Vietnam in-country partner (ICP) for EOR and payroll providers

An in-country partner (ICP) is the licensed local company that acts as the legal employer in a country where a global EOR or payroll platform has no entity of its own. In Vietnam the ICP signs the Vietnamese employment contract, registers and pays compulsory social, health and unemployment insurance, withholds personal income tax and pays net salary every month, while the platform keeps the client contract, the invoice and the relationship.

Nhan Kiet is a Vietnamese Employer of Record (EOR), payroll and manpower provider in Ho Chi Minh City, operating since 2009 under labour sub-leasing licence No. 15/2019/SHCM, with 40,000+ workers on its contracts.

Different providers need different structures, usually driven by whether your client may see a Vietnamese supplier name and who carries the invoice. All three below are workable for us.

Knowing the limits before the first case saves both sides a wasted quotation:

Need the candidate as well as the employer? Nhan Kiet also recruits, from a database of more than 2 million candidates, 100+ community channels and provincial employment service centres — see manpower supply. Global payroll providers that only need the Vietnamese payroll leg for their own client's entity can use our payroll outsourcing instead.

Vietnam has no statute called “employer of record”, and no licence carries that name. Any EOR-style arrangement here has to sit inside one of two existing frameworks, and the dividing line is who directs the work day to day:

• Labour sub-leasing — Articles 52–57 of the Labour Code 2019 and Decree 145/2020/ND-CP. The worker signs with Nhan Kiet but works under your client's direct supervision. This route requires a labour sub-leasing licence, which Nhan Kiet holds (No. 15/2019/SHCM). It carries three statutory limits: only the 20 job categories in Appendix II of Decree 145/2020/ND-CP, a maximum of 12 months per worker under Article 53, and only in the permitted situations.
• Service contract — under the Commercial Law. Nhan Kiet organises, manages and supervises the staff and is responsible for a defined output. This route is not bound by the Appendix II job list or the 12-month cap — not because it is a way around them, but because it is a different relationship: your client does not direct individual workers, and we answer for the result. Placing an engagement here because it is more convenient is placing it wrongly; in an inspection what the workers actually do decides the question, not what the contract is called.

We tell partners which route a given case falls into before anything is signed, including when the answer is inconvenient. Placing an engagement in the wrong framework is the single most common way these arrangements fail an inspection in Vietnam, and under Article 19(2) of Decree 283/2026/ND-CP (replacing Decree 12/2022/ND-CP from 10 September 2026) each side is penalised directly and separately for its own conduct — the client as well as the supplier.

A full explanation of both routes, with the fee model, is on our EOR Vietnam page.

For an urgent single hire, steps 1 and 3 can run in parallel and staff have started within 5–7 working days of first contact.

We are the party carrying Vietnamese employer liability in this arrangement, so we check the other side as carefully as you check us:

• Company registration and the entity that will sign, in whichever jurisdiction it sits.
• Who the end client is, and what the workers will actually do — we need this to place the engagement in the correct legal framework, not for commercial reasons.
• Payment terms. Vietnamese salaries, insurance and tax leave our account on statutory dates whether or not an invoice has been settled, so we agree the funding cycle before the first worker starts.
• A named operational contact in your time zone.

We expect the same scrutiny in return — the documents we send are listed in what you can check about us.

• Our own payroll platform. Contracts are signed electronically, payslips reach each worker in our employee app, and you receive the monthly payroll report with an open-formula Excel reconciliation.
• Proven at scale. The same platform pays 40,000+ workers and has been reconciled line by line against real UKG/Kronos time data from an FDI manufacturer with more than 1,000 employees.
• Personal data stays in Vietnam. Workers' data is processed in our Vietnamese systems, under an information-security management system certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and under the Law on Personal Data Protection No. 91/2025/QH15, in force since 1 January 2026. Sending reports to you outside Vietnam is a cross-border transfer with its own dossier; who files what is set out in our guide to cross-border data transfer under EOR, PEO and payroll.
• One English-speaking contact. The partnership is run by Nguyen Quoc Trung, Deputy General Director; the worker-facing side is handled in Vietnamese.

How an EOR fee is built up in Vietnam, line by line, is explained in EOR pricing in Vietnam, and the checks a buyer should run on any provider are in how to choose an employer of record in Vietnam.

If you are a company hiring in Vietnam directly rather than a provider, local EOR company vs global EOR platform in Vietnam sets out how the two models differ.

Every serious guide to choosing an EOR tells buyers the same thing: check whether the provider owns its legal entity in your target country or relies on a third-party partner, and prefer the one that owns it. That is the right question, and our answer is short:

• Nhan Kiet is a Vietnamese company. Labour sub-leasing licence 15/2019/SHCM is issued in our name, not borrowed.
• Employment contracts, social insurance registration, personal income tax filing and monthly pay are all executed by Nhan Kiet staff. No part of it is sub-contracted.
• More than 40,000 workers are paid directly from our own systems across 34 provinces.

The partnership described on this page runs in the opposite direction to what people often assume: global providers without a Vietnamese entity use ours. We do not borrow capability from them. When a global platform serves Vietnam through an aggregator model — a third-party in-country partner — your company sits one layer further from the entity that actually employs your staff — and pays for that layer.

Contracting us directly removes it. Same entity, same operations team, one step shorter.

The fastest way to test whether this works is a live requirement rather than a general introduction. Send the role, the province, the salary band, the headcount and the start date, and you will get back the legal route it falls into, the quotation and the timeline.

Nguyen Quoc Trung — Deputy General Director
[email protected] · +84 908 636 108

Nhan Kiet Supplying Manpower Co., Ltd — tax code 0308022768, established 15 April 2009, head office at Room 202, Building 57, 57 Le Thi Hong Gam, Ben Thanh Ward, Ho Chi Minh City. Member of the Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Vietnam (KOCHAM).