- Ways to apply
- Acquisition or reacquisition through a Vietnamese parent or grandparent (2025 law)
- Dual citizenship
- Kept, however you apply
Each answer assumes none of your ancestors became a citizen of another country before their child was born. Below is what changes each answer.
On this page›
- 01Who qualifies
- 02Dates that matter
- 03Through your mother
- 04Keeping your citizenship
- 05Ways to apply
- 06The documents
- 07What it takes
- 08Where the records live
- 09Places that changed countries
- 10Law changes
- 11Other options
- 12Sources
Who qualifies, generation by generation
POSSIBLE
Can you claim Vietnamese citizenship through a parent?
Through a Vietnamese parent or grandparent (2025 law)
With a Vietnamese parent or grandparent, you can acquire or reacquire Vietnamese nationality without the language, residence or financial tests, and keep your other citizenship if the President approves, which the 2025 law made routine for this group.
What would settle itHow Decree 191/2025/ND-CP is applied to retention of your home citizenship in your case; approvals are case by case.
POSSIBLE
Can you claim Vietnamese citizenship through a grandparent?
Through a Vietnamese parent or grandparent (2025 law)
With a Vietnamese parent or grandparent, you can acquire or reacquire Vietnamese nationality without the language, residence or financial tests, and keep your other citizenship if the President approves, which the 2025 law made routine for this group.
What would settle itHow Decree 191/2025/ND-CP is applied to retention of your home citizenship in your case; approvals are case by case.
UNLIKELY
Can you claim Vietnamese citizenship through a great-grandparent?
Two generations
The 2025 law reaches people with a Vietnamese parent or grandparent, not great-grandchildren.
What would settle itWhether a parent or grandparent can acquire first.
The dates that matter
No date named in Vietnam’s rule decides who qualifies. The answers above turn on the family’s facts, not on when anyone was born or left.
Claiming through your mother or grandmother
Vietnam’s rule gives the same answer whether the line runs through a mother or a father.
Dual citizenship with your home country
You keep your citizenship.
On every open route, the rule lets a citizen of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina or South Africa keep that citizenship.
Every way to apply, and the law behind it
The law
What would settle an unsure case
- How Decree 191/2025/ND-CP is applied to retention of your home citizenship in your case; approvals are case by case.
- UNLIKELY
Through a great-grandparentThe 2025 law reaches people with a Vietnamese parent or grandparent, not great-grandchildren.
The law
What would settle an unsure case
- Whether a parent or grandparent can acquire first.
The documents, as the rule lists them
Through a Vietnamese parent or grandparent (2025 law)
Through a parent or grandparent
- Your ancestor’s Vietnamese birth or household record
- Birth records linking each generation
- A request to retain foreign nationality
Most countries also want proof that your ancestor didn’t become a citizen somewhere else before their child was born: the naturalization record with its date, or a letter saying there isn’t one.
What it takes: time, cost, the hard part, who decides
Through a Vietnamese parent or grandparent (2025 law)
- Time
- 6–12 months under the eased 2025 procedure; retention of U.S. citizenship needs separate presidential approval, which adds time.
- Cost
- About $400–800: application fees, certified translations of every record, and notarization costs.
- The hard part
- Getting the President’s approval to keep your U.S. citizenship alongside the new Vietnamese one; it’s granted case by case, not automatically.
- Who decides
- The Ministry of Justice, through the Vietnamese consulate for your address.
- The first record
- Your ancestor’s Vietnamese birth certificate or household registration (hộ khẩu), from The commune-level People’s Committee (Ủy ban nhân dân) where they were registered. A family member in Vietnam, or a proxy with authorization, requests the record from the commune’s civil status office by name and address history. vietnamembassy-usa.org ↗
How it’s filed
- Where
- Any of Vietnam’s four U.S. missions: the Embassy in Washington, D.C., the Consulates General in San Francisco and Houston, or the Consulate in New York. There is no fixed state split; use the one nearest you. The mission forwards the file to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Justice; the President decides. office list ↗
- How
- In person; you appear in person
- Fee
- About $250
- Decision
- 6–18 months
What goes in the file (6)›
- The application form, with a request to retain the foreign nationality where wanted
- Copy of the applicant’s birth certificate, passport or equivalent, apostilled and translated
- Criminal-record certificate from the country of residence (issued within 90 days), apostilled and translated
- Proof of the parent’s Vietnamese citizenship, or of both paternal or both maternal grandparents’ Vietnamese citizenship (Vietnamese passport, ID, birth record, household book, nationality decision)
- Birth records linking each generation to the applicant
- A chosen Vietnamese name, in the form
What goes wrong (8)›
- The consular fee is USD 250 per person to acquire Vietnamese nationality, or USD 200 to restore it (Ministry of Finance consular tariff, Circular 264/2016/TT-BTC). Inside Vietnam the naturalisation fee is VND 3,000,000.
