Money in Vietnam.

Vietnam's currency is the dong (VND), and by law it's what you pay in. Some higher-end hotels and tour operators still quote prices in US dollars and will take dollars in cash, but your change comes back in dong at a rate they set, which is usually worse than paying in dong from the start. Get your dong from an ATM or a money changer once you arrive.

The bigger notes are polymer (plastic): 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 and 500,000 dong, with small paper notes below that you'll rarely handle. Watch the 20,000 and the 500,000: both are blue, they look alike at a glance, and the 500,000 is worth twenty-five times as much. Mixing them up, or being handed one as change for the other, is the classic Vietnam money mistake, so check the number printed on the note, not just the color.

In the cities your card handles the big stuff. Visa and Mastercard are taken across hotels, malls, supermarkets, chain cafés and mid-range and upmarket restaurants in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang and Nha Trang. Step outside those, into street food, wet markets, family guesthouses, taxis and small towns, and it's cash only. American Express is accepted in far fewer places, so don't make it your only card. UnionPay is widely taken too, a legacy of the many Chinese visitors, which helps if that's the card you carry.

Where you'll meet friction is the surcharge. Plenty of smaller shops, hotels and tour desks add 2 to 3% for paying by card, sometimes more, to cover the processing fee. It's rarely worth an argument, so keep enough cash for those places and put everything else on the card. Separately, your own bank may charge a foreign-transaction fee on every payment abroad, which is exactly what the calculator below helps you dodge with the right card.

Contactless is worth using where the terminal takes it. Apple Pay and Google Pay arrived in Vietnam in 2025 and work wherever a compatible contactless reader exists, mainly modern chains and city venues, with your phone handing over a one-time token instead of your real card number. Coverage is thinner than the QR codes locals use, so treat it as a bonus in the cities rather than something to rely on countrywide.

Carry more cash than you would in a card-first country, but not a brick. Cards cover city hotels and bigger restaurants; cash is for the day's real spending: street food, coffee, markets, taxis, tips and anywhere rural, where ATMs thin out fast. Around 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 dong on you is a sensible float. When you withdraw, take a larger amount in one go, since Vietnamese ATMs charge a flat fee per withdrawal and cap each one fairly low.

An ATM is the simplest way to get dong, but if you've brought cash from home or want to change a larger sum at once, Vietnam has a quirk worth knowing: the best rates are often at gold and jewelry shops, not banks. Two things decide whether you get a fair deal: where you change, and how you handle the count.

Locals pay for almost everything by scanning a VietQR code, run over the national NAPAS 247 network, and Vietnam is fast becoming a QR-first country. For foreign visitors, though, it's the one payment method that mostly doesn't work, because native VietQR needs a Vietnamese bank account.

Most visitors never need this. But if you're paying a hotel or tour deposit, sending money to family, or funding a stay as a long-term visitor, the rate you're quoted is rarely the rate you get. Most of the cost isn't the visible fee. It's a markup buried in the exchange rate, often a few percent you never see itemized.

The mid-market rate is the real mid-point you'd see on Google, and it's the benchmark a fair transfer should track. Specialist services like Wise and Instarem land within about 1% of it and pay out in dong straight to the main Vietnamese banks (Vietcombank, BIDV, Techcombank and others), usually within a day. A high-street bank wire can quietly cost several percent once the rate markup and correspondent-bank fees are counted, and it takes longer.