Vietnam E-Visa 2026: The $25 Form People Pay $150 For — and the New Arrival Card Most Guides Missed

Two documents get you into Vietnam. One costs $25 and is routinely sold for six times that. The other is completely free, launched four months ago, and has expanded so fast that most of the guides describing it are already wrong.

Vietnam took 21.2 million international arrivals in 2025, a record and a 20% jump on the year before. The paperwork has not kept pace with the guidance, and the gap is where people lose money.

Here’s the current picture.

Document one: the e-visa

The only official portal is evisa.gov.vn. Bookmark that. We’ll come back to why it matters more here than almost anywhere else.

E-visa detail	Requirement
Cost	$25 single entry / $50 multiple entry
Validity	Up to 90 days
Eligibility	All nationalities, since August 2023
Processing	3 working days officially; plan for 3–5
Refundable	No — not even if rejected

Americans need a visa for Vietnam regardless of trip purpose, so for most US travelers the e-visa is the route. Some European nationalities have short visa-free allowances; check the official list rather than assuming, because the arrangements differ by country and have changed more than once.

What you’ll need before you start:

• A passport valid at least six months beyond arrival, with blank pages
• A clear scan of your passport data page in .jpg, with the two ICAO machine-readable lines at the bottom legible
• A portrait photo: 4×6, .jpg, white background, looking straight at the camera, no glasses, no hat, under 2MB
• Your temporary address in Vietnam — hotel name and full address
• Your intended entry and exit ports
• A working email address

Budget about 20 minutes for the form. You’ll get a registration code — save it somewhere you won’t lose it, because you need it to retrieve the visa later.

Single or multiple entry? Single entry ends the moment you leave Vietnam, even if the 90 days haven’t run out. If your trip loops out to Cambodia or Laos and back, the $50 multiple-entry visa is not an upgrade, it’s a requirement.

The domain trick that catches careful people

Now the part that makes Vietnam’s scam problem meaner than most.

The official portal is evisa.gov.vn. One of the fraudulent operations runs at vietnamvisa.govt.vn.

Look at those again. gov.vn versus govt.vn. One letter.

That’s not a typo somebody makes when they’re careless — it’s a domain chosen precisely because it reads as more official than the real one. A traveler documented realizing only after he’d submitted and paid that he’d used the wrong site, and had paid double the official fee. He’d checked. He just hadn’t checked the right character.

The tiers of what’s out there:

• Fake portals. Take your passport number, photo and card details, submit nothing, and vanish. You discover this at check-in.
• Inflated resubmitters. These genuinely file your application on the government portal, then charge $80 to $200 for the privilege. The Immigration Department processes every application at identical speed regardless of who submitted it. You are paying for nothing.
• Disclosed agencies. Legitimate services that clearly state they aren’t the government, show the government fee separately from their own, and offer real support. Not fraud. Just usually unnecessary.

How to stay out of trouble:

• Type evisa.gov.vn directly. Don’t click a search ad and don’t follow a link from a booking site.
• Read the domain character by character, specifically the bit right before .vn.
• $25 or $50 is the government fee. A checkout total above that includes somebody’s margin — which is legal if disclosed and theft if not.
• The official portal has no expedited option. Standard processing is the only processing. Anyone selling “urgent” or “guaranteed” e-visa approval is either a middleman or a liar; the Immigration Department offers neither guarantee nor expediting.
• The official form asks for passport details, photos, travel information and payment. Nothing else. A site asking for more is harvesting.

Every travel scam runs on the same fuel: you don’t know what normal looks like, so a fake fee looks like a real one. That’s the whole reason I built Good Trip — scam warnings for Vietnam and 25 other countries, offline, free, no account, no data collected.

Document two: the Digital Arrival Card — and why your guide is probably out of date

This is the newest thing in Vietnamese entry rules and the most likely to catch you out, because the published guidance has lagged the rollout badly.

On April 15, 2026, Vietnam made a free online pre-arrival declaration mandatory at Tan Son Nhat (SGN) in Ho Chi Minh City. Most coverage stopped there, and a great many guides — including ones published in July — still describe this as a Ho Chi Minh City requirement only.

It isn’t anymore. Reporting as recent as this month has the requirement live at Phu Quoc (PQC) from June 1, and since extended to Noi Bai (HAN) in Hanoi, Cam Ranh (CXR) and Da Nang (DAD) — plus the Dong Dang land border crossing and a list of seaports. The form itself has always included fields for air, land and sea travel and an unrestricted point-of-entry selector, which telegraphed the expansion from day one.

