Travel money in Vietnam: cash or card?

The money itself

• 10,000 ₫Yellow-brown
• 20,000 ₫Pale blue
• 50,000 ₫Pink-brown
• 100,000 ₫Green
• 200,000 ₫Red-brown
• 500,000 ₫Blue-green

There are none in practice. Coins were issued in the 2000s and abandoned by 2011, so nothing jingles here — small change is paper: 1,000, 2,000 and 5,000 ₫ notes, soft and often close to falling apart.

The six polymer notes are the same size and feel, and the 20,000 and the 500,000 are both blue — a twenty-five-fold mistake that visitors make constantly and that a tired vendor at midnight will not always correct. Count the zeros rather than reading the colour, and look at what you are handed as change, not just what you hand over. ATMs pay in 500,000 notes, which nobody selling phở wants to see.

Every way to pay, and whether it works for a visitor

Whether a payment method exists in Vietnam and whether you can use it are different questions. This table answers the second one: no local bank account, no local SIM, no residency.

• Cash (dong)

  Works

  Accepted everywhere without exception, and the only thing that works at a market stall, a xe ôm, a sleeper bus, a rural homestay or a plastic-stool restaurant. This is the default, not the backup.

• Visa / Mastercard

  Works, with a catch

  Reliable from three-star hotels upward, in malls, supermarkets, chain restaurants, tour agencies and airline offices, and increasingly in city cafés. Below that it thins out fast, and plenty of businesses that do take cards pass the processing fee to you.

  2–3% surcharge is common

• Apple Pay / Google Pay

  Works

  Your own card, so it works at any contactless terminal — including the gates on Ho Chi Minh City's metro. It does not get you into the QR economy, which is where most Vietnamese money actually moves.

• VietQR / bank QR

  Residents only

  The QR code on every counter, cart and windscreen in the country. Paying with it means a Vietnamese bank account, and a tourist visa will not get you one — banks want a long-term visa or a residence card.

• Your home bank app or wallet, via the QR

  Depends where you're from

  NAPAS has opened VietQR to some foreign apps: visitors from Thailand, Laos and Cambodia can scan with their own banking apps, and Chinese (Alipay, UnionPay) and Korean (GLN, Naver Pay) apps are supported at participating merchants. Coverage is merchant-by-merchant rather than universal, and if you are from anywhere else it does not apply.

• MoMo / ZaloPay / VNPay

  Residents only

  The wallets Vietnamese use for everything. Registration is built around a Vietnamese phone number, and raising the account above the basic tier needs a Vietnamese ID card. Not a plan for a two-week trip.

• JCB / UnionPay / American Express

  Works, with a catch

  Turn up at hotels, larger restaurants and some ATMs, and disappear below that. Bring a Visa or Mastercard as the card you actually rely on.

• Grab / Be / Xanh SM

  Works

  All three take a foreign card in the app, for cars and motorbikes alike, and all three let you hand the driver cash instead. Fares are fixed in the app, which quietly solves the haggling problem for anyone who dislikes it.

• US dollars

  Works, with a catch

  Some hotels and tour operators still quote in dollars, and a few will take them. Pricing and paying in foreign currency is outside the rules here, the rate applied is theirs rather than the market's, and change comes back in dong anyway. Convert and pay in dong.

Cash

Vietnam is the most cash-first country covered here, and the gap between what the country pays with and what a visitor can pay with is the whole story. Domestic payment is overwhelmingly digital — the QR code is on every stall — but that system is closed to anyone without a Vietnamese bank account, so a tourist ends up using the one method that never asks who you are.

Budget your notes rather than your total. The workable float is 50,000, 100,000 and 200,000 notes; 500,000 notes are what machines dispense and what small businesses cannot change. A supermarket, a chain café or a fuel station will break one without blinking, and doing that early costs nothing.

Prices in markets and from street vendors are often negotiable and sometimes quoted higher to foreigners. That is a haggling question rather than a payment one, but it interacts with cash: agreeing the number before you buy, and having something close to the right notes, removes most of the friction.

Cards

ATMs

Vietnamese ATMs are unusually expensive for foreign cards, and the reason is the combination rather than the fee alone. Most banks charge a fixed amount per withdrawal — commonly in the 22,000–66,000 ₫ range, with at least one bank having switched to a percentage — while capping each withdrawal at 2 to 3 million dong. A fixed fee against a low ceiling is a high fee per unit of cash, and no amount of planning gets around it if the machine will not give you more.

So the tactic that works elsewhere — take out a lot, rarely — only half works here. Look for the banks with the higher per-transaction limits, take the maximum the machine allows, and treat the fee as the price of the trip rather than of the withdrawal. Fee levels and free-withdrawal deals change often enough that the screen in front of you is the only reliable source.

Machines are on nearly every city block and inside every mall, and they run out at Tết and on long weekends. Withdraw before a public holiday and before heading anywhere rural, and decline the on-screen conversion offer every time.

Changing money

Costs that are not the price

Paying for transport

What you may carry in and out

Common questions about money in Vietnam