Vietnam rental yield: gross, net, and the 50-year clock.

A Vietnam apartment has three yields, and the listing always quotes the friendliest one. Gross yield is annual rental revenue over purchase price. It assumes maximum occupancy, ignores the building management fee, ignores the rental tax, and pretends the ownership term is permanent. It is the ceiling, not the floor.

Net yield is what actually reaches your account: realistic occupancy, minus the roughly 10% combined rental tax on gross, minus the building management fee, platform commission, vacancy, furnishing wear, and a maintenance buffer. Net-of-clock yield is the Vietnam-specific one the free guides never compute, because the foreign owner holds a wasting asset, not a perpetual one.

The Capital Allocator optimises for the realistic net, then stress-tests it against the clock. The Lifestyle Buyer reads the gross off the brochure and discovers the gap four years in. The gap between brochure-gross and real-net commonly runs near 6.7 percentage points before the term even takes its cut. I model all three. The deck models the view. See how the cost lines stack in the Vietnam fee stack.

For an individual landlord, rental income in Vietnam is taxed at approximately 10% of gross revenue, built from a 5% VAT component plus 5% personal income tax. The line lands on the top line, not the bottom one, which is the part the gross-yield brochure conveniently never subtracts.

There is one structural feature worth pricing deliberately: rental turnover under 100M VND per year is exempt. That is a cliff, not a slope. A unit grossing 96M VND can read zero on this line; cross the 100M VND threshold and the full roughly 10% applies. A buyer modelling a single small long-let unit near the threshold should treat the exemption as a real lever, not a rounding detail.

These rates and thresholds are stated neutrally and they move. Confirm current treatment with a licensed Vietnamese tax professional before you underwrite a live deal. The point here is the method: the tax is on gross, the exemption is a cliff, and the brochure quotes a number that ignores both. Walk the rest of the closing and carry lines in the fee-stack breakdown.

Take a hypothetical worked example: a 5.8B VND apartment, roughly 137,800 USD at 25,400 VND per dollar. Marketed at a healthy nightly rate and high occupancy, the brochure can show a gross near 9%. Mathematically correct. Operationally fictional.

Underwrite it honestly. At a realistic lower-band occupancy and a blended nightly rate (not the peak-month screenshot the deck quotes), realistic gross lands near 315M VND. Subtract the roughly 10% rental tax on gross, about 32M VND. Subtract the operating stack — building management fee, platform commission, local management, vacancy provision, furnishing buffer — call it about 145M VND on this unit. Net cash to the account is roughly 139M VND.

That is a net yield near 2.4% against the purchase price — computed inside the math, never as a headline figure next to a sticker. The moment a yield number sits beside a price it stops being analysis and starts being a sales claim. And this is before the clock. The figure is an independent research estimate for one illustrative unit, not a promised outcome — run your own numbers against your own unit. The verification steps live in the 5-step framework.

Two units can show the identical net yield above and produce wildly different real outcomes, purely on how much term is left when you exit. Foreign ownership is a 50-year term, renewable once. Each year you hold, the remaining window shortens, and the next foreign buyer — your realistic exit — pays for the term that is left, not the term you bought.

Put a number on it. A unit bought with the full term and resold with 35 of 50 years remaining is selling a 0.70 term fraction to the next buyer. On a 5.8B VND base, a straight-line term-fraction haircut is the conservative floor; in practice the decay steepens late in the term. Layer that against modest underlying price growth and the brochure-implied gain can be cut by something on the order of 47% over a long hold — a figure that never appears on any deck.

The net cash yield is modest. The clock is a structural headwind, not a tailwind. A unit underwritten as a permanent, appreciating asset will disappoint; a unit underwritten as a term-limited, tax-dragged, currency-exposed asset matches the math. The renewal-once provision is real but is a future process to verify, never a value you have already banked. The full term mechanics sit in the 50-year term explainer.

Within Vietnam, the short-let model and the long-let model are almost separate businesses, and most foreign buyers underwrite the short-let upside and inherit the long-let reality. The Ho Chi Minh City long-let profile is structural: corporate and expat tenants on six-to-twelve-month leases, occupancy over a multi-year hold sitting high for well-located stock, but a per-month equivalent rate far below short-let nightly pricing. Booked depth, not nightly rate, is the value.

The tourist short-let profile (Da Nang beachside stock as the archetype) carries a higher headline nightly rate and a heavier drag. A realistic annual occupancy blend runs near the 66–74% band, and you plan on the floor of it. The October-to-November rainy trough is the line the brochure leaves out. Agents quote the peak-month rate and imply it as the annual average; the year-blended rate typically runs well below peak once the shoulder and the trough discount to fill nights.

The Playbook position: use the lower band of the annual blend and the year-blended rate, never the peak-month screenshot, and decide short-let versus long-let on the district and the term remaining on the clock. The small long-let unit also interacts with the 100M VND rental-tax exemption in a way the short-let unit rarely does — another reason the two models do not share a spreadsheet. Cross-region, the same gross-to-net discipline applies in the Bali villa yield walkout.