Payroll 2026: the legal changes and how to configure your HRMS

Three legal documents shape payroll 2026 in Vietnam, and all three have already been issued: Decree 293/2025/ND-CP on the regional minimum wage, Resolution 110/2025/UBTVQH15 on personal income tax deductions, and the 2024 Social Insurance Law, in force since mid-2025. The short answer for anyone searching: from 1 January 2026 the regional minimum wage rises 7.2% on average, and the personal deduction rises to VND 15.5 million per month. The work to do in December is to review the parameters in your HRMS, run one payroll cycle in parallel, and only then publish. This article walks through each milestone, the places systems commonly get it wrong, and what to look for when selecting HR software for a large organisation.

Three legal milestones behind payroll 2026

The tricky part is not the content of each document but the fact that their application dates differ. Two take effect on 1 January 2026 but are back-dated differently, while the third has been running since 1 July 2025.

• Regional minimum wage. Decree 293/2025/ND-CP was issued by the Government on 10 November 2025 and takes effect on 1 January 2026. Monthly minimums: Region I VND 5,310,000; Region II VND 4,730,000; Region III VND 4,140,000; Region IV VND 3,700,000. The corresponding hourly minimums are VND 25,500, 22,700, 20,000 and 17,800. The average increase is 7.2%, or VND 250,000 to 350,000 per month depending on the region.
• Personal deduction. Resolution 110/2025/UBTVQH15 was passed by the Standing Committee of the National Assembly on 17 October 2025. It raises the taxpayer deduction from VND 11 to 15.5 million per month (VND 186 million per year) and the deduction per dependant from VND 4.4 to 6.2 million per month. It takes effect on 1 January 2026 and applies from the 2026 tax period, replacing Resolution 954/2020/UBTVQH14.
• Social insurance base. The 2024 Social Insurance Law, No. 41/2024/QH15, was passed on 29 June 2024 and took effect on 1 July 2025. It replaces the base salary concept with a reference level set by the Government (Article 7) and widens the group of employees subject to compulsory contributions. We covered its impact on HR systems in what the 2024 Social Insurance Law changes in an HRMS.

This is why the January 2026 cycle is harder than a one-off change of two numbers. January payroll must apply the new minimums and the new deductions when withholding tax, while any back-pay or adjustment relating to December 2025 must still use the old parameters.

Why payroll parameters must be configurable by effective date

Many payroll systems in Vietnam still hard-code these figures: the VND 11 million deduction sits inside an Excel formula, the regional minimum sits in a source-code constant, sometimes even in a column name. That works for exactly one year, and every legal change becomes a change to the system rather than a change to configuration.

The cost is not only the effort of editing. It is that payroll does not only compute the present.

• Recomputing the past. In a dispute, an audit or a tax finalisation, HR has to reconstruct the payroll of a month that has already closed. If the parameter was overwritten, the system computes June 2025 with the 2026 deduction and produces a figure that does not match the payslip already issued.
• Back-pay across periods. A December 2025 amount paid out in January 2026 must use the parameters of the period it arose in, not the period it was paid in. A system with a single set of "current" parameters cannot express this.
• Mid-year effective dates. Not every change lands on 1 January. The 2024 Social Insurance Law took effect on 1 July 2025, splitting the financial year. Without effective dates on parameters, every mid-year change becomes manual work.

Configuring payroll parameters by effective date means every legally defined figure — regional minimum, personal deduction, contribution rates, contribution ceilings — is stored together with the period it applies to. When computing a cycle, the system picks the value in force for that cycle. This is the minimum bar for any payroll software serving a few hundred employees or more, and the first question to put to a vendor.

Preparing the first payroll of the year

Preparation should start in early December, not late January. The sequence below has worked in large organisations and is ordered by dependency.

