- Routes
- Acquisition or reacquisition through a Vietnamese parent or grandparent (2025 law)
- Dual citizenship
- Kept on every open route
The stamps assume no one in the line became a citizen of another country before the next person in the line was born. What changes each answer is below.
On this page›
- 01Who qualifies
- 02Dates that matter
- 03Mothers’ lines
- 04Keeping your citizenship
- 05The routes and the law
- 06The documents
- 07What it takes
- 08Where the records live
- 09Former places
- 10Law changes
- 11Other doors
- 12Sources
01Who qualifies
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.
02Dates that matter
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.
03Mothers’ lines
How mothers’ lines were treated
Vietnam’s rule gives the same answer whether the line runs through a mother or a father.
04Keeping your citizenship
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.
05The routes
Every route, 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.
06The documents
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 no one in the line became a citizen elsewhere before the next birth: the naturalization record with its date, or a letter that none exists.
07What it takes
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
- The Embassy of Vietnam in Washington, D.C. or the Consulates General in San Francisco, Houston and New York (unverified: which posts accept nationality files and their jurisdictions); forwarded to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Justice; the President decides. office list ↗
- How
- In person; you appear in person
- Fee
- Not confirmed: no official fee was found
- 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, legalized and translated
- Criminal-record certificate from the country of residence (issued within 90 days), legalized 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)›
- Fee shown as 0 because the consular fee was not verified; the fee is set by the Ministry of Finance's consular tariff (unverified amount). Inside Vietnam the naturalisation fee is VND 3,000,000.
- The grandparent test is two grandparents on one side (both paternal or both maternal), per the embassies' guidance on the 2025 law; one grandparent alone may not be enough (unverified reading).
- 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). 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 2025 law's eligibility test is that the parent/grandparent was Vietnamese, not that they still are: nothing found this pass asks separately whether that person later naturalized abroad. This is a very new (1 July 2025) law and Decree 191/2025/ND-CP's own text wasn't read directly, only secondary law-firm summaries, so treat this and the form's field list above as provisional.
- Addresses found this pass (no published state-jurisdiction split for any of the four): Embassy of Vietnam, Washington — 1233 20th Street NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20036 (secondary confidence); Consulate General, Houston — 5251 Westheimer Road, Suite 1100, Houston, TX 77056 (snippet); Consulate General, San Francisco — 1700 California Street, Suite 580, San Francisco, CA 94109 (snippet); Consulate General, New York — 866 United Nations Plaza, Suite 435, New York, NY 10017 (snippet).
- From CA, GB, AU, NZ, ZA, BR, AR: the Vietnamese embassy for your residence (Ottawa, London, Canberra, Wellington, Pretoria, Brasília, Buenos Aires), same law.
Checked 25 September 2026 · source ↗
Estimates are honest ranges from official fee tables and what families report; where a fee or time could not be confirmed, it says so.
08Where the records live
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: an old Vietnamese passport, ID card, household registration book (hộ khẩu), or a decision on nationality. unverified: which documents the Ministry of Justice accepts for pre-1975 southern records.
- unverified: fees (small, in dong).
Checked 25 September 2026 · source ↗
Translations
- Into
- Vietnamese
- Who may translate
- Any certified translator; the translation itself is legalized
- About
- $25–$70 a page
Foreign documents must be consularly legalized (Vietnam is not an apostille country), and documents in a foreign language 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.
Checked 25 September 2026 · 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). Fee not verified; the 0 here is a placeholder.
- Fee
- Not confirmed
- Time
- 3–6 months
Checked 25 September 2026 · source ↗
09Former places
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.
10Law changes
Recent and pending changes
The legislative watch has no pending bill or recent ruling recorded for Vietnam.
The watch re-reads the official pages behind this guide every day. When one changes, a person re-checks the rule before anything here moves.
11Other doors
If descent doesn’t reach you
2 residence programs lead to Vietnam without an ancestor, each with its own law and road to citizenship.