The Vietnamese e-visa is genuinely straightforward to apply for, and the application takes perhaps twenty minutes. A few of its fields are more binding than they look, though, and the mistakes worth knowing about are the ones you cannot correct once you have landed.
Use the official site and nothing else
Vietnam's e-visa is issued by the Immigration Department, and the fee is $25 for single entry or $50 for multiple entry, paid by bank transfer. The department runs it on two official domains, evisa.gov.vn and thithucdientu.gov.vn; evisa.gov.vn is the one to use. Beyond those, you are dealing with an intermediary, and the market around this particular visa is unusually aggressive.
Plenty of those intermediaries are legitimate agents doing real work. The problem is that their markup is rarely presented as a markup — sites styled to look governmental will charge several times the state fee for submitting the same form you could submit yourself. Paying an agent is a choice; paying one without realising you had the option is not.
Have your passport scan, a passport-style photograph, your travel dates, your intended port of entry and your first night's address ready. The form will not let you save your way around a missing field, and sessions time out.
Choosing your dates and duration
Vietnam usually grants exactly the period you ask for rather than defaulting to the maximum, so the duration field deserves more thought than it looks like it does. Validity runs up to 90 days, but asking for three weeks gets you three weeks even if you later wish you had more.
Build in a buffer at both ends. Arriving a day or two later than planned is fine as long as you are inside the validity window — what you cannot do is arrive before it opens or leave after it closes, and neither is fixable from the airport.
One rule you can safely ignore
Your e-visa's validity has to be at least 30 days shorter than your passport's remaining validity. A 90-day visa therefore needs about four months of validity — and since Vietnam separately requires six months at entry, anyone eligible to enter already clears this. It sits in the official FAQ and it worries people who find it, which is the only reason it is here.
Picking your port of entry
The application asks which border gate you will use, and that answer is binding. Your entry and exit locations must match what you selected, so an e-visa naming Noi Bai in Hanoi will not get you through Tan Son Nhat in Ho Chi Minh City.
Two different rules are at work here and they are easy to confuse. The first is which gates accept an e-visa at all: 83 of them since December 2025, including every international airport in Vietnam, so flying in is never the problem. The second is the one above — your selected port is binding whichever gate you choose. Overland crossings into Cambodia and Laos are where the first rule still bites, because many crossings are not on the list.
Paying and waiting
Processing normally runs 3 to 5 working days from the point the Immigration Department has both your completed application and your payment. Weekends and Vietnamese public holidays are not working days, and Tet shuts the calendar down for a week or more.
Do not treat that window as a guarantee. Vietnam's own embassy in India publishes a substantially longer range, and the honest planning advice is to apply several weeks out. One thing worth knowing: the US Embassy states that it cannot change your e-visa information or speed your application up, so your own consulate is not a shortcut if it stalls.
Check the document before you celebrate
When your e-visa arrives, read every field against your passport, character by character. A mismatch in your name, passport number or date of birth can mean being refused entry on arrival, and the State Department warns you may then have to pay a travel agency at the airport for an expensive visa sponsorship — a remedy that is neither guaranteed nor cheap.
Then print it. The official instruction is to carry a printed copy alongside your passport, and a sheet of paper is a cheap hedge against a flat phone battery in an immigration queue.
The separate form you also need
Vietnam runs an online pre-arrival declaration independently of the visa, filed at the Immigration Department's portal no earlier than three days before you arrive. It is free and takes about ten minutes. The State Department describes it as required for air arrivals on a non-Vietnamese passport; Vietnam's own portal frames it as advisory. Do it regardless.
What you cannot do later
An e-visa cannot be renewed or extended from inside Vietnam. The Immigration Department allows in-person extensions for other visa categories, but the electronic visa is not one of them, which makes the duration you choose at application the final word.
Anyone selling you an e-visa extension is therefore selling a service the government says does not exist. If you genuinely need longer, the answer is a different visa type arranged before you travel, not a fix applied once you are there. That is worth knowing before you choose a duration, because it is one of the places where the order you plan things in matters — something Vietnam, End to End works through in full.
FAQ
Where do you apply for a Vietnam e-visa?
Vietnam's e-visa is issued by the Immigration Department, and the fee is $25 for single entry or $50 for multiple entry, paid by bank transfer. The department runs it on two official domains, evisa.gov.vn and thithucdientu.gov.vn; evisa.gov.vn is the one to use. Beyond those, you are dealing with an intermediary, and the market around this particular visa is unusually aggressive.
How long should you ask for on a Vietnam e-visa?
Vietnam usually grants exactly the period you ask for rather than defaulting to the maximum, so the duration field deserves more thought than it looks like it does. Validity runs up to 90 days, but asking for three weeks gets you three weeks even if you later wish you had more.
Does the port of entry on your e-visa matter?
The application asks which border gate you will use, and that answer is binding. Your entry and exit locations must match what you selected, so an e-visa naming Noi Bai in Hanoi will not get you through Tan Son Nhat in Ho Chi Minh City.
