Paying Contractors in Vietnam and Thailand: Corridor Costs

Sending USD 200 from the United States to Vietnam cost an average of 5.27% in Q3 2025. Sending the same amount from Thailand to Vietnam cost 11.33% (World Bank, 2025). The short regional hop is more than twice the price of the transpacific one. That inversion is the first thing to understand about payouts to Vietnam and Thailand, and it tells you where the real constraint sits: not distance, and not technology.

What the corridors cost, measured

All figures: World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q3 2025 issue.

Why the intra-Asian corridor is dearer. Corridor pricing follows competition and volume, not geography. The US–Vietnam route carries a very large, mature flow and has attracted every digital remittance operator that exists; the Thailand–Vietnam route is thin, served by fewer providers, and priced accordingly. The FX margin alone is 73% higher on the regional route. If your payee list spans Southeast Asia and you assumed that paying from a regional treasury entity would be cheaper than paying from Europe, that assumption deserves testing against actual quotes. The same pattern of corridor-specific pricing shows up elsewhere in our corridor work: see payments to Turkey and LatAm contractor payouts.

The caveat to state before the table is used. The World Bank series prices a USD 200 consumer remittance. A company paying 900 Vietnamese developers USD 1,400 each is buying a different product, and the fixed-fee component that dominates a USD 200 transfer matters far less at USD 1,400 while the FX margin matters far more. Use these figures for corridor structure (which route is competitively priced, where the margin hides) and price your own batch against your own quotes.

The flows are large enough to matter. Vietnam received over USD 16 billion in remittances in 2025, described as a record by Foreign Minister Le Hoai Trung (VietnamNet, January 2026).

The real constraint is permission, not price

Here is the thesis, stated plainly: in both Vietnam and Thailand the binding constraint on a payout batch is not cost or speed. It is who is permitted to convert into local currency, and under what documentary rules. Both markets prohibit crypto as a means of payment: Vietnam through the State Bank, Thailand through an SEC notification issued with the Bank of Thailand and the Ministry of Finance. Both are moving from prohibition to a licensed perimeter. Neither will let a foreign payer settle directly into a local account in a crypto asset.

That changes the question you put to a provider. “Do you support Vietnam?” is not a question. “Which licensed entity performs the VND conversion, under which authorisation, and what documents does it require from my payee?” is.

Can you pay contractors in Vietnam in crypto? No. The State Bank of Vietnam’s Official Letter 5747/NHNN-PC of 21 July 2017 states that crypto is not legal currency and not a lawful means of payment. A stablecoin can settle the international leg between you and a licensed local counterparty, but the Vietnamese contractor is paid in Vietnamese dong by that counterparty. Sending USDT to the contractor’s own wallet is not that route.

Vietnam: a pilot market with a hard currency boundary

Vietnam spent 2025 moving from a grey zone to a defined, time-limited perimeter.

Resolution 05/2025/NQ-CP, issued on 9 September 2025 and valid for five years, establishes a pilot regime covering crypto-asset offering and issuance, organisation of a trading market, service provision, and the state management mechanism (PwC Vietnam, December 2025). Five pilot trading licences are expected, roughly 50 asset types are to be listed, and transactions must be denominated in VND.

Law No. 71/2025/QH15 on the Digital Technology Industry took effect on 1 January 2026 and recognises crypto as an instrument for exchange and investment. Note what it does not do: it excludes digital forms of fiat currency from the definition, which PwC Vietnam reads as leaving fiat-backed stablecoins outside the Law, to be regulated separately, while describing their status as still ambiguous. If your provider’s Vietnam story rests on the new Law covering USDT, ask them to point to the provision.

Crypto as payment remains prohibited. Official Letter 5747/NHNN-PC (21 July 2017) is still the operative position. The one exception is narrow and instructive: a stablecoin payment sandbox in Da Nang for foreigners, running 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2028, limited to three locations, with Travel Rule obligations applying from USD 500.

One forward-looking item to put in your compliance plan. The State Bank of Vietnam has proposed reporting all international crypto transactions of USD 1,000 or more. That is a proposal, not law, but it is the direction, and it is the same order of magnitude as thresholds already live elsewhere in the region.

Thailand: licensed, enumerated, and still baht-only

Thailand has the more mature licensing regime of the two and the same payment prohibition.

