Filming in Vietnam in 2026: Permits, Costs and Why There Is Still No Rebate

Updated 4 August 2026. Reflects the Cinema Law in force and the cultural development measures under parliamentary review in 2026.

Vietnam is one of the few major Asian production destinations where the financial case has nothing to do with an incentive. There is no national cash rebate. There is no transferable tax credit. What there is instead is a cost base that undercuts most of the region, a location range that runs from limestone karst to French colonial boulevard inside a two-hour flight, and a permitting system that is bureaucratic but genuinely navigable if you start early.

That combination has drawn Kong: Skull Island, Tomorrow Never Dies, The Quiet American and a steady stream of commercials, documentaries and branded content. It has also caught out plenty of producers who assumed filming in Vietnam worked like filming in Thailand. It does not.

This guide covers what actually exists on the incentive side, how the two-ministry permit system works, what the visa and drone rules require, and where Vietnam wins and loses against its neighbours.

Filming in Vietnam: quick facts

Filming in Vietnam: what incentive exists and what is only proposed

This is the section producers get wrong most often, because several third-party incentive databases list Vietnam as having a rebate. It does not have one in any form a producer can model, and filming in Vietnam has to be budgeted accordingly.

What the law says. The Law on Cinematography, which superseded the 2006 legislation, contains a provision stating that foreign organisations producing films using Vietnamese backgrounds, or using film production services provided by Vietnamese organisations, are entitled to tax incentives in accordance with the tax laws. The same law establishes a Cinematographic Development Support Fund as an off-budget state financial fund with its own charter capital and legal personality.

Both provisions are real. Neither is an incentive you can put in a budget. The tax-incentive clause points outward to general tax law rather than creating a defined rebate percentage, qualifying-spend definition or application process. The support fund is oriented toward developing Vietnamese cinema rather than reimbursing foreign spend, so it does not function as a rebate for productions filming in Vietnam.

What is under discussion. In April 2026 the National Assembly reviewed a draft resolution on Vietnamese cultural development which proposes, among ten policy groups, a 5% value-added tax rate for film production, distribution and exhibition alongside sports and performing arts, together with a commitment that annual state culture spending reaches at least 2% of total budget expenditure and improved tax, fee and land access for cultural and creative businesses.

Separately, industry discussions through late 2025 and 2026 have pushed for a centralised film commission. International experts have observed that Vietnam lacks a formal policy framework for filmmakers and have recommended the film commission model that most competing markets already run, and Vietnamese officials have acknowledged that bottlenecks in regulatory procedure, incentives and taxation need addressing to draw international producers.

What this means practically. Treat any Vietnamese incentive as a future possibility, not a line item. If a scheme arrives, it will most likely arrive with a defined application window and a local-entity requirement, which means the productions positioned to use it will be the ones already working with a Vietnamese service company. Anyone budgeting filming in Vietnam in 2026 or 2027 should model zero rebate and treat anything else as upside.

Filming in Vietnam: how the permit system actually works

Vietnam runs a two-ministry split, and picking the wrong ministry is the fastest way to lose two weeks.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) handles permits for television programmes, reality shows, documentaries, commercials, brand and corporate films, music videos, live production of sports, political and social events, and news reporting.

Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MoCST) handles permits for feature films — the route used by Kong: Skull Island and Tomorrow Never Dies.

For most international work — commercials, documentaries, branded content — MoFA is the route, and it covers the large majority of productions filming in Vietnam. Feature narrative work goes to MoCST, and the script review is correspondingly more substantive.

What the application requires

Applications must be lodged at least ten working days before the planned shoot, and the documentation is granular. Expect to supply:

• A daily shooting schedule, broken down by location
• A full location list, with alternates
• Crew list with passport details and roles
• Details of local contributors, interviewees and contributors on camera
• Project synopsis or, for features, the script
• Equipment list

Ten working days is the statutory floor, not the practical planning assumption for filming in Vietnam. National parks and national relics require a separate additional permit with its own fee and lead time. Provincial and municipal authorities may add their own layer. Sensitive subject matter, military-adjacent locations and anything touching on politics or religion extends the timeline substantially.

The film officer

Vietnamese permits typically come with an assigned film officer or minder who accompanies the production. Their day rate, travel and accommodation are charged to the production. This is a real budget line that first-time producers routinely omit, and on a multi-province schedule it compounds.

It is also, handled well, an asset rather than a tax. A cooperative officer resolves location access disputes on the spot in a way that a foreign production manager cannot, and on rural schedules that is worth more than the line item costs.

Visas for filming in Vietnam: the exemption trap

Vietnam has expanded visa-free entry for citizens of a range of countries for stays of roughly 14 to 30 days, and an eVisa is available to many more. Neither covers production work.

For filming purposes, a press or film visa is required, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs consults the Department of Immigration before entry is approved. The visa application runs in parallel with, and is linked to, the film permit — you cannot cleanly separate the two workstreams. Allow roughly a fortnight for the press visa, and longer if the permit application is still under review. Sequencing these two workstreams together is one of the first things a fixer does when planning filming in Vietnam.

Crews that arrive on tourist eVisas and attempt to shoot are the single most common enforcement problem when filming in Vietnam. Footage confiscation and equipment detention are real outcomes, not theoretical ones.

Drones, customs and equipment when filming in Vietnam

Drones. All drone activity requires registration and a permit. The operative distinction is who is flying: where a foreign operator flies the drone, a permit is required; where a Vietnamese operator flies it, the position is simpler. Applications go to the General Staff of the Vietnam People’s Army under the Ministry of National Defence. Build in weeks, not days, and expect restrictions near borders, military installations and certain coastal zones.

