Personal Injury Law · 20.09.2026

Personal Injury & Liability Claims in Vietnam: Legal Guide for Companies, Insurers and Foreigners

Who this page is for. You run a company, a hospital, a resort, a fleet or a vessel in Vietnam, or you insure one. Or you are a foreign resident, a traveller or an overseas Vietnamese who was hurt here. Either way you want the same three answers: who pays, how much, and how long.…

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Who this page is for. You run a company, a hospital, a resort, a fleet or a vessel in Vietnam, or you insure one. Or you are a foreign resident, a traveller or an overseas Vietnamese who was hurt here. Either way you want the same three answers: who pays, how much, and how long.

This page is the map. Personal injury claims in Vietnam are ordinary civil claims for damages outside contract. There is no jury, no punitive damages and no tariff. What decides the outcome is who the law makes liable, and whether each head of loss stands on its own evidence.

The framework in five articles

Almost every file turns on a short list from the Civil Code, Law No. 91/2015/QH13.

Article 584 sets the basis of liability. Article 585 sets the principles. In short, the law compensates actual damage in full and promptly. The claimant recovers nothing for the part their own fault caused, and nothing for loss they failed to limit.
Article 588 gives three years to sue. The clock starts the day the claimant knew or should have known of the infringement.
Article 590 lists the heads for harm to health. Article 591 covers loss of life. Where the parties cannot agree, the law caps mental suffering at fifty times the State base salary in the first case and one hundred times in the second.
Under Article 597 a legal entity answers for harm its people cause on assigned duties. It may then recover from the person at fault.
Article 601 governs a source of extreme danger. That expressly includes motor vehicles, power systems, operating industrial plant, explosives and dangerous animals. Liability arises even without fault, subject only to the victim’s deliberate act or to force majeure.

One more article matters where a foreign element is present. Article 687 applies the law of the place where the consequence arose, unless the parties agree otherwise. Harm suffered in Vietnam is therefore a Vietnamese law case. Nationality does not move it, and neither does later treatment abroad.

Personal injury claims in Vietnam: case one, on causation

Judgment No. 302/2023/DS-PT of 21 November 2023, Superior People’s Court in Da Nang. A British visitor suffered an injury at a resort on Ba Na mountain, had rehabilitation in the United Kingdom, and then sued the operator for failing to warn and to keep visitors safe.

The court accepted the accident and the treatment as real, then dismissed the claim in full under Articles 584 and 585. The evidence never established causation. Moreover, her strongest document failed too: a staff member had signed an English note accepting blame, but a bailiff’s record showed the signatory did not read English.

Therefore the lesson runs both ways. First, claimants need contemporaneous evidence of fault, not sympathy. Second, operators need to control what their staff sign.

Personal injury claims in Vietnam: case two, on quantum

Cassation Decision No. 65/2021/DS-GDT of 8 September 2021, Superior People’s Court in Da Nang. A company driver injured a cyclist. The company admitted fault, and forensic examination put bodily impairment at 31 per cent. The claimant advanced sixteen heads totalling VND 169,055,345.

First instance allowed VND 56,705,345 and mis-added the column. Appeal allowed VND 38,555,345. The cassation panel quashed both judgments, because the lower courts cut lost income without establishing the salary of the month before the accident, and then refused future dental restoration outright instead of pricing it from a quotation.

For a defendant organisation the warning is sharper still: the panel treated figures the company had agreed at the hearing as a floor.

Case three: who is actually the defendant

Judgment No. 09/2021/KDTM-PT of 22 January 2021, Superior People’s Court in Ho Chi Minh City. Two vessels collided in Nha Be on 19 April 2019. The owner was a Marshall Islands company. It argued that it had bareboat chartered the vessel out for sixty months, so under Article 601(2) the charterer in possession should pay.

The court rejected that. Article 601(2) shifts liability to the possessor unless the parties have agreed otherwise, and clauses 43 and 53 of the charter required the charterer to notify and indemnify the owner, who had in fact negotiated and posted the undertaking itself. Both appeals failed and the award of VND 78,777,007,456 stood, with interest at 10 per cent a year from the enforcement request.

In short, handing an asset to an operator does not hand over the liability. The contract decides, and a foreign company is not beyond the reach of a Vietnamese court.

Road and transport accidents

This is the largest group. A motor vehicle is a source of extreme danger, so the operator answers under Article 601 even without fault, and the employer answers under Article 597 for a driver on duty. Detailed pages sit here: auto accident attorney, automobile accident attorneys, lawyer for a car accident, truck accident lawyer and truck accidents.

Medical incidents

A medical incident is not a separate category of case, but it has an extra step. The facility must convene a professional council under Article 101 of the Law on Medical Examination and Treatment, Law No. 15/2023/QH15, before anything reaches a court, and Article 103 requires professional liability insurance that covers both the compensation and the legal costs.

Three pages cover it: what a patient must prove, defence for hospitals and insurers, and the first thirty days after a claim.

Workplace, maritime and public liability

Injuries at sea follow their own route, because the Maritime Code adds fault rules for collision on top of the Civil Code, as case three shows. See maritime injury lawyers. For visitors and customers hurt on premises, see public liability, and for long-latency exposure, toxic injury claims.

What belongs in the file from day one

Documents gathered in the first weeks decide most of these claims. Both sides need the same bundle, and whoever assembles it first controls the argument.

The incident record made at the time: police or traffic inspectorate report, the facility’s own log, CCTV, and the names of everyone on shift.
A forensic assessment of bodily impairment. That percentage drives several heads of damage at once.
Proof of income before the event. A payslip or contract for the month immediately before beats any later statement.
Every invoice and referral, including treatment abroad. Foreign invoices are recoverable only where the file shows the treatment was reasonable.
The insurance policies on both sides, with their notice periods. A late notice is the commonest way a defendant loses cover it paid for.

Documents made abroad need certified translation, and usually consular legalisation unless a treaty removes it. Start that early. It is slow, and it is the reason hearings get adjourned.

What personal injury claims in Vietnam cost and how long they take

Expect negotiation with the insurer in months and a contested first-instance hearing in about a year from filing. An appeal adds six to twelve months. Most files that settle do so once the insurer accepts the evidence on causation, so the work that matters happens long before any hearing.

As for cost, court fees follow the value claimed under the National Assembly Standing Committee resolution on court fees, and the losing party bears them. We agree legal fees in the engagement letter, and we set them out before the file opens rather than after.

If you are the injured person

Two pages are written for you rather than for a company. For what you can claim and who pays it, see personal injury lawyer in Vietnam. For which court hears your claim and which office to approach, see personal injury lawyer near me.

Article 40(1)(d) of the Civil Procedure Code, Law No. 92/2015/QH13, matters here. For compensation outside contract you may choose the court where you live or work, or the court where the harm happened. You are not confined to the defendant’s home court.

How UniLaw handles personal injury claims in Vietnam

We read the liability question first, because it decides whether there is a case at all. Then the policy, because it usually decides the number. Then the schedule of damages, line by line, because that is where both of our cassation examples came apart.

We act for injured people and for the companies and insurers who are sued, but never for both sides of the same dispute. However, we publish decided judgments with full reasoning on case.unilaw.vn. Offices in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Nha Trang, working in English and Vietnamese.