Vietnam

Decree 06/2017/ND-CP created Vietnam’s first framework permitting betting on horse racing, greyhound racing and international football through a limited pilot, with a minimum age of 21, VND 1 trillion charter-capital requirements and restrictive bet caps. Implementation has been extremely slow: no company took up the original football opportunity, the National Assembly Standing Committee set 2025 as the deadline for the government to amend Decree 6, and as of mid-2026 no operator has been licensed and nothing is live.

Consequently no legal sports or horse-race betting is actually available to consumers in 2026. All other betting, including online and offshore wagering, is illegal, and the authorities prosecute both the operators and the agencies that promote offshore gambling sites.

The trajectory is toward eventual regulation, but the market in practice remains prohibitory. Pilot minimum age 21.

The Vietnamese culture embraces gambling even if the government does not. Until recently, the gambling laws of Vietnam restricted citizens from visiting land-based casinos and participating in real money games at home. Decrees issued in 2017 and 2018 relaxed certain aspects of Vietnam's gambling law, but no sports-betting operator has yet been licensed and online wagering is still not permitted.

However, at this point, there are still no Vietnamese betting sites located here on home soil. There are strict penalties for unauthorized betting anywhere in the country, and those involved can face criminal prosecution, asset seizure and fines.

Vietnam Betting Sites

The country has licensed a number of establishments to offer games, but access to these casinos was prohibited to all locals for years. That changed with a 2017 decree that let locals into a pilot casino provided they could prove monthly income above a certain level and pay hefty entry fees; the pilot ran through 2024, after which lawmakers passed Resolution No 307/2025/NQ-CP granting locals permanent access at Corona, and Grand Ho Tram joined an expanded five-year trial of locals gaming in January 2026. Not surprisingly, it is estimated that thousands of people cross the border into Cambodia every day to visit that country’s casinos.

Vietnam betting sites are prohibited, and the government pursues the operators and marketing agencies behind offshore betting websites. Despite the government’s efforts, many Vietnamese visit foreign websites every day to place bets online.

Offshore Betting Sites and Vietnamese Law

No betting site may lawfully take a Vietnamese customer. Online gambling is illegal in Vietnam, but the black market is worth an estimated VND250.6 trillion, spurred by demand and the accessibility of internet sportsbooks, and the platforms serving it lacked official licences, placing them outside regulatory compliance.

Restricted Access to Gambling Sites in Vietnam

In many cases, an attempt to access a betting site is met with a page informing you that this site is restricted in Vietnam.

A Potential for Change

The current legal climate in Vietnam is unfriendly to most forms of betting, but this is slowly changing. Government officials have been publicly discussing easing up on their gambling laws for years now. The first actions on that front came in 2017 with two decrees that legalized certain forms of betting for Vietnamese locals.

A decree issued in 2017 legalized betting on international football matches that meet certain conditions. Under that decree, football matches recognized by FIFA are eligible for betting if they also appear on a list of eligible matches provided by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. That same decree also legalized dog and horse racing betting with similar restrictions.

Their logic is that with thousands of Vietnamese citizens crossing the border to gamble in other countries, lots of money is flowing outward to the benefit of foreign companies. If people are going to gamble anyways, the country might as well license and regulate local casinos and at least keep some of that money here in Vietnam where it can benefit the economy.

Industry figures now put Vietnamese gambling spend at up to $10 billion a year, most of which leaves the country untaxed. Numbers that big tend to catch the attention of lawmakers constantly on the lookout for new sources of revenue. Several proposals were put forth over the years, and finally the government issued a decree in 2017 to relax those restrictions on locals over a three-year trial period.

Local access to brick-and-mortar casinos is confined to the pilot venues — lawmakers granted permanent access to locals at Corona in late 2025, and the Grand Ho Tram integrated resort became part of an expanded five-year trial of locals gaming in January 2026 — and a Vietnamese customer must also meet these conditions:

• The customer is 21 or older

• The customer earns at least 10 million dong per month

• The customer has no criminal record

Furthermore, the families of gamblers may prevent them from visiting casinos and casinos are required to charge entry fees of either 1 million dong per day or 25 million dong per month.

In 2018, the National Assembly voted in favor of a new bill to legalize and regulate sports betting in Vietnam. The details of the bill and how sports betting would work remain unclear at this time, but early reports indicate the government would tightly regulate gambling to ensure proper controls for problem gambling and to ensure fair gaming for all participants.

There is no doubt at this point that the Vietnamese government is slowly opening itself to the idea of legal gambling. Things are moving very slowly, but changes over the past few years should give gamblers a sense of optimism. The hardline stance toward betting is slowly but surely changing into something more permissive. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but recent developments make it clear the government is at the very least considering an approach of regulation and taxation rather than outright prohibition.

Online gambling still hasn’t been addressed and probably won’t be for a while. The government has some of the strictest gambling laws on the planet, and what liberalisation there has been is confined to land-based casinos. Brick-and-mortar locals gaming now looks more settled — lawmakers granted permanent access at Corona in late 2025 — but there is still no progress on legalizing online betting sites in Vietnam.