Eight decrees, three channels: reading the IFC in English

Correction, dated 30 August 2026

This source map was updated after a fresh source search. Decrees 326 and 328 are not VIFC Da Nang-only: English LuatVietnam pages were located for both. Decision 05/QĐ-HĐĐHTTTC is a later Operating Regulation, not one of the eight Government decrees. Its Annexes I–II now supply procedure and criteria for business sectors outside finance and banking; other sectors follow the applicable licensing route.

All eight decrees behind Vietnam's International Financial Centre now have published English texts. That was not true in the morning of 3 August 2026 and it was true by the afternoon, which says more about searching than about Vietnamese law.

Three things are worth knowing before you go looking. In the eight VIFC-DN decree PDFs re-fetched on 20 August 2026, no translator credit or translation-certification statement was located. That dated, source-specific observation does not establish that no certified English version exists elsewhere. Most of them are not where you would first look. And the government's own copies, the ones that actually govern, are scans without a text layer, so you can read them and cite them but you cannot search them.

Here is the map.

What was actually issued

Resolution 222/2025/QH15 is the enabling instrument, passed by the National Assembly on 27 June 2025 and in force from 1 September 2025. It authorises the Centre and leaves nearly all the operative detail to the Government.

That detail arrived on 18 December 2025 as Decrees 323 through 330:

Separately, the Law on the Specialised Court at the International Financial Centre came into force on 1 January 2026.

No part of that set is outstanding. Anyone still describing any of these as "expected" is describing December 2025.

Being signed is not the same as being in force. Seven of the eight commenced on signature. Decree 327 alone did not, taking effect on 17 January 2026. Those dates come from the Government Portal's own commencement record rather than from my reading of each commencement clause. The Regulation Tracker carries issuance, entry into force and English-text availability as three separate signals. Every time two of them shared a column, this site published an error.

Where the English texts actually are

Three channels, three provenance stories.

The commercial databases. LuatVietnam and Thư Viện Pháp Luật carry their own translations of some instruments, behind their own access tiers. Those translations are maintained by the databases; their translator and certification status must be checked against the relevant record.

The operator's own site. The Da Nang Executive Agency publishes all eight English decree texts itself, at vifcdanang.vn/legislation.htm. A fresh search on 30 August 2026 also located LuatVietnam English pages for Decrees 326 and 328. For Decree 330, VIFC Da Nang remains the only English text I located in that search. Who translated the VIFC files, and against what standard? In the eight VIFC-DN decree PDFs re-fetched on 20 August 2026, no translator credit or translation-certification statement was located. An answer from the Executive Agency would settle it in a sentence.

The government's own copies are the signed Vietnamese PDFs on datafiles.chinhphu.vn. They are the citation authority, and they are 200 dpi scans with no text layer: citable and checkable by eye, not searchable.

The caveats that come with the texts

For the eight VIFC-DN decree PDFs re-fetched on 20 August 2026, no translator credit or translation-certification statement was located. That observation does not establish that no certified English version exists elsewhere, and each channel carries its own condition.

• The VIFC-DN decree files carry no credit. They are reading copies until

someone establishes who translated them and how. Where an English text and the Vietnamese differ, the Vietnamese governs.

• Thư Viện Pháp Luật asserts copyright over its Resolution 222 translation.

Reading copy only, not for republication and not for lengthy quotation.

• The commercial databases gate part of what they show: bilingual views,

downloads, effect-status metadata. Thư Viện Pháp Luật additionally blocks automated requests entirely.

Neither database is the Government. If a discrepancy between an English translation and the Vietnamese text ever matters to a decision you are making, the Vietnamese governs, and that is the point at which you want a Vietnamese-qualified lawyer rather than a blog.

Why an alert is not a translation

Decree 324 is the one that was worth finding. It carries the corporate income tax treatment, the personal income tax position, the accounting-standards question, and — less discussed and more consequential — the registration and recognition procedure for IFC membership. The decree also sets the registration and recognition procedure for IFC membership.

Advisory summaries described it as nine chapters and seventy-six articles. Now that it is readable, it is nine chapters and seventy-seven articles.

That single-article discrepancy is not important in itself. What it indicates is. On the one instrument where a foreign operator most needs the exact wording, English readers were working from client alerts, and the alerts were slightly wrong about the shape of the document they were summarising.

The alerts are good. I use them. But an alert is not a translation, and the difference matters more than it looks:

• An alert tells you what changed for the firm's clients. A decree tells you

what applies to everyone, including the definitions, the exclusions, and the conditions attached to each incentive. The conditions are the part that gets compressed out.

• **Alerts agree with each other, which reads as corroboration and often is

not.** When six firms publish within three weeks of one signing, much of the overlap comes from the same government announcement, not from six independent readings.

• Nobody's client alert leads with what the decree fails to settle. That is

not a criticism. It is a description of what the format is for.

A correction, dated

The first draft of this post, finished on the morning of 3 August 2026, said four of the eight decrees had no English translation I could find. A few hours later all four turned up: three on the legislation page the Da Nang operator runs (the same page that already carried the five I had found), and Decree 324 on LuatVietnam, where it had been sitting.

The hole was in the search, not in the law. That distinction is the reason this site exists, and I had just failed at it in public. This post now carries the correction with a date.

Method

Compiled 3 August 2026. Issuance dates cross-checked against the Government News portal, Tilleke & Gibbins' 5 January 2026 summary and Baker McKenzie's January 2026 note. Commencement dates are the Government Portal's own record. I have not read every commencement clause, and the English text of Decree 329 leaves its date blank. The four texts located on 3 August were fetched directly from vifcdanang.vn/legislation.htm. Their translator and certification status has not been established by this publication, so anything built on them stays provisional until second-sourced against the Vietnamese. Decree 323 was read in full. The others were confirmed as published pages. The source register at /sources/ lists the public sources used by this site; entries without a captured publication date are labelled rather than approximated.

Research and operational planning only. Not legal, tax, immigration, securities, investment, banking, payments, digital-asset, licensing, accounting, labor, or regulated financial advice. Formal decisions should be reviewed by qualified professionals in the relevant jurisdiction.

Spotted an error? Tell me — corrections run in the post, with my name on them.