I’d treat the exact airport list as a moving target rather than settled fact, and here’s why that doesn’t matter much in practice: the form is free and takes five minutes, so just file it regardless of where you’re landing. That advice is correct under every version of the rule, current or future. Filing it when you didn’t strictly need to costs you nothing. Skipping it because a July blog post said Hanoi was fine could cost you an hour in a side room.

Arrival card detail	Requirement
Official portal	prearrival.immigration.gov.vn
Cost	Free
When	Within 72 hours before arrival
Who	All foreign nationals — including visa-exempt travelers
Output	A QR code, shown at immigration

What it asks for: passport details matching your passport exactly, arrival date, flight number, port of entry, your accommodation address in Vietnam, purpose of travel, planned departure date, and short health and customs questions. You can upload your passport bio page to auto-fill most of it.

Points people get stuck on:

• Visa type: if you’re entering visa-free, select the visa-exemption option rather than leaving it blank or guessing. E-visa holders select accordingly.
• One declaration per traveler: parents complete them for children, and one person can submit for a family or group.
• Flight changes: resubmit once the new date is inside the 72-hour window because the QR code is tied to the arrival date.
• Save it offline: screenshot the QR code and print it. Airport wifi is not a plan.
• It is not a visa: if your nationality needs an e-visa, you still need the e-visa. Most travelers need both documents.
• Airport fallback: QR codes are posted in the SGN arrival hall so you can file on the spot, but that is the queue you’re trying to avoid.

What actually gets applications rejected

E-visa rejections are uncommon but not rare, and the government often doesn’t tell you why. Since the fee is non-refundable, a rejection costs you $25 and several days.

The recurring causes:

• Photo problems: blurry passport scans, glare across the data page, illegible ICAO lines, portrait photos with glasses or a non-white background, and files over the size limit.
• Name mismatches: enter your name exactly as printed on the passport, in the passport’s order—not your everyday name.
• Insufficient passport validity: under six months from arrival gets you rejected.
• Incorrect dates: you must enter on or after the visa’s start date and before it expires, not a day early.
• Payment gateway trouble: if your card fails, switch browsers, turn off any VPN, tell your bank to expect an international online charge, or try a different card.

Apply 10–14 days before travel, not three. The official processing window excludes weekends and Vietnamese public holidays, and applying early leaves room to fix a rejection.

A few things that surprise people at the border

Your e-visa names your ports. You declare entry and exit points, and e-visa holders enter through a specified list of international airports, land crossings and seaports. If your itinerary changes to an unlisted crossing, that’s a problem to solve before you’re standing at it.

Ninety days is a maximum, not a guarantee. The stay actually granted is set by the immigration officer at your entry port.

Print it. Digital is accepted almost everywhere, but officers and airline staff at some crossings still ask for paper. A printed e-visa and a printed arrival card QR weigh nothing.

Dual nationals: one passport throughout. The passport you apply with must be the passport you travel on.

Watch the Tet window. Vietnamese Lunar New Year shuts much of the country for several days, prices spike, and domestic transport sells out well in advance. If you’re traveling in the first quarter, confirm the dates before you build an itinerary around them.

Your checklist

When	Do this
Before booking	Check passport has 6+ months validity beyond arrival
10–14 days out	Apply at evisa.gov.vn — $25 single / $50 multiple
At application	Save your registration code
On approval	Download the PDF and print it
Within 72 hours of arrival	File the free Digital Arrival Card at prearrival.immigration.gov.vn
After filing	Screenshot and print the QR code
If your flight moves	Resubmit the arrival card with the new date

Before you fly

Vietnam is one of the great travel countries and also one where the gap between the price locals pay and the price you’ll be quoted is widest in the first forty-eight hours — the airport taxi, the SIM card, the cyclo ride that was definitely free until it wasn’t.

That’s why I built Good Trip. It’s a free app with destination-specific scam warnings, an offline phrasebook, a currency converter, local emergency numbers, and step-by-step eSIM setup — for Vietnam and 25 other countries. All of it works offline, so it’s on your phone at Noi Bai before you’ve found the ATM.

No account. No data collected. Download it before you fly, not after you’ve paid $150 for a $25 form.