Trade & Customs Law · 12.10.2026

Export from Vietnam: Trade Agreements, Licences, Duty and Customs Clearance

Trade and customs law in Vietnam is not one statute. It is four layers stacked on top of each other, and most costly mistakes come from reading one laye...

Lawyer UnilawReading time: 6 min

What this covers

Export from Vietnam, and import into it, is not governed by one statute. It is four layers stacked on top of each other, and most costly mistakes come from reading one layer and assuming it settles the question. A treaty tariff preference you qualify for on paper is worthless without the origin document the treaty requires. An import licence obtained correctly does not clear your goods if the customs declaration window has closed. A perfect customs file does not protect you from a five-year post-clearance audit. And when the money is already lost, whether you end up in court or in arbitration was decided by one clause someone copied into the contract years earlier.

This page sets out the four layers, the hard numbers in each, and which page covers the detail.

Layer one: the treaties

Vietnam is a party to the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, among others. Both cut tariffs. Neither cuts them automatically.

The operative mechanism in every one of these agreements is rules of origin. A tariff line is only preferential if the goods originate in a member party under that agreement's own origin rules, and if you hold the document that agreement accepts as proof: the EUR.1 certificate or a registered exporter self-declaration under the EVFTA, the agreed certification form under the CPTPP. Vietnamese courts and customs authorities treat the origin document as a condition of the preference, not as paperwork supporting it. Lose the document and you pay the Most Favoured Nation rate, with the difference collected retrospectively.

The investment chapters sit in the same instruments and operate on a different clock. The CPTPP investment protections run to a three-year limitation period, and investor-state dispute settlement under the treaty is a separate track from the commercial arbitration clause in your contract. Mixing the two up is how claims die.

Detail: EVFTA and origin documents at the EVFTA and rules of origin , and the CPTPP, its negative list and investor protection at the CPTPP in Vietnam .

Layer two: permission to import

Before duty and before clearance there is the question of whether the goods may enter at all. Vietnamese law sorts goods into three streams: freely importable, importable subject to a licence or condition, and prohibited. The lists are in the appendices to the implementing decree, and the appendix your goods fall into determines everything that follows, including the dossier and the statutory time limit for the authority to answer.

The number to hold on to is ten working days for a licence decision from a complete dossier. Incomplete dossiers do not start that clock, which is why licensing delays almost always turn out, on inspection, to be dossier defects rather than administrative slowness.

Detail: which stream your goods are in, the dossier, and the ten-working-day clock at import licensing in Vietnam .

Layer three: duty and clearance

Duty and clearance are two different things and the law treats them separately.

Import duty has three forms, ad valorem, specific and compound, and three tariff tiers: preferential, special preferential and ordinary. The tier you get depends on origin, which takes you back to layer one. Customs value is calculated on its own statutory basis, not on your invoice alone, and exemptions exist but must be claimed with evidence at the right moment.

The number that catches importers is five years. Customs may conduct post-clearance audit for five years from the date of registration of the customs declaration. A consignment cleared today is not closed today.

Clearance is the separate mechanical step: dossier, declaration within the statutory window, channel assignment, and the authority's own response clock of two hours for green channel and eight working hours where physical inspection is required. Release of goods and clearance of goods are distinct legal statuses, and the difference matters when goods are released against a guarantee while a valuation dispute is still open.

Detail: duty forms, tariff tiers, customs value and exemptions at import duty in Vietnam , and the declaration windows, channels and release-versus-clearance distinction at customs clearance in Vietnam .

Layer four: who carries the loss when it goes wrong

Freight forwarders

A forwarder that issues a house bill of lading in its own name is a contractual carrier, not a broker, and cannot escape liability by saying it only booked space. Its exposure is nonetheless capped by the Commercial Law unless you declared cargo value before shipment, and it may lien your cargo for unpaid freight only with immediate written notice and only while preserving the goods. On the other side of the ledger, an ocean carrier is exempt from weight shortage claims where the bill carries a "said to weigh" reservation and the hatch seals stay intact.

Detail: freight forwarder liability in Vietnam .

Arbitration or court

If your contract contains a valid written arbitration agreement naming the Vietnam International Arbitration Centre, a Vietnamese court must refuse the case. It has no discretion unless the agreement is invalid or incapable of performance. That rule reaches a company charter as well as a sale contract, and an imprecisely named institution does not put you back in court: the parties must agree the institution again, and if they cannot, the claimant's choice governs.

Detail: VIAC arbitration .

Related practice areas

Three questions arrive with almost every trade mandate, but they are governed by different bodies of law and are covered in their own practice areas rather than here.

Factory space is a real estate question. You do not buy land in a Vietnamese industrial park; you sublease serviced land from the park's infrastructure developer or lease a ready-built factory, for the operating duration of your project, capped at 70 years in total. See industrial park leases in Vietnam .

Housing is also a real estate question. A foreign individual may own a dwelling, but only commercial housing inside a licensed project, only up to 30 per cent of the apartments in a building or 250 landed houses per ward-sized area, and only for 50 years. See buying property in Vietnam as a foreigner .

Residence is an immigration question. Your visa symbol decides your residence rights: a temporary residence card exists only for fifteen listed visa categories, and its term follows the symbol, from two years for an employee to ten for an ĐT1 investor. See temporary and permanent residence cards .

The numbers worth memorising

Ten working days for an import licence decision from a complete dossier. Two hours for green channel clearance, eight working hours where physical inspection applies. Thirty days before and no later than thirty days after arrival for the customs declaration window. Five years of post-clearance audit exposure from declaration registration. Sixty days before a carrier may auction unclaimed cargo.

How these pages are built

Each page below states the answer first, then the procedure, then one real Vietnamese court judgment taken from the published judgment database and verified against the original text, then the controls we apply in practice. Judgment numbers and dates are given in full so you can check them. Where a case number appears, the first-instance and appellate judgments are both identified, because an appellate reversal changes what the case stands for and a citation to the first instance alone is often misleading.

How UniLaw helps

UniLaw advises foreign manufacturers, traders, forwarders and investors on the full chain: treaty preference and origin planning, import licensing and conditional goods, customs valuation and classification disputes, post-clearance audit defence, cargo and misdelivery claims, VIAC arbitration and court proceedings, and the establishment work that goes with trading in Vietnam, from industrial leases to residence cards.

Tell us where in the chain the problem sits and we will tell you which of the four layers governs it.