# Vietnam Address Standard

## Overview

A Vietnamese address is built from the bottom up through an alley hierarchy (`Số 12, ngõ 34, ngách 5`), and since 1 July 2025 it has only two administrative levels above the street: the province or centrally run city, and the commune. The district that sat between them on every address written before that date no longer exists.

This article describes the Vietnamese address format, what the 2025 reform changed, how CDQ represents a Vietnamese address in the CDQ address model, and which reference data CDQ maintains for Vietnam. It is the reference for anyone mapping Vietnamese business partner data into CDQ, or consuming curated Vietnamese addresses from CDQ.

**In this article, you will understand:**

- Which administrative levels exist in Vietnam since 1 July 2025, and why master data written before then does not match them
- How the street line is built: the alley hierarchy, floors, buildings and lots
- Why many Vietnamese business addresses name an industrial park or an export processing zone, and what that means
- How Vietnamese levels map to concepts in the CDQ address model, and which SAP field they reach
- Which region value CDQ guarantees, and the collision to avoid between two kinds of `VN-` codes
- Where the current CDQ coverage for Vietnam is incomplete


Available in:

* [CDQ Wiki: business partner metadata for Vietnam](https://meta.cdq.com/DataModel:CDQ/Business_Partner/Address/Country/VN): browse the published Vietnamese metadata


## How a Vietnamese address is built

A Vietnamese address is written smallest-first, in the order a postman reads it: house, alley, street, commune, province. The post code, when used, follows the province.

What is specific to Vietnam:

| Specific to Vietnam | Why it matters |
|  --- | --- |
| The administrative structure changed on 1 July 2025 | addresses written before that date carry a district and a province name that no longer exist |
| Alleys are numbered and nested | `12/34/5` is one building reached through two alleys, and the slashes are not a fraction or a range |
| Industrial parks and export processing zones are part of the address | many business partners sit inside one, and the park name often stands where the street would be |
| Text is written with or without diacritics | `Hồ Chí Minh` and `Ho Chi Minh` are the same place, and the second is common in exports and forms |
| The post code has had two lengths | five digits since 2018, six digits before, and both are present in master data |


### The 2025 administrative reform

From 1 July 2025 the 63 provinces and centrally run cities were merged into 34 (28 provinces and 6 centrally run cities), and the district level, the quận, huyện and thị xã that sat between province and commune, was abolished. Local government now has two tiers.

| Level | Vietnamese | What it is | Used to address mail | Example |
|  --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | tỉnh, or thành phố trực thuộc trung ương | province, or centrally run city: 28 provinces and 6 cities (Hà Nội, Hải Phòng, Huế, Đà Nẵng, Hồ Chí Minh, Cần Thơ) | yes | Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh |
| 2 | xã, phường, đặc khu | commune (xã), ward (phường) in urban areas, or special zone (đặc khu) on an island | yes | Phường Bến Nghé |
| abolished | quận, huyện, thị xã, and a city below the province | the former district level | no longer | Quận 1 |


Many provinces were merged, and many communes and wards were merged or renamed with them. Two consequences matter for data:

- **Master data written before the reform has four levels and the old province names.** A partner recorded in Bình Dương or Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu is now in Hồ Chí Minh City, one in Hà Giang is now in Tuyên Quang, and one in Thái Bình is now in Hưng Yên. The old name is not wrong as history, but it is not a province any more.
- **Both forms are in circulation at once.** Companies are not required to update their registered address because of the reform, so a current business register extract can still show the old address while a new invoice shows the new one.


Do not discard the district, and do not rely on it
A district in older data is the only clue to which commune an address belonged to before the merger, so it should be kept as history. It should not be required, and a record without one is complete. Matching a province against the 34 current units fails for any record that still carries a pre-2025 province, which is why CDQ also needs the old names (see the limitations).

### The postal address

```
Công ty TNHH Ví Dụ
Số 12, ngõ 34, đường Láng, phường Láng
Thành phố Hà Nội
```

The commune or ward comes after the street, and the centrally run city or province on the last line. A post code, if written, closes the line: `Thành phố Hà Nội 10000`.

### The street line

The house number comes first and the street after it, which is the reverse of the order in many Asian addresses. Large buildings and parks add further parts.

| Written | Vietnamese | Means |
|  --- | --- | --- |
| `Số 12`, `12` | số nhà | house number |
| `ngõ`, `ngách` | ngõ, ngách | alley and sub-alley, in the north: `ngõ 34, ngách 5` |
| `hẻm` | hẻm | alley, in the south |
| `kiệt` | kiệt | alley, in the centre (Huế, Đà Nẵng) |
| `đường`, `phố` | đường, phố | street and avenue, `phố` mainly in Hà Nội |
| `tầng` | tầng | floor: `Tầng 5` |
| `tòa nhà`, `tòa` | tòa nhà | building or tower |
| `lô` | lô | lot, mostly inside an industrial park: `Lô B2` |


The alley hierarchy is written in words in the north, `Số 12, ngõ 34, ngách 5`, and as slashes in the south, `12/34/5`, both meaning house 12 in sub-alley 5 off alley 34. In Hồ Chí Minh City the form `Số 12/34` is common and reads house 12 in alley 34, with no relation to a fraction.

