Vietnam Sourcing Compliance Guide: What Actually Applies in September 2026

The figure came from Executive Order 14326, whose section 3(a) set a 40% ad valorem rate — in place of, not on top of, the origin country's reciprocal rate — on goods US Customs determined had been transshipped to evade that order's tariffs, effective 2025-08-07. According to the US Federal Register, the whole layer is gone: Executive Order 14389 terminated the ad valorem tariffs issued under the IEEPA emergency-powers statute after the Supreme Court held on 2026-02-20 that the statute does not authorise the President to impose tariffs, and the corresponding tariff-schedule codes have been inactive at entry since 2026-02-24.

Here is the trap that keeps the number alive. The current tariff schedule still prints heading 9903.02.01 at the applicable subheading rate plus 40%, with no termination annotation — unlike 9903.01.72, the line that carried Vietnam's original 46% rate and is explicitly marked as terminated. Anyone who checks the schedule today reads a rate that is no longer charged, which is why it keeps reappearing in quotes, consultancy decks and landed-cost models.

Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions. The penalty instrument is gone: the current Section 301 structure contains no transshipment or origin-evasion heading at all, so there is no successor rate to quote in its place. The exposure is not gone. A false origin claim is still a false statement on a customs entry, with penalty and back-duty consequences that never depended on any single executive order. Whether your supplier's operations would survive an origin challenge is the question that outlived the 40%.

The current country-specific add-on for Vietnam is 12.5%, imposed by the US Trade Representative under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 in the forced-labour import-ban investigation, carried on heading 9903.05.84 and effective 2026-07-24. It sits on top of the subheading's own duty rate. For Vietnam it is not applied net of the normal rate, and it is not a total.

That distinction is where landed-cost spreadsheets break. There is no single Vietnam rate: a product whose normal duty is zero lands at 12.5%, while a garment carrying a double-digit normal rate lands at that rate plus 12.5%. Goods already subject to Section 232 steel, aluminium, copper, or vehicle and parts tariffs are carved out of the add-on under heading 9903.05.90 rather than charged twice. If you are still comparing Vietnam against China on unit price alone, this is the line that decides the comparison.

For continuity when you read anything written earlier this year: between 2026-02-24 and 2026-07-23, imports from every country carried a 10% surcharge under Section 122 of the same Act, on heading 9903.03.01, which expired automatically at that section's 150-day statutory ceiling. The Section 301 action started the following day, so there was no gap — but the legal basis, and therefore what can be challenged or changed, is entirely different from what came before.

None of the tariff arithmetic matters if the origin claim itself does not hold. Under 19 C.F.R. §134.1(b), a country becomes the country of origin only where work or material added there amounts to a substantial transformation of the goods. That definition sits inside the marking rules; for duty assessment US Customs applies a substantial-transformation standard drawn from case law, and goods claiming preference under the North American agreement are judged by a separate rule set. The practical consequence is the same in every version: no certificate substitutes for the underlying production facts.

On the Vietnamese side there is no blanket percentage that makes goods Vietnamese. Non-preferential origin turns on where the last substantial production step took place, with the operative test set product by product against the HS code — either a change of tariff classification or a value criterion, depending on the item. Decree 31/2018/NĐ-CP remains the base instrument; a replacement has been in drafting since 2025 without being issued.

The 30% local value added rule that circulates in sourcing guidance has never been in force. It has lived in draft instruments since 2019, and the draft decree on Vietnamese origin marking for domestically circulated goods was still at submission stage in mid-2026 — with voluntary self-declaration, and no published percentage. The mechanics of the test, and what evidence actually satisfies it, are worth settling before you accept a supplier's word for it.

Buyers track US action and miss the Vietnamese half, which changed underneath them. Decree 169/2026/NĐ-CP took effect on 2026-07-01, replacing Decree 128/2020/NĐ-CP in full along with Article 2 of Decree 102/2021/NĐ-CP. Any compliance memo still citing the 2020 decree is citing a repealed instrument.

Its Article 18 penalises falsely claiming Vietnamese origin specifically across export, import, temporary import for re-export, transit and transshipment, with fines banded by the value of the goods and, on top of the fine, confiscation of the goods or forced destruction. Article 5 sets the limitation periods: five years for tax-management violations such as underpaid duty from a wrong declaration, two years for other customs violations. That is the real reason to keep production files for years — not a retention target set by your own document policy.

The certificate-of-origin issuing authority also moved twice. The Ministry of Industry and Trade withdrew the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry's issuing authority on 2025-04-21, with issuance stopping on 2025-05-05 and passing to the ministry's import-export department. Decree 146/2025/NĐ-CP then decentralised the function, and Circular 40/2025/TT-BCT set out issuance and written recognition of exporter self-certification, shared between that department and provincial people's committees. A certificate is only worth the current mandate of whoever signed it, so ask for the document set rather than the certificate alone.

The EU adds two regimes that operate independently of tariffs and of each other. The deforestation regulation covers seven primary commodities and asks whether the land they came from was deforested after 2020-12-31 — a cut-off unchanged through every postponement. It applies to large and medium operators from 2026-12-30, and to micro and small operators and natural persons from 2027-06-30, but only where they were established on or before 2024-12-31. Newer small companies stay on the earlier date, and so do micro and small operators handling the timber products already covered by the earlier EU timber regulation — the deferral does not reach them at all.

The carbon border mechanism has been in its definitive phase since 2026-01-01, covering six sectors: cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen. The legal obligation sits on the EU importer, not on the Vietnamese exporter — there is a de minimis of 50 tonnes net mass per importer per calendar year, and the first annual declaration and certificate surrender fall on 2027-09-30. Nothing in that is directly enforceable against your supplier, which is precisely why it arrives as a buyer questionnaire with a deadline instead.

The cost of having no verified emissions data is explicit rather than theoretical: EU default values apply with a mark-up of 10% in 2026, 20% in 2027 and 30% from 2028 for cement, steel, aluminium and hydrogen, and 1% for fertilisers. Whether your product is in scope at all, and what an EU customer will ask for is worth settling before the questionnaire arrives, because the answer usually depends on records the factory has to start keeping months earlier.

Sequence matters more than the checklist. Origin evidence comes first, because it is the only thing both US entry and Vietnamese penalty exposure depend on, and it is the slowest to build — production records cannot be created retroactively for shipments that already sailed. Everything else can be fixed in a quarter; this cannot.

Second, rehearse retrieval rather than assuming it. An origin verification request is answered in days, not weeks, and the constraint is almost never whether the records exist but whether anyone can pull them across a factory, a trading company and a freight forwarder who each hold a third of the chain.

Tariff arithmetic comes last, deliberately. It has changed by executive and agency action twice inside a year, and it will change again; the origin file will not. And if your programme also sells into Vietnam rather than only buying from it, the market-entry requirements are a separate exercise that should not be folded into the sourcing file — different regulators, different documents, different owner internally.