UĐ1 and UĐ2 visas: Vietnam's five-year talent route

Since 1 July 2026 Vietnam's visa rulebook has two symbols it did not have before: UĐ1 and UĐ2. They arrived through Law No. 118/2025/QH15, signed by National Assembly Chairman Tran Thanh Man on 10 December 2025. That law amends ten separate statutes tied to security and public order, and the relevant piece for travellers is a small edit to Article 8 of the Law on Entry, Exit, Transit and Residence of Foreigners. Two new clauses, 22 and 23, drop in after the e-visa clause.

The ceiling on both is five years. Put that next to what the system already offered and you see why people noticed. A tourist e-visa runs 90 days. Work visas under the LĐ1 and LĐ2 symbols are capped at two years. Investor visas under the ĐT family run one to five years depending on how much capital is on the table. For decades the only way to stay in Vietnam for years at a stretch was to hold a job, hold a company, or hold a Vietnamese spouse. UĐ1 opens a fourth lane: be very good at digital technology, and the country wants you without you first having to buy a business.

The two codes are not twins. UĐ1 goes to the person. UĐ2 goes to their family and exists only because the UĐ1 exists. If you are reading this because you want to live in Vietnam long term and you are not in the digital technology industry, the honest answer is that neither visa is aimed at you, and the rest of this page explains why before it explains how.

Article 8 clause 22, translated from the Vietnamese text, grants UĐ1 to "foreigners who are high-quality digital technology industry workforce and cases entitled to preferential treatment under the provisions of laws, resolutions of the National Assembly, and resolutions of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly."

That sentence defines two tracks. Track one is the digital technology phrase, "nhân lực công nghiệp công nghệ số chất lượng cao." Track two is a designation route: anyone that the National Assembly or its Standing Committee decides by resolution deserves preferential treatment. Track two is the escape hatch. It lets the government add new professional groups later without reopening the law, which is the stated reason the criteria were left vague.

Left vague is the important part. Lawmakers considered hard-coding the tests into the legal text: degree levels, years of experience, project size, investment value, contribution to the economy. A government submission argued that fixing those thresholds now would make them expensive to widen later. So the law names the category and skips the checklist.

And here is the problem nobody selling this visa mentions

As of this writing, in September 2026, the Ministry of Public Security has still not published an implementing decree, a circular, a fee schedule, or a standard application form for the general UĐ1 pathway. The category exists in law. The administrative machinery to process an ordinary application does not, at least not yet.

What that means in practice: if you are the founder of a software company in Nha Trang and you want to apply tomorrow, there is no counter to walk into with a document list. Applicants outside the financial centre framework are still directed to older instruments, including the five-year temporary residence card route for high-quality digital technology personnel that already existed before this reform.

Watch vanban.chinhphu.vn and the immigration department's own portal. When the decree lands, it will carry the eligibility tests, the forms and the fee table in one document.

Article 8 clause 23 is short. UĐ2 goes to the spouse and to children under 18 of a foreigner who holds a UĐ1. That is the whole list. Parents do not qualify. Adult children do not qualify. Siblings do not qualify. An unmarried partner does not qualify, however long you have lived together. If your situation is anything other than a registered marriage or a minor child, the family route closed before you got to the counter.

UĐ2 also has no independent life. It is granted because a UĐ1 exists, and it follows that visa's fate. Cancel the UĐ1, or let it run out without renewal, and the family status goes with it. In the financial centre regime, where the rules are written out in detail, a UĐ2 card is valid to the exact remaining term of the UĐ1 card it hangs off, so a family's residence rises and falls as one unit.

Two lines in Article 9 that will bite someone

Both visas sit under Article 9 clause 6, which caps the symbols LS, ĐT1, ĐT2, UĐ1 and UĐ2 at no more than five years. Note the wording. Not exceeding five years is a ceiling, not a promise. An officer can issue three years. Nobody has published a schedule of how long a given profile gets.

Then there is clause 8, which applies to every visa in the law: the visa must be at least 30 days shorter than the passport, or the travel document, it is stamped into. So a five-year UĐ1 needs a passport with more than five years and 30 days left on it. Most passports run ten years, so this is usually fine. It matters if you renewed recently and lost time, or if you hold a passport from a country with a shorter standard validity. Check your expiry date before you plan a five-year stay around it. Renew first if it is close.

Here is the part that should interest anyone who has spent a decade of their life on sleeper buses to Moc Bai. The visa ceiling is five years. The residence card ceiling is not.