- The grandparent test is two grandparents on one side: both paternal grandparents or both maternal grandparents must be Vietnamese citizens. One grandparent alone is not enough.
- Keeping U.S. citizenship requires the President’s approval; the 2025 law made it available to this group but it is still decided case by case.
- Check first: a child born abroad to a Vietnamese citizen may already be Vietnamese (the embassy’s ‘registration to determine Vietnamese nationality and issue a passport’ procedure, which confirms nationality in 5–10 working days). That route is faster than naturalisation if it applies.
- Former Vietnamese citizens (e.g. who renounced or lost citizenship) apply to restore it (trở lại quốc tịch) instead, through the same missions.
- The law asks that the parent, or both grandparents on one side, be Vietnamese citizens (Law on Vietnamese Nationality, Art. 19, as amended from 1 July 2025; Decree 191/2025/ND-CP). A parent or grandparent who took U.S. citizenship but never renounced or lost Vietnamese nationality still counts; the embassy’s nationality-determination procedure confirms it from their old Vietnamese papers.
- Embassy of Vietnam, Washington — 1233 20th Street NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20036; Consulate General, Houston — 5251 Westheimer Road, Suite 1100, Houston, TX 77056; Consulate General, San Francisco — 1700 California Street, Suite 580, San Francisco, CA 94109; Consulate, New York — 866 U.N. Plaza, Suite 435, New York, NY 10017.
- From CA, GB, AU, NZ, ZA, BR, AR: the Vietnamese embassy for your residence (Ottawa, London, Canberra, Wellington, Pretoria, Brasília, Buenos Aires), same law.
source ↗
Fees are each office’s published fee, converted to U.S. dollars.
Where each record lives, and how to ask for it
birth
The commune-level People’s Committee (Ủy ban nhân dân cấp xã) that holds the civil-status (hộ tịch) register where the birth was registered; since 2025 the electronic civil-status database
The ancestor’s birth or household record, by name, date and commune; communes were merged in the 2025 local-government reorganisation, so the old commune’s books may now sit with a successor commune. Records from before 1975 in the south may survive only in provincial archives or not at all.
- Takes
- 1–6 months
Good to know (3)›
- A relative or an authorized person in Vietnam requests an extract (trích lục khai sinh) from the commune; the Vietnamese embassy can also issue extracts of records it registered.
- Other evidence of a parent’s or grandparent’s Vietnamese citizenship: any nationality, civil-status, household or identity paper issued by Vietnamese authorities from 1945 to 1 July 2009 that records Vietnamese nationality. Papers issued in the south before 30 April 1975 count too, including birth certificates, birth extracts, substitute birth certificates and travel documents.
- A certified copy of a civil-status extract costs VND 8,000 a copy, the same everywhere in Vietnam.
source ↗
Translations
- Into
- Vietnamese
- Who may translate
- Any certified translator; the translation itself is legalized
- About
- $25–$70 a page
Since 11 September 2026 Vietnam is a party to the Apostille Convention: a U.S. document needs only a U.S. apostille, not consular legalization (documents from Germany, Austria and Czechia, which objected, are still legalized). Documents in a foreign language are translated into Vietnamese with the translator’s signature certified (chứng thực chữ ký người dịch). A criminal-record certificate from abroad must be issued within 90 days of filing.
source ↗
The passport
- Where
- The Vietnamese embassy or consulate after the nationality decision (first-time passports are forwarded to Vietnam for background checks; 3–6 months). A new passport is USD 70.
- Fee
- About $70
- Time
- 3–6 months
source ↗
Places on old papers that lead to Vietnam
If your family’s records name one of these, Vietnam’s law may be the one that applies. The town decides.
- Indochina · also Cochinchina, Tonkin, Annam
Vietnam today.
Recent and pending changes
We know of no pending bill or recent court ruling for Vietnam.
We re-read the official pages behind this guide every day. When one changes, a person checks the rule before we update anything here.
If descent doesn’t reach you
2 residence programs lead to Vietnam without an ancestor, each with its own law and road to citizenship.