taxOther Vietnam series: Policy rate · Value added tax (Thue gia tri gia tang) · VAT registration threshold · Minimum wage (Muc luong toi thieu vung) · Public holidays · Consumer price index (Chi so gia tieu dung) · Corporate income tax (Thue thu nhap doanh nghiep) · Statutory late-payment interest (lãi chậm trả) · Personal income tax (Thue thu nhap ca nhan) · Statutory social-insurance contributions
The same figure elsewhere: Bahrain · Bangladesh · China · Hong Kong · India · all 28