If you came looking for a Vietnam visa approval letter, here's the short version, and it will probably save you money: you almost certainly don't need one. The approval letter, and the stamping fee that went with it, belong to visa on arrival. That route has been largely replaced by the eVisa since 2023. We don't process approval letters, and we point every traveler at the eVisa instead, which costs us business on this exact search term and is still the honest answer. This post explains what the letter actually was, why two separate payments confused so many people, what "stamping fee" means today, and what you receive now instead.
The Approval Letter: What It Actually Was
Under visa on arrival, you didn't get your visa before you flew. You got permission to be given one when you landed, and that permission was the approval letter.
The sequence went like this. You filled in a form on an agent's website and paid that agent. The agent lodged the request with Vietnam's Immigration Department. A few working days later, a pre-approval letter came back as a PDF, issued by Immigration, naming you and listing your passport details. You printed it and carried it with you. At the airport in Vietnam, before you reached the passport control desks, you queued at a landing visa counter, handed over the letter and your passport, paid the stamping fee, and waited for a visa to be put into your passport. Only then did you join the immigration line like everyone else.
That is what people still picture when they search for an approval letter, and it worked well enough for years. It also had a specific failure mode: everything that could go wrong went wrong after you had already flown. A name that didn't match, a letter that didn't cover your arrival date, a long queue at 11pm, or no cash on you. None of those is comfortable to solve in a foreign airport with your bags still on the belt.
⚠️ If you're flying to Vietnam as a tourist, you probably don't need an approval letter at all. The document most travelers now need is an eVisa, which arrives by email before you leave home. If you're reading this because a search result promised you a letter, the rest of this post is the alternative, not a detour.
Two Payments, and Nobody Explained the Second One
Here is the detail that caused most of the confusion, and it's worth being precise about: visa on arrival involved two separate payments to two separate parties.
The first was the agent's service fee, paid online, in advance, to a private company. That covered lodging the request and producing the letter. The second was the government stamping fee, paid in cash at the landing visa counter after you landed, to Vietnamese authorities, for the visa itself.
Plenty of travelers only ever saw the first. They paid an agent, received a letter, assumed the visa was paid for, and then met a cash-only counter at the far end of a long flight. That is the classic surprise at the border, and the most common complaint of the whole visa-on-arrival era. Two payments, two recipients, and only one of them ever showed up on the checkout screen.
August 15, 2023: The Day the eVisa Opened to Everyone
The reason the approval letter has faded is not that it was banned. It's that the eVisa got dramatically better, twice.
The first change was in 2023. Under Resolution 127/NQ-CP, dated August 14, 2023, Vietnam opened the eVisa to citizens of all countries and territories from August 15, extended the maximum stay from 30 days to 90, and allowed multiple entry as well as single entry (Embassy of Vietnam in the United States). Overnight, the thing visa on arrival was mainly used for, a longer stay or a second entry without a trip to an embassy, was available online.
The second change was in 2025. Resolution 389/NQ-CP of December 2, 2025 added 41 international checkpoints to the eVisa list, taking the total from 42 to 83: 17 airports, 27 land border gates and 39 seaports (VietnamPlus, Vietnam News Agency). That matters, because visa on arrival was an air-travel product. If you were crossing from Cambodia by road or arriving by ship, the letter was never an option for you in the first place.
You apply for the eVisa yourself at evisa.gov.vn, and the state processing time published there is 3 working days. What arrives is a PDF. There's no counter, no queue before the queue, and no cash. If you want the wider picture of how Vietnam's entry rules have moved in the last three years, our guide to Vietnam's visa policy and recent rule changes tracks the resolutions in order.
Then and Now: The Two Routes Side by Side
This is the comparison worth having in front of you before you pay anyone anything.
| What You're Comparing | Visa on Arrival (the Approval Letter) | eVisa (Today) |
|---|---|---|
| Where you apply | Through an agent, who lodged it with the Immigration Department | Online at evisa.gov.vn, or through an agent who submits it for you |
| What you receive | A pre-approval letter, often covering several travelers at once | A PDF eVisa in your own name |
| Where the visa is issued | At a landing visa counter, after you land | By email, before you fly |
| Where you pay the government | In cash, at the airport counter | Online by card, when you apply |
| What the government charges | A stamping fee, collected on arrival | $25 single entry, $50 multiple entry |
| Where it works | A limited list of airports, and we could not confirm the current one | 83 checkpoints: 17 airports, 27 land borders, 39 seaports |
Read down the "eVisa" column and the pattern is obvious. Every step that used to happen in an airport after a flight now happens at a desk before one.
Our Position: We Don't Process Approval Letters
We should be direct about our own position here, because it is unusual for a page like this one.
We don't process visa-on-arrival letters anymore, and we recommend the eVisa to every applicant. That's stated plainly in our FAQs, and it's not a soft preference. We stopped because the eVisa is better for the traveler on every axis that matters: you hold the document before you board, it covers land and sea crossings as well as airports, nobody asks you for cash in a terminal, and if something is wrong with your details you find out while you're still at home and can do something about it.