### Industrial parks, export processing zones and economic zones

Many Vietnamese business partners, and nearly every manufacturer, sit inside a planned zone, and the zone appears in the address:

| Abbreviation | Vietnamese | English |
|  --- | --- | --- |
| KCN | khu công nghiệp | industrial park |
| KCX | khu chế xuất | export processing zone |
| KKT | khu kinh tế | economic zone |
| KCNC | khu công nghệ cao | high-tech park |


```
Lô C2, đường số 5, KCN Sóng Thần 1
phường Dĩ An, Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh
```

A zone is **address content, not an administrative level.** It sits inside a commune and does not replace it, and it does not change the country or the province.

An export processing zone is a customs-free area. This is the Vietnamese analogue of a free zone elsewhere: goods enter and leave under a separate customs regime, and companies inside it are registered as export processing enterprises. For address data that is a property of the place, so it is carried in the address as a zone name and is kept apart from the region.

### Writing, diacritics and the post code

Vietnamese is written in Latin script with diacritics, and the same address regularly appears with them removed (`Đường Lê Lợi` and `Duong Le Loi`). Matching has to treat them as the same value. The letter Đ is the common failure: it has no decomposed form, so a simple accent stripper leaves `Đà Nẵng` as `Đa Nang` instead of `Da Nang`.

Since 2018 the national post code has five digits, issued to communes, wards and other units. Before that it had six digits, whose first two identified the province. Both are present in master data.

| Form | Example | Status |
|  --- | --- | --- |
| Five digits | `70000` | the current format |
| Six digits | `700000` | the superseded format, still present in older master data |


A post code issued before the reform can therefore point at an old province.

### Properties that regularly cause integration errors

**Quận 1 is a name, not a number of something.** The urban districts of Hồ Chí Minh City were numbered, so `Quận 1` or `Q.1` arrives in the city field of older data. Those districts no longer exist as an administrative level.

**The old province is often the only locality in the record.** Older data names `Bình Dương` as the city. Today that is a place within Hồ Chí Minh City, and the province is a different one.

**A name can belong to more than one level.** A former district, a ward and a commune can carry the same words, and only the marker word (quận, phường, xã) separates them.

**Slashes in the house number are the alley path.** Splitting `12/34/5` on the slash destroys the address.

## How CDQ models a Vietnamese address

The CDQ address model has two parallel hierarchies. **Administrative areas** represent the political containers, typed `REGION` and `COUNTY`. **Localities** represent the places themselves, typed `CITY`, `DISTRICT`, `QUARTER` or `BLOCK`. Streets are held as **thoroughfares** with the number in its own field, and the position inside the building as typed **premises**.

Vietnam maps as follows:

| Vietnamese level | CDQ concept | Type | SAP field |
|  --- | --- | --- | --- |
| tỉnh, thành phố trực thuộc trung ương | administrative area, level 1 | `REGION` | `region` |
| xã, phường, đặc khu | locality | held as submitted, no CDQ reference list | `city`, or `district` where a second locality is present |
| quận, huyện, thị xã (before 2025) | locality, kept as history | not required | `district` |
| khu công nghiệp, khu chế xuất, khu kinh tế | thoroughfare | `INDUSTRIAL_ZONE` | appended to `district` |
| đường, phố | thoroughfare | `STREET` | street |
| ngõ, ngách, hẻm, kiệt | part of the thoroughfare | `STREET` | street |
| số nhà | thoroughfare number | n/a | house number |
| tầng | premise | `LEVEL` | floor |
| tòa nhà | premise | `BUILDING` | building |
| bưu chính (post code) | post code | `REGULAR` | post code |


Vietnam has no `COUNTY` level in CDQ: administrative area level 2 is empty, which is now also the correct reading of the administrative structure.

### The region key

CDQ holds each of the 34 provinces and cities with a **technical key** that carries the new administrative number of the unit, so `VN-01` is Hà Nội and `VN-79` is Hồ Chí Minh City. Each entry also carries an **ISO 3166-2 code**, and that code is still the one registered before the reform: Hà Nội is `VN-HN`, Hồ Chí Minh City `VN-SG`.

The same VN- code can name two different places
The administrative numbers and the old ISO 3166-2 numbers overlap, and they are not the same numbering. `VN-01` as a technical key is Hà Nội, whereas `VN-01` as an ISO 3166-2 code is Lai Châu. `VN-22` is Quảng Ninh as a technical key, but Nghệ An as an ISO code. Never compare a technical key with an ISO code, and never read a bare `VN-nn` without knowing which of the two it is.

**What CDQ guarantees is the technical key and the name** of the 34 current units. The ISO code is delivered for continuity with systems that were keyed on it before 2025, and it follows the old ISO register, not the new units.

An SAP system does not validate against either: it validates the region field against its own region key table, `T005S`, which is customer configuration, so this standard does not define a key. The default mapping CDQ carries for Vietnam equals the number in the technical key (`01` for Hà Nội). The mapping from it to the key your system expects is yours to maintain.

