What the law says, and what Vietnam's official sites actually publish

Two government resolutions decide which checkpoints admit a traveller holding an e-visa. Resolution 127/NQ-CP named 42 of them in August 2023. Resolution 389/NQ-CP added 41 more on 2 December 2025, bringing the total to 83.

The e-visa portal run by the immigration department publishes its own list of those checkpoints, and that list is what a traveller planning a route will actually read. On 2026-08-03 it held 42 entries. We matched all of them against the 83 checkpoints in the decrees, by type and by name: every one of the 42 corresponds to the older resolution, and not one of the 41 added by the newer one appears.

The obvious explanation would be a page nobody maintains. That explanation does not hold. The file that carries the list was last changed ten days before we read it, which is eight months after the resolution that should have expanded it. Someone is editing the page; the list is simply not being brought up to date with the law.

What this means in practice is narrow and worth keeping narrow. A traveller who checks the portal, finds their intended crossing absent and books a different route has lost money and time over a document that is behind the law. A traveller who relies on the newer decree alone has no way to know that the immigration department’s own page disagrees. We publish both, dated, and leave the decision where it belongs.

The register holds 9 checks, all run on 2026-08-03. 4 returned the fact we were after. 3 established that a source does not publish it, and 2 failed to load at all. Rows that record an absence come first, because they are the ones no other site carries.

The distinction between the last two categories is the whole discipline of this page. A source that we read and that turned out not to carry a fact tells you something about the source. A source we could not open tells you only about our attempt. Writing them the same way would let a failed request masquerade as a finding.

Every row above can be reproduced, and two of them need a note on how. The e-visa portal sends no intermediate certificate, so a plain request fails on certificate validation; the chain completes with the CA certificate published at the address inside the portal’s own certificate, and verification then succeeds against a trusted root. We did not disable verification to get the page.

The portal also renders its checkpoint list in the browser rather than in the HTML, so the entries come from a script served by the same site. The link in our data points at the page a reader can open, not at the script.

The acts themselves are signed PDFs on the government document portal, and most are scans with no text layer. Those were rasterised and read page by page. Our methodology page describes each of these techniques in full, and the register records which one applied to which source.