A Vietnam residence card (TRC) through company registration makes sense once you’re paying more than roughly $150-200 a year on visa runs and want to open a local bank account - a turnkey company setup runs $800-5,000 depending on structure, and the actual residence card starts at the DT3 tier: $120,000+ in charter capital gets you a TRC valid up to 3 years.
Who Actually Needs a Business Visa Instead of a Work Permit?
If you already have a Vietnamese employer, the LD (labor) card is faster and cheaper - roughly 3-4 weeks from application to card, sponsored by the company you work for. The DT (investor) route only makes sense if you’re self-employed, running remote client work, or want to register a company to bill Vietnamese clients directly. It’s not the route for someone who just wants to live in Da Nang for a year without any local business activity - if you’re still weighing work permit vs. investor vs. marriage-based routes, our full breakdown of Vietnam’s long-stay visa options covers all four side by side.
One thing worth knowing: investor visas skip the work permit requirement entirely - company owners and board members registered on the business license are exempt, which is one of the practical advantages over the employment route.
How Much Capital Do You Actually Need?
Below $120,000 in charter capital, you’re at the DT4 tier - a 12-month investor visa, but no TRC and no right to sponsor family. Clear $120,000 and you’re at DT3, which is where an actual residence card kicks in: a TRC valid up to 3 years. DT1 and DT2 start at $2-4 million, built for institutional-scale investors rather than a solo operator with a laptop and a handful of clients, and they extend the card to 5 and 10 years respectively.
Your passport also needs at least 13 months of remaining validity to apply for any TRC category, longer than the 6 months required for a standard visa-exempt entry - worth confirming early, since a short-validity passport is an easy way to get the whole application bounced. Checking details like that before anything gets filed is exactly what our visa and residency service from Da Nang does first, so a preventable detail doesn’t stall months of paperwork.
How Do You Register the Company, Step by Step?
- Register the company and get the Business Registration Certificate - 5-10 business days.
- If foreign ownership exceeds 51%, apply separately for the Investment Registration Certificate - 15-20 business days.
- Deposit the charter capital into the company account within 90 days of registration, or the license gets revoked.
- Apply for the DT visa at the Immigration Department with your registration certificate and proof of capital.
- Once you hold the visa, apply for the TRC itself - standard processing runs 5 business days.
Start to finish with a lawyer handling it: 2-4 months. Doing it yourself usually takes longer, and mistakes in the company charter or a missed license step cost months, not days.
Is DIY Registration Actually Cheaper Than Using a Lawyer?
The government charges almost nothing to register a company in Vietnam now - the Enterprise Registration Certificate fee is $0 when filed online. What you actually pay for is the professional service around it: a basic self-assisted LLC setup runs $800-1,500, a full turnkey package $2,000-5,000, and a Representative Office $900-3,000 - our full company registration cost breakdown has the exact line items if you want to see where the money goes.
None of that is a one-time bill, either. Once the company exists, you’re locked into $100-300/month in bookkeeping and a mandatory annual audit - $1,500-3,000/year for any foreign-invested company, regardless of how small it is or how little revenue it makes.
This is usually the point where people reach out - getting the charter and license structured so the capital gets accepted without a second round of paperwork, and staying on it all the way through to the card in hand. What that needs from you is the charter details and target capital amount - the license structuring and paperwork are the part that gets handled from there.
One filing people forget on top of the audit: the company owes quarterly tax returns even with zero revenue. Skipping one freezes the tax code and complicates renewing the card later.
How Does It Compare to Just Doing Visa Runs?
A year of visa runs costs $1,200-2,400 - a border crossing to Cambodia or Laos every 45-90 days at $100-200 a trip. The TRC card itself costs $145-155 in government fees for 1-5 years, on top of whatever the company setup runs. Past six months of actually living in Vietnam, the math tips toward the residence card, plus it opens a local bank account and lets you sign leases and business contracts without the visa-run gap every few weeks.
Overstaying while you sort any of this out gets expensive fast: fines run $10-20 per day under the penalty schedule that tightened in December 2025, so a week of delay can cost close to $140 on top of everything else.
If the company registration and paperwork side of this isn’t something you want to handle solo, the current DT visa and company registration numbers live on danangvisarun.com, where I lay out what DT3 actually costs against just sticking with a work permit.