The SEC supervises six categories of digital asset service provider in the secondary market (exchanges, brokers, dealers, advisory services, fund managers and custodial wallet providers) plus ICO issuers and portals in the primary market (Chambers and Partners, Fintech 2026 – Thailand). A notification issued by the SEC in joint consideration with the Bank of Thailand and the Ministry of Finance prohibits digital asset business operators from using digital assets as a means of payment for goods and services. That notification remains in force, and a further draft amendment to the Emergency Decree advanced by the SEC keeps the payment prohibition.

Three 2025 developments change the operating picture:

• April 2025: the 2025 amendment extends licensing to offshore operators serving persons in Thailand and adds site-blocking powers. Offshore platforms that offer trading or custody to persons in Thailand now need a Thai licence. For a payout, the question is which Thai-licensed operator converts the payment into baht.
• March 2025: the SEC expanded the list of eligible cryptocurrencies for certain regulated transactions to include USDC and USDT.
• TouristDigiPay, a Bank of Thailand–SEC sandbox, lets licensed operators convert tourists’ crypto into baht for e-money wallet spending with QR payments and AML safeguards. It is a sandbox for inbound tourism, not a contractor-payout route, and it is worth knowing precisely because it is frequently miscited as evidence that Thailand has opened up to crypto payments.

The foreign-exchange rules are the part that actually bites. Outward remittances must go through a Bank of Thailand authorised agent, and remittances of USD 200,000 or more require supporting documents submitted to the authorised bank, with each bank setting its own documentation requirements. If your Thai entity is the payer rather than the payee, that documentation requirement is a planning item, not an afterthought.

This article describes regulatory and market conditions for general information. It is not legal, tax, or financial advice. INXY Payments is a payment infrastructure provider, not a law or accountancy firm, and decisions with regulatory consequence should be reviewed by qualified counsel in the relevant jurisdiction.

INXY serves Europe, Asia and LatAm, and does not serve the UK, the US or sanctioned jurisdictions.

What stablecoin rails change here, and what they do not

What changes. The international leg stops being a correspondent-banking problem and becomes a network transfer with deterministic finality, settled in minutes. Cost per payee stops scaling with the wire fee and starts scaling with the network fee, which is why a 900-payee batch behaves completely differently from 900 wires. That is the model behind INXY mass crypto payouts. Screening runs before the transfer leaves, not inside a correspondent’s queue. INXY prices payouts from 0.1%, depending on volume, currency and corridor, with no setup or monthly fees.

What does not change. The conversion into VND or THB still happens, still carries a spread, and is still performed by a locally permitted counterparty under local rules. The 2.04% FX margin on the Thailand–Vietnam corridor does not vanish because the value arrived on-chain; it reappears at the off-ramp, where you can at least see it as a separate line. The contractor still has a bank or wallet with KYC tiers and receiving limits. If you want those components priced against your own payee list rather than a USD 200 benchmark, talk to a payments specialist with your corridor split.

Chain choice matters more in thin corridors than in liquid ones, because local off-ramp depth differs by network. Our breakdown of TRC-20, ERC-20 and BEP-20 network costs covers the tradeoffs, and USDT mass payouts sets out the asset-level detail.

Standing up these corridors: the sequence

1. Name the licensed local counterparty for each market and get its authorisation in writing. In Thailand, which of the six SEC categories. In Vietnam, under which permission, given that the pilot regime is new and time-limited.
2. Confirm the payout currency in the contract. Contractors are paid in VND and THB. If your contractor agreements denominate in USD, decide explicitly who bears the conversion rate risk and write it down before the first batch, not after the first complaint.
3. Collect Travel Rule data up front. The Da Nang sandbox applies obligations from USD 500 and the SBV has proposed USD 1,000 reporting for international crypto transactions. Our guide to what screening actually runs before a payout leaves lists the fields.
4. Check the payer side, not just the payee side. If a Thai entity in your group funds the batch, the USD 200,000 documentary threshold and the authorised-agent requirement apply to you.
5. Run a 20-payee pilot per market. Include one name-mismatch case and one payee whose wallet verification tier caps the receivable amount. Both will occur at scale.
6. Reconcile the pilot to the unit, including the network fee as its own ledger line, before scaling.
7. Write the failure path. Who re-issues a returned payout, in which currency, and how the contractor is told. In a thin corridor the re-issue is the expensive event.