Saying so on a page about approval letters is commercially awkward. This is a search term with real volume, attached to a product we deliberately don't sell, and the honest answer sends a share of readers to a route where they may not need us at all. We'd rather write that than take an order for the wrong thing. If you want to see what we do instead, how our application process works sets out each step, including the review pass where we catch the mistakes that would otherwise come back from Immigration.
⚠️ Nobody should be asking you for cash at a counter if you hold an eVisa. The government fee is paid online when you apply, and the document you carry is already a visa. If you land holding a PDF eVisa and someone asks you for an on-the-spot "stamping fee", that is not part of the eVisa process.
The Stamping Fee Today: $25, $50, and What Sits on Top
The phrase "stamping fee" still has a modern equivalent, and it's simply the government's own charge for the visa.
Vietnam's eVisa fee is $25 for a single-entry electronic visa and $50 for a multiple-entry one, stated on the state eVisa portal, which also notes that the fee is not refunded if an application is refused (Vietnam National Electronic Visa portal). You pay it by card, online, at the moment you submit. It isn't paid in cash, it isn't paid on arrival, and no separate charge waits for you at the border.
Now the arithmetic on our side, which we publish for the same reason we published this whole page. Our 1-month single-entry eVisa is $54 per applicant, and the $25 government fee is inside that number. So $29 is our service: the review pass, the correction loop, the submission, and a human who answers when something goes sideways. The three longer options run $84, $94 and $104, again with the government fee included, and our pricing page shows the full table alongside the speed tiers.
You can also skip us entirely, apply yourself, and pay only the $25 or $50. We say that on our pricing page too. Both choices are reasonable, but make yours knowing what the difference buys. One thing nobody can sell you is a faster decision from Immigration: processing is their call, not ours.
Where Approval Letter Language Still Turns Up
The term hasn't vanished, and it's worth knowing where you'll still meet it, so you can tell a live use from a stale one.
It survives in embassy paperwork for visas issued the traditional way. The Vietnamese Embassy in the United States, for example, lists a "Visa Approval Letter of Immigration Department in Vietnam (if already granted)" among the documents you may submit when applying in person or by mail (Embassy of Vietnam in the United States). It also survives around sponsored and pre-arranged categories, where an entity in Vietnam obtains approval for you before a visa is issued. Those are a different animal from tourist visa on arrival, and our post on Vietnam business and work visas covers where sponsorship genuinely comes into it.
And it survives, heavily, in marketing. Agents still advertise letters, and search results still promise them, which is most of why you're reading this.
⚠️ Treat any visa-on-arrival airport count you read, including ours, as unconfirmed. We could not find a Vietnamese government page that states whether visa on arrival remains available in 2026, or at how many airports. Commercial sites publish numbers, they don't all agree, and none of them cites a government source. If your plan depends on visa on arrival specifically, verify it at evisa.gov.vn or with a Vietnamese embassy before you book, and don't take our word or anyone else's.
The PDF You Receive, and What to Do With It
Once your eVisa is approved, you get a PDF by email. That's the document. Our own customers call it "the PDF", and that's the right word for it, because it isn't a letter asking a counter to issue you something. It is the visa.
Print it and keep a copy on your phone. The printed copy is the one that matters, because a flat battery at a border crossing is an avoidable problem. Then check it against your passport, character by character: family name, given names, date of birth, passport number. A single wrong letter on a travel document is not a small thing, and the time to find it is at your kitchen table, not at a gate.
Two more practical points. Your passport needs to be valid for at least 6 months beyond your arrival date and to hold at least 2 blank pages (UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office). And your actual point of entry has to be one of the 83 checkpoints on the list, so if you're crossing at a small land gate, check it appears there before you commit to the route. The checkpoint field has since been removed from the issued eVisa itself, so you aren't locked to the exact gate you nominated on the form, but the one you use still has to be on the list. If you're only passing through Vietnam on your way somewhere else, our guide to the Vietnam transit visa covers when you need a visa at all.
One Applicant, One PDF: The End of the Group Email
There's one more thing worth saying about approval letters, because it's a real reason travelers were uneasy about them.
Approval letters were batch documents. Immigration issued one letter covering a group of applications, so the letter you received often listed strangers: their names, their passport numbers, their dates of birth, sitting in your inbox alongside your own. Travelers noticed, and they were right to be annoyed. The complaint still appears in public reviews of visa agents, ours included, years after the practice stopped being how most people enter Vietnam.
The eVisa doesn't work that way, and our terms state it plainly: each applicant receives their own individual eVisa linked to their own passport. Order for a family of four and four separate documents come back, each tied to one passport. It's a quiet improvement rather than a feature anybody advertises, but if the letter made you uneasy, that's the answer.
A Few Parting Notes on a Term That's Fading Out
If you take one thing from this page, take the order of operations. The old route was pay, fly, then get your visa. The current route is apply, get your visa, then fly. Everything else follows from that.
So: check first whether you need a visa at all, because a number of nationalities enter Vietnam visa-free and the length varies by passport. If you do need one, the eVisa is the route, the government's charge is $25 or $50 depending on entries, and you'll pay it online rather than in cash at an airport counter.
Standing at immigration in Hanoi or Da Nang with a printed PDF in hand, you'll see why we retired the word "letter". There's nothing left for a letter to do.