Money in Da Nang.

The currency is the dong (VND), and by law it's what you pay in. A few beach resorts and tour desks quote in US dollars and will take dollar cash, but change comes back in dong at a rate they set, usually worse than paying in dong from the off. Pull your dong from an ATM or change cash once you land.

The notes you'll actually handle are polymer: 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 and 500,000 dong. Keep an eye on the 20,000 and the 500,000: both are blue, they look near-identical in a hurry, and the 500,000 is worth twenty-five times as much. Being handed the small one as change for the big one is the classic Vietnam slip, so read the number on the note, not the color. The polymer is hard to fake and survives a soak, but a badly torn or taped note can still be refused, so don't take damaged ones as change.

Around the beach and the city center your card handles the big spends. Visa and Mastercard work at Da Nang's hotels, the Vincom and Lotte malls, supermarkets, chain cafés and the mid-range and upmarket restaurants along My Khe, An Thuong and My An. Step into street food, the Han and Con markets, family guesthouses and small local shops and it's cash only. American Express is taken in far fewer places, so don't make it your only card; UnionPay is fairly widely accepted if that's what you carry.

Watch for the card surcharge, though. Smaller shops, guesthouses and tour desks often add 2 to 3% for paying by card to cover the processing fee. It's rarely worth an argument, so keep cash for those and put the rest on the card. Separately, your own bank may add a foreign-transaction fee on every payment abroad, which is what the calculator below helps you avoid with the right card.

Contactless is worth using where you see it. Apple Pay and Google Pay work at Da Nang's modern chains and mall venues wherever a compatible reader exists, handing the terminal a one-time token instead of your real card number. Coverage is thinner than the QR codes locals use, so treat it as a city bonus rather than something to lean on everywhere.

Carry more cash than you would in a card-first city, but not a wad. Cards cover the hotels and bigger restaurants; cash is for the real day-to-day: street food, Vietnamese coffee, markets, tips and day trips out to Hoi An or the Marble Mountains. Around 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 dong on you is a sensible float. Withdraw a bigger amount in one go, since Da Nang's 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, Da Nang has the same quirk as the rest of Vietnam: gold and jewelry shops often give the best rates, sometimes better than the banks. Two things decide the deal: where you change, and how you handle the count.

Locals pay for almost everything by scanning a VietQR code over the national NAPAS 247 network, and Da Nang is as QR-first as anywhere in Vietnam. The country is moving fast toward cashless, but the system is built around local bank accounts, so tourists are largely on the outside of it: native VietQR needs a Vietnamese account.

Most visitors never need this. But if you're paying a hotel or tour deposit, sending money to family, or funding a longer stay, the number to watch is the exchange rate, not the advertised fee, because that's where a few percent usually hides.

Wise and Instarem land within about 1% of the real Google rate and pay out in dong to the main Vietnamese banks, usually within a day. A high-street bank wire often costs several percent once the rate markup and correspondent fees are counted, and it's slower. The calculator below compares them on the dong that actually arrives.