What breaks in production

• Name-matching against Vietnamese and Thai conventions. Diacritics, name order and the length limits on beneficiary name fields in legacy local systems produce failures that have nothing to do with your data being wrong.
• The payee is paid in local currency and quotes you the shortfall. If the contract says USD and the account receives VND, the contractor sees the spread. This becomes a people problem before it becomes a finance problem.
• Someone cites TouristDigiPay as proof Thailand allows crypto payments. It is an inbound-tourism sandbox. Build nothing on it.
• Vietnamese pilot status changes mid-year. Resolution 05/2025/NQ-CP is a five-year pilot with licences still being issued. Treat your Vietnamese counterparty’s permission as a thing to re-verify, not a thing you confirmed once.
• Partial batch failure. Eleven of 900 fail. If reconciliation assumes all-or-nothing, the ledger is wrong and two time zones of support queue are live.
• Funding from the wrong entity. A Thai payer entity discovers the USD 200,000 documentary requirement on the day the batch is due.

Decision framework

1. How many payees, how often? Below roughly 50 a quarter, your incumbent rail is fine and the integration effort will not pay for itself. Above a few hundred a month, per-transaction pricing, not FX, is probably what is actually costing you.

2. Which direction does money flow? Paying into Vietnam and Thailand is a licensing-and-conversion problem. Paying out of Thailand is a foreign-exchange-control problem with a documentary threshold. These require different answers from the same provider.

3. Can your provider name the licensed local counterparty? If not, the concentration risk is unpriced and the compliance position is undocumented.

4. What does the contractor actually receive? In local currency, after what spread, by when, and what happens on a name mismatch. A provider who answers the settlement-speed question crisply and this one vaguely has optimised the leg that was already fast.

Where INXY is not the answer. If you pay a handful of Vietnamese or Thai suppliers a few times a year at high value, a bank wire or an established money transfer operator relationship will cost less in integration and governance than any new rail. Stablecoin rails earn their keep on payee count and batch frequency, not on the existence of a border. If your shape is the other one, compare your current flow with our team with your corridor split and payee count, or see how the same model applies to contractor payouts for global teams.

FAQ

How much does it cost to pay a contractor in Vietnam?

The World Bank put the average cost of sending USD 200 from the United States to Vietnam at 5.27% in Q3 2025, with an average fee of USD 8.17 and an FX margin of 1.18%. The Thailand to Vietnam corridor averaged 11.33%. These are consumer remittance benchmarks, so a business batch should be priced against its own quotes.

Can I pay a Vietnamese contractor in USDT?

No. The State Bank of Vietnam prohibits crypto as a means of payment under Official Letter 5747/NHNN-PC of 21 July 2017. Sending USDT to the contractor’s own wallet is not a lawful route. A stablecoin can settle the international leg with a licensed local counterparty, which then pays the contractor in Vietnamese dong.

Is crypto legal in Thailand for business payments?

Digital assets are legal to trade through SEC-licensed operators, but a notification issued by the SEC with the Bank of Thailand and the Ministry of Finance prohibits digital asset business operators from using digital assets as a means of payment for goods and services. Payment to a Thai contractor is made in baht.

Why is the Thailand to Vietnam corridor more expensive than the US to Vietnam one?

Corridor pricing tracks competition and volume rather than distance. The US–Vietnam route is a large mature flow served by many digital operators; the Thailand–Vietnam route is thinner and served by fewer. The FX margin was 2.04% versus 1.18% in Q3 2025 (World Bank, 2025).

What is Vietnam’s crypto pilot programme?

Resolution 05/2025/NQ-CP, issued on 9 September 2025 and running five years, establishes a pilot for crypto-asset issuance, a trading market and service provision, with roughly five trading licences expected and transactions denominated in VND. Law No. 71/2025/QH15 on the Digital Technology Industry took effect on 1 January 2026.

Do Travel Rule obligations apply to payouts to Vietnam and Thailand?

Yes, with thresholds that differ by market and are still moving. Vietnam’s Da Nang stablecoin sandbox applies Travel Rule obligations from USD 500, and the State Bank of Vietnam has proposed reporting international crypto transactions of USD 1,000 or more. Check the applicable threshold per market rather than assuming one global figure.