Vietnamese New Year falls on 6 February 2027. The immigration offices close for the better part of a week, e-visa processing stops, and every bus out of the city sells out. Here is how the calendar actually bites.
Tet 2027 lands on Saturday 6 February, the first day of the lunar year Dinh Mui, the Year of the Goat. The date nobody argues about is the day itself. The argument is over how many days off surround it.
As of late September 2026 the Ministry of Home Affairs has two options in front of the Prime Minister, and neither is final. Option one gives seven straight days off, Thursday 4 February to Wednesday 10 February, which is the 28th day of the twelfth lunar month through the fifth day of the new year. It needs no working-day swap, and the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism have all backed it.
Option two stretches the break to ten days, Friday 5 February to Sunday 14 February, by swapping Friday 12 February for Saturday 27 February. Both versions cover the same five statutory Tet days. The annual schedule is normally announced between October and December of the year before, so the firm answer arrives in that window. For a visa run it barely matters which option wins. The blackout starts a day earlier or later, and your deadline moves with it.
The 2026 holiday is the useful precedent. Tet day fell on Tuesday 17 February, and the Vietnam Immigration Department, along with Vietnamese embassies and consulates abroad, stopped processing from 14 to 22 February. Nine consecutive days. Applications filed near that window sat untouched until offices reopened, then queued behind everything else.
The confusion people hit at the border comes from treating the gate and the office as the same thing. They are not.
Land border gates stay open. Moc Bai, Xa Mat, Lao Bao, Huu Nghi, Ha Tien, Le Thanh: they run every day of the year, including Tet day, because trade and freight do not stop for the holiday. If you already hold a valid Vietnamese e-visa or visa, a run on 5 February works exactly like a run on 25 January. Click through to the city desk pages for gate windows, since each crossing keeps its own hours.
What closes is the administration. Immigration offices shut for the statutory break, which in 2026 meant nine days. During that period no extensions are issued, no new approvals are written, and the counters at the gate work with skeleton staff, so the queue moves slower than usual. The e-visa portal stays reachable and will happily accept a filing. It will not review it. Vietnam's e-visa processing runs on working days, Monday to Friday, so those nine days simply fall out of the clock.
Airport visa-on-arrival desks are government counters, so they close on the same holidays as the offices. If your plan depends on landing at Tan Son Nhat or Noi Bai and collecting a stamp at the VOA desk, a Tet arrival is the wrong plan. An e-visa already approved and printed does not have that problem, because the arrival stamp is handled by the immigration counter, which stays staffed at the airport around the clock.
Transport is the second squeeze, and it is worse than the closure. Domestic flights, trains and long-distance coaches sell out weeks ahead as the whole country travels home at once, and holiday pricing on the routes that remain can run two or three times the normal fare. A shared van seat to Moc Bai that costs 1.5M VND in October is not the price you will be quoted on 3 February. Book the run early or expect to pay for the privilege.
Everything here depends on one document: the approval in your hand before you walk up to the exit counter. A filing that is still sitting in the system is not permission to re-enter, no matter how long ago you submitted it.
Start with the processing time. A Vietnamese e-visa normally comes back in three to five working days. December and January are peak season, so budget the five and give yourself room for a request to re-upload a photo.
Now count backwards from the holiday. If the break opens on 4 February, the last week of January is already fragile territory: a filing on 28 January has four working days in it, and one of those may be lost to a queue that is twice its normal length. Our advice for the 2027 run is blunt. Have the e-visa approval by 20 January and travel between 10 and 30 January. Do it in that window and Tet is a news story you read from a coffee shop, not a deadline sitting on your stamp.
Post-Tet is the other trap. Offices reopen on 11 February with a backlog of ordinary private filings stacked behind the holiday, and files that were pending when the doors shut get looked at first. Call it one to two weeks before routine turnaround returns. If your stamp runs out in mid-February, running before Tet is the cheaper choice on every line of the calculation.
Tet is the one that wrecks plans. The others are smaller, but two of them are still worth circling.
New Year's Day on 1 January 2027 is a Friday. Offices close for the day and reopen on the Monday, so nothing much changes for a runner. Same for Vietnamese Cultural Day on 24 November 2027, a Wednesday, one day off.
The date to watch in April is the 16th, Hung Kings' Commemoration Day, which gives a three-day weekend from 16 to 18 April. Two weeks later Reunification Day on Friday 30 April meets Labour Day on Saturday 1 May, and the compensatory day falls on Monday 3 May, so the country takes a four-day break from 30 April to 3 May. Long-distance transport fills for both, and immigration offices are shut for the whole of each block. If your stamp expires in the last days of April, plan the run for the middle of the month.