The practical answer on most schedules is to engage a licensed Vietnamese drone operator rather than importing a foreign pilot. It is faster, cheaper and removes an approval from the critical path — a meaningful gain when filming in Vietnam on a compressed schedule.

Customs. Vietnam accepts the ATA Carnet, which is the cleanest route for temporary import of camera, lighting and grip packages. Carnet or not, the equipment manifest should match the permit application exactly — discrepancies at the port of entry are resolved slowly.

Local kit. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City both support professional rental houses with current camera and lighting packages. For standard commercial and documentary specifications, sourcing locally avoids the customs question entirely and is usually the right call. Specialist packages — high-speed, large-format, technocrane, underwater — generally still travel in.

Locations: what filming in Vietnam gives you

The argument for filming in Vietnam is compression and contrast. Few countries put this much visual range inside this small a travel envelope, and fewer still do it at Vietnamese day rates.

• Hanoi — French colonial architecture, the Old Quarter’s density, lakes, pagodas and a street life that shoots beautifully with minimal dressing.
• Ha Long Bay and Bai Tu Long — the limestone karst seascape that most international audiences recognise instantly.
• Ninh Binh — often described as Ha Long on land; the Kong: Skull Island terrain.
• Phong Nha-Ke Bang — the world’s largest cave systems, including Son Doong, with heavily controlled access.
• Hue and Hoi An — imperial citadel architecture and lantern-lit heritage streets, both with strict heritage-site permit conditions.
• Da Nang — modern coastal city, bridges, resorts, and an increasingly capable local crew base.
• The Mekong Delta — floating markets, waterways and rural texture.
• Sapa and the northern highlands — terraced rice fields, mountain villages and ethnic minority communities, where community consent protocols matter as much as the official permit.
• Ho Chi Minh City — commercial energy, contemporary skyline, and the country’s deepest advertising production infrastructure.

Heritage sites, national parks and national relics all sit behind additional permits. Community filming in minority areas requires a consent process that a good fixer will run properly and a bad one will skip. Getting this wrong is the fastest way to have a location closed to every production that follows you.

What filming in Vietnam actually costs

With no rebate to model, the cost case for filming in Vietnam has to stand on its own — and it does.

Crew day rates sit well below Thailand, and dramatically below Australia, Japan or Korea. Accommodation, ground transport and catering are similarly competitive. On commercial and documentary work, the effective saving against a Thai schedule of equivalent scope is often in the range that a 15–20% rebate would have delivered elsewhere, which is the honest way to frame it to a client.

Against that, budget the following lines that do not appear in incentive-market schedules:

• Film officer costs — day rate, travel, accommodation, across the full schedule.
• Permit fees — charged per project rather than on a standard published tariff, and scaling with project size, location count and complexity.
• Additional permits — national parks and relics carry their own fees.
• Longer pre-production — the permit lead time is a scheduling cost even when it is not a cash cost.
• Provincial travel — a multi-province schedule multiplies the administrative layer, not just the transport line.

A rough shape for a five-day commercial

For orientation rather than quotation, a five-day commercial shoot filming in Vietnam with a small imported creative team and a local crew typically breaks down as follows: local crew and production staff will be the largest single block; equipment rental in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City a distant second; permits, film officer costs and location fees together forming a third block that is smaller in absolute terms but the most variable; and accommodation, transport and catering rounding it out. Against a Thai equivalent, the crew and accommodation lines are where the saving concentrates. Against an Australian or Japanese equivalent, the gap is not close.

The variability sits in the permit and location block. A single-city shoot with straightforward street and interior work is predictable. A schedule that touches a national park, a heritage site and two provinces is not, and that unpredictability is the real cost of filming in Vietnam without a rebate to absorb it.

Filming in Vietnam versus Thailand: the comparison that actually gets made

Almost every producer weighing filming in Vietnam is also looking at Thailand, so it is worth being direct about where the line falls.

The structural difference is the incentive. Thailand operates a formal, filed, audited rebate process with a registered Thai service company as applicant. Vietnam does not. On larger, incentive-dependent projects that gap decides the question. On commercials, documentaries and branded content where the rebate would never have been claimable anyway, Vietnam’s lower base cost and less-used locations frequently win.

There is also a creative argument that gets undersold when producers compare filming in Vietnam with Thailand: Vietnamese locations are simply less recognisable on screen than Thai equivalents. For brands and broadcasters trying to avoid the visual shorthand that Bangkok and Krabi now carry, that is worth real money.

Filming in Vietnam: frequently asked questions

Planning a shoot? Talk to a fixer on the ground

The absence of a rebate makes the operational side more important, not less: with no incentive to recover, every day lost to a permit error is a day of budget with nothing behind it. Hoodlum Film Fixers handles ministry applications, press visas, provincial coordination, drone approvals, customs clearance, crew, locations and full production management for international productions filming in Vietnam.

Next steps:

• See our Vietnam country page: permits, visas, drones and customs
• Explore our production company services in Vietnam
• Browse where we work worldwide
• Compare global film incentives

Sources

• Vietnam Law Magazine — Law on Cinematography
• Apolat Legal — Law on Cinematography of Vietnam, full text
• VietnamPlus — Draft resolution pushes 2% budget floor and tax breaks for the cultural industry
• VietnamPlus — Solutions sought to lure international film producers to Vietnam
• 2Big Production — How filming in Vietnam works
• Fixers in Vietnam — Vietnam filming incentives: grants, rebates and tax benefits
• Overgrown Productions — Thailand versus Vietnam film production