TL;DR
- A Vietnamese household on 400 kWh a month pays an effective 2,686 dong per kWh, roughly 22 percent above the national average retail price of 2,204.07 dong.
- The six residential bands run from 1,984 dong per kWh at the bottom to 3,460 at the top, a gap of 74 percent, before 8 percent VAT.
- Shops on low voltage pay 5,422 dong per kWh in the evening peak against 1,918 off peak, a spread of nearly three to one.
- A five band structure signed in May 2025 puts the top band at 180 percent of the average and the bottom at 90 percent, so the top is exactly double the bottom.
Short version: the published average is a policy number. What a Vietnamese meter charges depends on which band the last kilowatt hour falls into, and that is also why a rooftop panel there earns more than the headline rate suggests.
Vietnam does not really have an electricity price. It has six of them for households, a separate set for shops, another for factories, and a time of day multiplier layered on top of the commercial ones. The figure that turns up in coverage, 2,204.0655 dong per kilowatt hour, is the weighted average the regulator works back from when it sets everything else. Hardly any meter is billed at it.
That distinction is not pedantry. It decides whether a household efficiency measure is worth doing, and what a rooftop panel earns per kilowatt hour generated. Both answers move by more than half depending on where the meter already sits.
The six household bands, and what each one costs
Residential supply is billed progressively. The first 50 kilowatt hours of the month are cheap, and every band above that costs more than the one below it. Nobody moves onto a single higher rate: you keep the cheap units you already used and pay the new rate only on the units above the threshold. The full schedule, including the commercial and production categories, is maintained in Vietnamese at https://vietnamsolar.vn/gia-dien/ and updated each time a new decision lands.
| Band | Monthly consumption | Rate, dong per kWh | Against band 1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 to 50 kWh | 1,984 | baseline |
| 2 | 51 to 100 kWh | 2,050 | plus 3 percent |
| 3 | 101 to 200 kWh | 2,380 | plus 20 percent |
| 4 | 201 to 300 kWh | 2,998 | plus 51 percent |
| 5 | 301 to 400 kWh | 3,350 | plus 69 percent |
| 6 | 401 kWh and above | 3,460 | plus 74 percent |
All six figures exclude value added tax, charged at 8 percent on top. Prepaid card meters sit outside the ladder entirely at a flat 2,909 dong per kilowatt hour. Worse than band 4, better than band 5, and no way to move between them.
The average is a policy number, not a price
Work a real bill through the ladder and the gap opens up fast. A household on 100 kilowatt hours a month pays 201,700 dong before tax, an effective 2,017 dong per unit, below the national average. The same household at 400 kilowatt hours pays 1,074,500 dong, an effective 2,686 dong per unit. Four times the consumption, but 1.33 times the unit cost on top of that.
So the average retail price does two jobs at once and is honest about neither. It anchors the whole schedule, and it is the number quoted whenever rates change. It is not what a family in a Ho Chi Minh City apartment with two air conditioners pays, and it is not what a small household in the delta pays either.
Shops and factories are billed by the clock instead
Commercial and industrial supply drops the consumption ladder and picks up a time of use schedule. The same premises pays three different rates through the day, and the evening peak window that runs from 17h30 to 22h30 is where the damage is done.
| Customer, below 6 kV | Off peak | Standard | Peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing | 1,300 | 1,987 | 3,640 |
| Retail and services | 1,918 | 3,152 | 5,422 |
A shop pays 2.83 times as much for a unit at eight in the evening as it does at three in the morning, and 2.46 times the national average. That is the single widest spread anywhere in the Vietnamese schedule, and it is the reason load shifting gets talked about more in Vietnamese retail than in most of Europe.
Six bands are about to become five
Decision 1279 of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, dated 9 May 2025, set the rates above and is the schedule in force. The Ministry publishes the full retail electricity tariff for every customer class in English, which is unusual and useful.
Three weeks later the Prime Minister signed Decision 14/2025/QD-TTg on the structure of the retail tariff, which replaces the six bands with five and expresses each one as a percentage of the average rather than a fixed figure. Band 1 becomes 90 percent of the average and covers the first 100 kilowatt hours. Band 5 becomes 180 percent and starts at 701. Bands 2, 3 and 4 sit at 108, 136 and 162 percent.
Two things follow from that. The top band ends up at exactly twice the bottom band, which is a wider spread than the 74 percent gap in the current ladder. And the first 100 units get cheaper in relative terms, because band 1 now swallows what used to be bands 1 and 2. Households under 100 kilowatt hours a month do slightly better. Households above 700 do considerably worse.
The new structure takes effect from the next adjustment of the average retail price after the signing date rather than on a fixed calendar day, which is why the six band ladder is still what appears on bills.
What the bands do to rooftop solar maths
A rooftop system does not displace an average kilowatt hour. It displaces the most expensive one the household was about to buy, because generation comes off the top of the consumption ladder rather than the bottom. That single fact gets mishandled more often than anything else in the schedule.
For a household already in band 6, every unit the roof produces is worth 3,460 dong, not 2,204. That is 57 percent more than the headline average, and it is the number that belongs in a payback calculation. Run the same sum with the average and the payback period comes out roughly half again as long as it will actually be.
The effect compounds under the five band structure, where the top band moves to 180 percent of the average. Manufacturers already looking at the footprint of their production runs face a sharper version of the same arithmetic, since their peak rate is a multiple rather than a band and midday generation lands squarely inside the standard and peak windows.
None of which makes the average retail price wrong. It makes it the wrong number to plan with. Ask which band the next unit falls into rather than what a kilowatt hour costs in Vietnam, because that is the only rate anyone is ever choosing between.
