After you’ve applied on evisa.gov.vn, two portal statuses hold up Vietnam visa approval until you act: Unpaid and Amendment required. You can act on either one today; Unpaid needs only the government fee you owe anyway. Once the status reads Processing, the application moves on Vietnamese working days and the portal itself sells no faster option. What’s left is paid priority, which we sell, from US$69 for the 48-hour tier to US$209 for the 1-hour tier.
Read the status label first
On the portal’s lookup for an individual application, the English status labels (as of 18 October 2026) are Unpaid, Processing, Amendment required, Acceptance and Denial, and a canceled file is labeled “Document canceled”. “Pending”, “Submitted” and “Not Granted” aren’t among them.
Unpaid means the fee step never went through. The portal’s line for it reads “Please click here to edit and submit the fee to the reviewing agency.” Fix this one first, because the law gives Immigration three working days counted from the date it has received all the information and the fee (Law 47/2014 as amended by Law 51/2019, Article 16a). For an Unpaid application that legal deadline hasn’t started, and paying anyone for priority does nothing until the fee goes through. When your card was charged but the status still reads Unpaid, report it on the official support form under the “Pay failed” problem type.
Amendment required means an officer wants something corrected. The portal’s line here is “Please click here to edit and return to the reviewing agency.” The application stays with you until you send it back, so do it the day you see it. If the request is for a new photo, the official spec is a recent 4×6 cm portrait in JPG or JPEG, under 2 MB, front-facing, on a white background, with no hat and no glasses. The portal’s automatic checks also warn that a portrait captured from another source, or a passport image below the required resolution, “may be rejected”. Your name has to match the ICAO line in your passport (the machine-readable lines at the foot of the photo page) exactly, in capital letters.
At Processing the application is with Immigration and there is nothing for you to fix; our guide shows how to look up your status on the portal. Acceptance means the e-visa has been issued. Denial closes the application: it can’t be escalated after that, and the government fee isn’t refunded.
Count Vietnamese working days up to your check-in
The Ministry of Public Security procedure 1.002757 (in Vietnamese) repeats the law’s deadline of no more than three working days from complete information and fee, and it is specific about days. You can submit online at any hour. Applications are received Monday to Saturday and results are returned Monday to Friday; both exclude Tết and public holidays. The portal’s own instructions add that declaration and processing run on Vietnam time, UTC+7.
By our reading, the count starts on the day after the fee arrives and skips Saturdays and Sundays, the weekly rest days set for civil servants by Decision 188/1999, so a fee paid on a Thursday reaches day 3 on the following Tuesday. A public holiday pushes it further:
- Fee paid Friday 20 November 2026: Monday 23 is day 1. Tuesday 24 November is Vietnam Culture Day, a new public holiday that civil servants get off, so Wednesday 25 is day 2 and Thursday 26 is day 3.
- Fee paid Wednesday 3 February 2027: civil servants are off for Tết from Thursday 4 to Wednesday 10 February, so Thursday 11 is day 1, Friday 12 is day 2 and Monday 15 February is day 3, twelve calendar days after the fee.
Wait for Vietnam visa approval or pay for priority?
While the status reads Processing, put two times side by side: the day the legal deadline falls (counted as above) and your check-in time, converted to Vietnam time. Treat check-in as the latest point you need the e-visa in hand. If the legal deadline falls at least one Vietnamese working day before check-in, wait and spend nothing. Three working days is the deadline the law sets for Immigration, not a promise that the result arrives by then, so that margin of one working day is our own suggestion. Already past the legal deadline with the status still at Processing? The count can’t tell you anything more, and the time left until check-in is what decides whether to keep waiting.
When the legal deadline falls later than that, pick the cheapest tier whose promised delivery time ends before check-in. With more than 48 hours to go, start with the 48-hour tier at US$69; with 24 to 48 hours, the 24-hour tier at US$99, once you’ve checked the weekend and holiday question below. With less than a day, the choice is among the 12-hour, 4-hour, 2-hour and 1-hour tiers, and the table’s last column is what you’re buying: the 4-hour tier promises “by noon or 6 PM same day”, and the 2-hour and 1-hour tiers allow up to 2.5 and 1.5 hours.
| Tier | Price per traveler | What the form promises |
|---|---|---|
| 48 hours | US$69 | Within 48 hours |
| 24 hours | US$99 | Within 24 hours |
| 12 hours | US$139 | Within 12 hours |
| 4 hours | US$159 | By noon or 6 PM same day |
| 2 hours | US$189 | Within 2–2.5 hours |
| 1 hour | US$209 | Within 1–1.5 hours |
The form to expedite the application you already submitted has the same price for each tier at every port it supports. Nothing is re-submitted (your registration code stays valid), and the government fee you already paid isn’t charged again. What you buy is priority; the decision is Immigration’s, and the e-visa itself still comes from the official portal.
We refund the escalation fee in full when our review finds a blocking issue. The delivery times are what the form promises, not a guarantee: our terms say we can’t guarantee approval or a specific issue time, so don’t book non-refundable travel around them. Ask us before you pay if a Vietnamese weekend or public holiday falls inside the delivery time you’re buying, or if you need to know which time zone the 4-hour tier’s noon and 6 PM are in.
Before you pay:
- Check that your passport needs the e-visa at all. Among others, passports from Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UK, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland get 45 days visa-free for any purpose until 14 March 2028. Those from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland get 45 days for tourism only, until 14 August 2028.
- You’ve cleared Unpaid or Amendment required if either showed, and the status isn’t Denial.
- The entry point on your evisa.gov.vn application is one of the six the form covers: Noi Bai (Hanoi), Da Nang, Tan Son Nhat (Ho Chi Minh City), Cam Ranh (Nha Trang), Phu Quoc, or the Moc Bai land border (Tay Ninh). The port you pick in the form has to match the application. Other ports, such as Hai Phong and Phu Bai (Hue), aren’t offered.
- For each traveler you have the full name as on the passport, the e-Visa app no. (the portal’s name for the registration code in your confirmation email) and the email used on the application. Payment is by card when you submit the form.
What does not move your application
A second application costs a new US$25 or US$50 and has its own legal deadline, three working days from the day its fee arrives, which can’t fall earlier than the one you already paid for. Anyone who already has two should read two applications, two confirmation emails: which one counts.
Contacting Immigration has no stated effect on speed. The official channels are the hotline 024 3825 7941, [email protected] and the support form on evisa.gov.vn. The support page gives no response time; its only promise is “We will contact you as soon as possible”. A mistake you spot in your own application goes on that form: pick the “Wrong application information” type and attach up to three images under 2 MB.