Vietnam Passes the Urban Development Law: What Changes for HCMC and Foreign Buyers

Vietnam's National Assembly passed the Law on Urban Development on 24 August, approving it by 465 votes of the 474 deputies present. It takes effect on 1 October 2026, with the provisions governing legal document issuance under the decentralised framework starting a month earlier on 1 September.

What changes

The law moves urban approvals away from a system built on central administrative sign-off toward one that delegates decisions to local authorities. Ho Chi Minh City is the primary beneficiary. The city gains expanded authority over public administration, investment, finance and urban governance, including the power to issue municipal and project bonds and to approve certain public-private partnership projects on its own.

Three provisions matter to anyone holding or considering Vietnamese property.

Transit-oriented development gets a legal basis for the first time. The law establishes the framework for higher-density residential, commercial and office development around railway and metro routes. Until now TOD in Vietnam has been an aspiration in planning documents without a statutory mechanism behind it. Metro-corridor land should reprice on the back of this, and the repricing will be uneven, favouring parcels near stations already under construction over those on lines still in planning.

Reclaimed urban areas are now permitted to attract investment in housing, tourism, financial services and integrated infrastructure. These areas stay under existing local jurisdiction rather than becoming separate administrative units, which keeps the approval chain intact.

Pilot policy programmes of up to five years, extendable by another five, let the city test rules in areas where no existing legislation applies. The People's Council also gains authority to set management policy for free trade zones, integrated logistics hubs and high-tech parks, with the chairman empowered to adjust their boundaries and functions.

The part foreign buyers should read carefully

The pilot mechanism cuts both ways. Shorter approval timelines in Ho Chi Minh City are a genuine improvement in a market where projects routinely stall for years in procedural limbo. But a pilot programme means the rules governing a specific development can now differ from national law, for a defined period, in ways that are set locally.

The practical consequence is that project-level due diligence gets more important, not less. "It complies with the Land Law" stops being a sufficient answer once a project sits inside a pilot programme with its own terms. You need to know which regime a given development is operating under and what happens to it when the pilot period expires.

The context this lands in

The law arrives alongside a Prime Ministerial directive dated 22 August ordering ministries and local authorities to review and resolve 4,619 projects and land-related cases that were stuck as of 31 July 2026. Provincial leaders are personally accountable and the deadline is 15 September. Anything a locality cannot resolve within its own authority must be escalated with a proposed solution rather than left open.

Read together, the two moves describe the same programme: clear the backlog of frozen projects, then change the approval machinery that froze them. For a buyer holding a deposit in a stalled scheme, the 15 September deadline is the nearer and more consequential date, because it should produce a published classification of which developments restart, which get revoked and which stay frozen.

Verification still does the heavy lifting

None of this changes what happens if the developer taking your money cannot deliver. A market carrying 4,619 unresolved projects and land cases is one where a developer's actual completion record tells you more than any regulatory reform. Checking that history before committing is the single highest-value step available to a foreign buyer, and platforms such as Bektu exist to make it verifiable rather than something taken on trust from a sales office.

Related reading: HCMC Has 1,200 Stalled Projects to Clean Up. On what the underlying ownership rules permit: Vietnam's 2024 Land Law: What Foreigners Can and Cannot Own.