Apostille or Consular Legalisation for Vietnam?

People arriving from Hague Convention countries often bring an apostille and assume Vietnam will accept it. Usually it will not.

The difference

	Apostille	Consular legalisation
Basis	Hague Convention 1961	Bilateral consular practice
Issued by	Designated authority in the issuing country	Issuing country authority, then the Vietnamese mission
Steps	One	Two
Accepted in Vietnam	Generally not on its own	Yes

Vietnam is not a party to the Apostille Convention, so the usual requirement is legalisation by a Vietnamese representative mission, unless a bilateral agreement exempts the document type.

If you already have an apostille

It is not wasted in every case — some Vietnamese missions accept an apostilled document as the base certification and add their legalisation on top. Send a photo of the document and the apostille before paying for anything else, and we will confirm what your specific mission requires.

Then translate

After legalisation, the document needs a notarised Vietnamese translation — in that order, never before.

Procedure and timing: step-by-step legalisation.