• Inventory the parameters. List every legally defined figure currently held in the system, where it lives and what effective date it carries. The list is usually longer than expected, because some parameters sit outside the payroll software — in allowance spreadsheets maintained by individual divisions, for instance.
• Re-check regional assignments. This is the step most often skipped. The list of localities for Regions I to IV is in the appendix to Decree 293/2025/ND-CP. Article 3 also sets out the rules: a branch applies the minimum of the locality where it operates; a unit inside an industrial park, export processing zone or hi-tech park that spans localities with different minimums applies the highest; a locality newly created from several localities with different minimums also applies the highest. Multi-site employers should re-verify their whole unit list.
• Re-check dependant registrations. The new deduction only works correctly if dependant registrations are current and no dependant is claimed by two taxpayers. Year-end is a sensible time to ask employees to reconfirm.
• Run in parallel. Compute the January cycle twice, once with old parameters and once with new, then compare per-employee deltas. Every delta must be explainable by one of the three changes above. Anything unexplained is a configuration error, not rounding.
• Reconcile with the social insurance agency. Match your internal headcount, contribution bases and participation periods against what has been declared. Doing this before publishing is far cheaper than adjusting afterwards.
• Publish and communicate. Issue payslips with a short note on what changed. Employees who see their withholding drop without explanation generate an avoidable wave of questions for HR.

Where systems commonly get it wrong

The same cluster of errors recurs across payroll reviews.

• Mixing monthly and hourly minimums. For employees paid weekly, daily, by piece or by contract output, Article 4 of Decree 293/2025/ND-CP requires conversion to a monthly or hourly figure that is not below the corresponding minimum. Many systems check only the monthly figure.
• Applying the headquarters region to everyone. An employer with a plant in a province and an office in a city easily applies one blanket rate to all staff.
• Applying the deduction by payment date. The new deduction applies from the 2026 tax period. Income belonging to the 2025 tax period but paid in 2026 must be assigned to the right period.
• Timekeeping data out of step. Wrong payroll usually starts in attendance data rather than formulas: night shifts crossing midnight, compensatory days off, overtime approved after the cycle is locked. If your timekeeping integration is a manual Excel export, errors are near certain in the first cycle of the year, when adjustment volume peaks.
• No immutable record of published cycles. A system that lets a closed cycle be edited without an audit trail turns every later reconciliation into an argument.

HRMS selection criteria for large organisations

For an organisation of several thousand staff, HRMS selection criteria look nothing like those of a small company. A pleasant interface does not rescue a wrong payroll cycle. Seven points worth putting on the scorecard:

• Effective-dated parameters. Ask the vendor to demonstrate live: create a new deduction effective 1 January 2026, then recompute an August 2025 cycle and show the result is unchanged.
• Permissions scoped by data, not just by function. Regional HR sees only its own region; executive pay is segregated. Function-level roles alone are insufficient.
• A complete audit trail. Who changed what, when, before and after values, with a log that cannot be edited. This underpins reconciliation and any response to an inspection.
• Two-way timekeeping integration. Attendance data flows straight into payroll, and payroll approval flows back as status into the timekeeping system, with no intermediate file exchange.
• Insurance and tax reports in the required formats. Headcount change reports, withholding schedules and contribution adjustment filings should export to form, not be rebuilt by hand each month.
• HR data is personal data. Employee files hold ID numbers, family details, bank accounts, sometimes health data. Personal Data Protection Law No. 91/2025/QH15 takes effect on 1 January 2026 and places clear obligations on the controller. An HR system outside the organisation's control makes those obligations hard to evidence, as the supply-chain SaaS data exposure we analysed illustrated.
• Deployment model. Whether the HR system sits on your infrastructure or the vendor's cloud is a data sovereignty decision, not only a cost one. We compared the two paths in on-premise or cloud under data compliance rules.

If you are considering folding HR into one platform alongside correspondence, digital signing and approval workflows, what office digitisation and eOffice actually cover describes the usual scope of such a system.

Conclusion

All three documents are issued and their application dates are settled; the rest is HR and systems work. The action worth taking now is not editing two numbers but checking whether your current system lets parameters change by effective date at all. If the answer is no, every future legal change will be another round of code edits.

The HR module of Tetra eOffice computes payroll and social insurance against Vietnamese legal parameters, each one carrying its own validity period, running on your own infrastructure. To review your configuration before the January cycle, book a consultation.

This article is for reference; organisations should check the current text of each document before applying it.