Law 118/2025/QH15 also rewrote Article 38, the article that lists who may hold a temporary residence card. It added UĐ1 and UĐ2 holders to that list. The same amendment sets the duration for cards bearing the symbols ĐT1, UĐ1 and UĐ2 at no more than ten years. Before this, the general rule for a temporary residence card was a two-year cap per renewal cycle.

Read those two numbers side by side. A visa that runs five years, attached to a card that can run ten. A card lets you stay inside the country without leaving at all, without a stamp, without a border gate, and without the 500 km each way between Nha Trang and Tay Ninh. For the audience this website usually writes for, that is the entire ballgame. Somebody holding a ten-year UĐ1 residence card has no reason to ever book a visa run again.

Two cautions before you get excited. First, that ten-year figure describes the category ceiling and the financial centre regime, not a promise for every applicant. Second, eligibility for the card depends on the visa, and the visa depends on criteria that, for the general pathway, are still unpublished. The card does not exist in isolation. Nothing here lets you skip the queue described in the previous section.

There is one UĐ1 pathway where the forms, the agency and the clock are all written down: the International Financial Centre.

Decree 327/2025/NĐ-CP, signed on 18 December 2025 and in force since 17 January 2026, sets an immigration regime for foreigners working at organisations headquartered at the Vietnam International Financial Centre, in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang. It was issued under National Assembly Resolution 222/2025/QH15. Article 3 defines who counts. Article 4 then grants a visa, or a temporary residence card, carrying the UD1 symbol with a validity of up to ten years, on the proposal of the centre's Executive Body.

Three things make this regime different from the general pathway.

The clock. Processing is capped at three working days from receipt of a complete dossier, against the five to fifteen working days typical for an ordinary residence card.

The gatekeeper. Your application does not go through a provincial immigration desk. It goes through the Executive Body, which appraises and recommends. That concentrates the paperwork with one contact point and shifts the burden of classification onto your employer, which is why you should settle which category you fall into before drafting anything.

The employer. The four categories the decree points at are key investors, experts, managers and highly skilled workers, with the detailed standards drawn from Decree 219/2025/NĐ-CP. Certain categories are exempt from the standard work permit requirement, and the card is then both your residence document and the legal basis for your employment.

There is also a permanent residence door. After three consecutive years at an entity headquartered at the centre, an applicant in the eligible categories can be considered for permanent residence. The Minister of Public Security decides within two months, extendable by one more if verification is needed.

One formatting note, since it confuses people comparing documents: the decree prints the symbol as UD1, the law as UĐ1. Same visa, different rendering of the Vietnamese letter Đ in English translations.

Khanh Hoa's own provincial police published a briefing on the new categories in August 2026, so local awareness is there. The operative fact for us is simpler: the International Financial Centre regime runs in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang. Nha Trang is not one of them, and there is no sign of that changing.

So the honest breakdown for the people this site actually serves.

If you are a remote worker, a freelancer, an online teacher, a retiree, a small business owner or a long-stay tourist, UĐ1 is not your visa. It was never aimed at you, and the "digital" in the title does not mean what the marketing around it implies. Remote work for a foreign client is not the high-quality digital technology industry workforce the law describes. For that life, the 90-day multiple-entry e-visa remains the tool, topped up with a run to Moc Bai every three months or so.

If you are an engineer, researcher or technical lead who genuinely fits the digital technology category, then your realistic route today is an employer headquartered at the financial centre, not a solo application filed from Tran Phu. That means the job comes first and the visa follows. The upside is real: three-day processing, a residence card valid up to ten years, and an end to border runs entirely for you and your family.

Either way, the visa situation in Nha Trang on the ground has not changed this year. Confirm by 20:00 the night before, get picked up between 02:30 and 05:00 depending on where you are on the coast, cross at Moc Bai around midday, back by 21:00.

Where to go next

If you are here because your 90 days are nearly up and UĐ1 was a long shot, start with the 2026 cost page, which breaks the 1.5M transport-only seat, the 5M Standard bundle and the 9.5M private car into line items in both VND and USD. The 90-day e-visa guide covers what the visa desk does once your exit stamp lands at the border.

Weighing the two long-stay approaches side by side? Visa run versus visa extension lays out the honest comparison, including why an e-visa cannot be extended inside the country and what a temporary residence card actually requires. For the residence card route in detail, see temporaryresidencecard.com, and for the longer five-year picture 5yearvisa.com.

Coming from somewhere else? Ho Chi Minh City runs the shortest version of the Moc Bai trip, Da Nang and Da Lat have their own corridors, and the network city comparison lines all of them up.

Booking is a WhatsApp message to +84 369 308 237. Confirm by 20:00 the night before and your pickup time comes back the same evening. Payment on arrival, free cancellation up to 24 hours out.