### Worked example

`Số 12, ngõ 34, Tầng 5, Tòa nhà Ví Dụ, đường Láng, phường Láng, Hà Nội 10000`, in the CDQ address model:

| Field | Value |
|  --- | --- |
| Country | `VN` |
| Administrative area 1 (`REGION`) | Thành phố Hà Nội |
| Administrative area 1 technical key | `VN-01` |
| Locality 1 | Phường Láng |
| Thoroughfare (`STREET`) | đường Láng, ngõ 34 |
| Thoroughfare number | `12` |
| Premise (`BUILDING`) | Tòa nhà Ví Dụ |
| Premise (`LEVEL`) | Tầng 5 |
| Post code | `10000` |


## Reference data CDQ maintains for Vietnam

These tables are extracts
The examples below show the shape of each dataset, not its full contents. The complete published lists for Vietnam are on the CDQ Wiki page [business partner metadata for Vietnam](https://meta.cdq.com/DataModel:CDQ/Business_Partner/Address/Country/VN).

### Provinces and centrally run cities

**34 entries**: the 28 provinces and 6 cities of the structure in force since 1 July 2025. Each carries its technical key and names in Vietnamese, English, French, German and Chinese. The six cities are held with the word `Thành phố` in front of the name.

| Technical key | Vietnamese | Chinese | Also matched as |
|  --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `VN-01` | Thành phố Hà Nội | 河内市 | Thanh pho Ha Noi, Ha Noi |
| `VN-79` | Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh | 胡志明市 | Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon |
| `VN-48` | Thành phố Đà Nẵng | 岘港市 | Thanh pho Da Nang, Da Nang |
| `VN-56` | Khánh Hòa | 庆和 | Khanh Hoa |
| `VN-31` | Thành phố Hải Phòng | 海防市 | Thanh pho Hai Phong, Hai Phong |


Names without diacritics are published as alternative names for every entry, so `Cao Bang` and `Tuyen Quang` resolve to the province.

### Address terms

**1 entry** today, in the industrial zone vocabulary: `Khu công nghiệp` (industrial park, `INDUSTRIAL_ZONE`), with its English form `Industrial Park`.

### Post code format

Five digits. The six digit form is recognised separately as the superseded format, so a record carrying `700000` is identified as old rather than invalid.

What CDQ standardises
The **province** is standardised against the 34 current units: the canonical name and the technical key are written back. A value that already is a current province, with or without diacritics, resolves.

The **commune or ward**, the street, and the alley are preserved as submitted. Where an address provider is enabled, it can enrich and complete them.

**Post codes** are validated against the five digit format, with the six digit form recognised as superseded.

## Current limitations

These are the gaps worth knowing about before designing an integration.

| Limitation | What it means for an integration |
|  --- | --- |
| **Pre-2025 provinces are not matched** | The reference data holds the 34 current units. The 29 provinces that were merged into them, and the former name of Huế, are not yet published as alternative names, so a record in Bình Dương, Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu or Long An does not resolve to the province it is in today. Records are never discarded, but they are not corrected either, and the old province is kept as submitted. |
| **Communes, wards and special zones have no CDQ reference list** | The second tier of the new structure is preserved as submitted. It is not standardised and is not derived from a post code. |
| **Only one address term is published** | The industrial park is recognised. The export processing zone, the economic zone, the high-tech park, the floor, the building, the alley words and the street words are not yet, so they arrive inside the street value and are not split out into their own fields. |
| **Former districts are not converted** | A district in older data is kept, and it is not used to work out the new commune or ward. Where the district sat in the city field, it is not moved. |
| **The post code is not checked against the province** | A post code is validated for its format only, so a well-formed code issued before the reform can point at a province that no longer exists. |


Check the region key before an SAP load
Before mapping the region of a Vietnamese address to an SAP key, decide whether your mapping is keyed on the technical key or on the ISO code, and check that the two are not mixed in one table. They share values with different meanings.

## Summary

A Vietnamese address is written smallest-first, through an alley hierarchy, and since 1 July 2025 it has two administrative levels: the province or centrally run city, and the commune. The district was abolished, and master data written before then carries it, together with province names that were merged away.

CDQ holds the 34 current provinces and cities, placed in administrative area level 1, and delivers their technical key. The ISO 3166-2 code that goes with each is the old one and overlaps the technical key with a different meaning, so the two must never be compared. Industrial parks and export processing zones are address content inside a commune, not a level. The pre-2025 province names, the commune level and most of the Vietnamese address vocabulary are not yet published.

## Related Resources

- [Business partner metadata for Vietnam](https://meta.cdq.com/DataModel:CDQ/Business_Partner/Address/Country/VN)
- [Thailand Address Standard](/documentation/_public/product-manuals/address-guard/country-standards/thailand-address-standard)
- [Japan Address Standard](/documentation/_public/product-manuals/address-guard/country-standards/japan-address-standard)
- [Korea Address Standard](/documentation/_public/product-manuals/address-guard/country-standards/korea-address-standard)


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