National Day is the last one in 2027. The Ministry of Home Affairs has proposed a four-day break from Thursday 2 September to Sunday 5 September, and that is expected to be confirmed alongside the Tet announcement.
A visa run crosses two immigration services, and they do not share a calendar. Vietnamese holidays cover the exit and re-entry stamps. Cambodia and Laos run their own, and that is where a run can stall on a day when Vietnam is working normally.
Cambodia celebrates Khmer New Year from 14 to 16 April, and Laos marks Pi Mai Lao over the same three days. In 2027 those dates collide with Vietnam's Hung Kings holiday on Friday 16 April, which makes the middle of April a bad week to attempt any run through Moc Bai, Xa Mat, Ha Tien, Le Thanh or Lao Bao. Both far-side counters thin out, visa-on-arrival desks slow to a crawl, and the buses are full of people going the other way.
The practical rule: check both calendars before you book, and ask your desk what the far side is doing that week. The gates stay open. The people processing you may not all be there.
Three options, in order of how much they cost you.
Run early. The simplest fix, and it works for anybody whose stamp date falls in the first three weeks of February: do the run in the second half of January, come back with a fresh 90-day e-visa entry, and let the holiday pass. You lose a day of your current visa. You gain a legal stamp that covers you into May.
Leave and stay out. If you were planning a trip anyway, time it to the closure. Exit Vietnam before the offices shut, spend the holiday week in Bangkok, Phnom Penh or Vientiane, and re-enter on an approved e-visa when the counters are staffed again. This is a real option for anyone whose renewal has already been approved and printed.
Overstay, if the first two are impossible. The clock runs from the date on your stamp, not from the day you notice it, and Vietnamese public holidays count. Under Decree 282/2025 an overstay of under 16 days falls in the 500,000 to 2,000,000 VND band. From 16 days the minimum fine is 5,000,000 VND, deportation moves onto the table, and the case shifts from an airport counter to an immigration office. The full bracket table and the calculator live on our Vietnam overstay fines guide, and the paperwork for the serious version is covered in the exit permit guide.
The dates are national. The damage is local, because what changes is how far you have to travel to reach an open gate.
From Ho Chi Minh City the run is Moc Bai, about 70 km and roughly two hours each way on a good day. Vans run from the city every morning, and in the last week of January those vans fill days in advance. Saigon desks also offer Xa Mat for anyone who wants to skip the Moc Bai queue.
From Da Nang and Hue the route is Lao Bao, in Quang Tri province, a long day out and back. Hue cars leave before dawn for a reason.
Hanoi sits furthest from a friendly border. The northern desks run sleeper buses and private cars to Na Meo and Lao Bao, which is why a Hanoi run is an overnight trip rather than a day out.
Phu Quoc is its own case. The island has no land border, so an islander either flies to HCMC and joins a Moc Bai van, or takes the ferry to Ha Tien and crosses at Xa Xia. Both versions need booking earlier than usual in February.
Yes. Moc Bai, Xa Mat, Lao Bao, Huu Nghi, Ha Tien, Le Thanh and the other international land gates operate every day of the year, Tet included. The counters are staffed more thinly than usual, so expect a slower queue. If you already hold a valid visa or approved e-visa, a holiday run is straightforward.
Yes, for the full statutory break. In 2026 the Vietnam Immigration Department and Vietnamese embassies and consulates closed from 14 to 22 February, nine consecutive days. Extensions, new approvals and administrative paperwork all stop during that window.
Tet day falls on Saturday 6 February 2027, the Year of the Goat. The Ministry of Home Affairs has proposed either seven days off, 4 to 10 February, or ten days, 5 to 14 February. The Prime Minister's decision is normally published between October and December 2026.
No. The portal accepts the filing, and the status sits untouched until offices reopen. Processing resumes on the first working day after the holiday, and files submitted before the shutdown are reviewed ahead of new ones. Allow an extra one to two weeks for anything filed in early February.
Between 10 and 30 January, with the e-visa approval in hand by 20 January. That leaves five working days for processing, plus room to fix a rejected photo, and it keeps you clear of the transport surge in the final week of the month.
Run before it starts, or exit Vietnam and re-enter after offices reopen. If neither is possible, the overstay clock runs from the date on your stamp and public holidays count. Under 16 days the fine band starts at 500,000 VND; from 16 days the minimum is 5,000,000 VND with deportation as a real risk.
Borders open, offices closed, buses sold out. Get the e-visa approved before the third week of January, run while the month still has working days in it, and treat Tet itself as the one week you do not want to be standing at a counter. If you are still choosing a route, the city comparison and the cost table by city will narrow it down, and the complete guide covers everything that is not holiday-specific.
Last updated: 22 September 2026