Ho Chi Minh City

The metro finally opened, and it changes where you would live

Metro Line 1, from Ben Thanh in District 1 out through Binh Thanh and Thao Dien toward Suoi Tien, began carrying passengers at the end of 2024 after more than a decade of delays. It is one line, not a network, and most of the city is still nowhere near it.

But it runs along the exact corridor foreigners live on, and that is the point. Thao Dien and the riverside stretch of Binh Thanh went from 'across the river, plan for traffic' to a fixed, predictable trip into the centre — which is the single biggest change to this city's liveability in years and the thing older guides are all still wrong about.

Everywhere else, the honest answer is a scooter or Grab, and Grab is cheap enough here that many people never buy a bike at all. That option does not exist in Da Nang, Phuket or Bali, and for anyone who does not want to ride, it is a genuine reason to pick this city over those.

Where people work, and who you will meet

This is the professional city. The client base, the agencies, the startups, the international companies and the deepest coworking market in Vietnam are all here, and someone whose work involves other people rather than just a laptop will find Saigon does something Da Nang cannot.

It is also several communities that barely touch: business expats on packages around District 1, families in Thao Dien and District 7, a large Korean and Taiwanese population in the south, a young Vietnamese professional scene in District 3 and Binh Thanh, and remote workers scattered through all of it. Nobody meets people by accident here the way they do in An Thuong — you have to pick a scene and show up.

What is genuinely bad here

The relentlessness, which sounds soft and is the reason most people eventually leave. Saigon has no quiet season and very little green space: the noise, the construction and the traffic run at the same level in March and in October, and there is nowhere in the centre to get away from it without leaving the city.

The air, which is traffic-driven rather than seasonal-burning like Chiang Mai's, so it does not clear for most of the year the way northern Thailand's does. Combined with heat and humidity that barely vary, it makes walking distances that look reasonable on a map something you stop doing by month two.

Then flooding. Parts of the city sit at or below the level of the tidal river, and heavy rain arriving with a high tide puts water into streets across Binh Thanh, District 7 and Thu Duc several times a year. It is routine rather than dramatic, and it is worth asking about a specific street before signing rather than after.

Healthcare here, specifically

This is Vietnam's best city for medical care by a clear margin, and it is where the rest of the country comes. The international hospitals used by foreigners — FV Hospital in District 7 and the Vinmec and Columbia Asia facilities among them — handle complex surgery and specialist care to a standard the rest of Vietnam does not offer. Our Da Nang page names this city as where its serious cases go.

That does not make it Bangkok or Singapore. For the most complex cases and for some specialist oncology and cardiac work, evacuation to one of those is still the realistic route, and an air ambulance is a five-figure bill. The practical read: routine and serious care are both well handled here, and the tail is what insurance is for.

Private hospitals bill immediately and in full unless your insurer direct-bills, so check that rather than the headline coverage number. And check motorbike use is covered at all — Vietnam's road statistics are poor, and riding without a licence valid for the bike plus an International Driving Permit voids the medical section of most policies.

There is still no long-stay visa

Vietnam has no digital nomad visa and no retirement visa. A package was proposed in 2025 and was still a proposal when we last checked the record; the pages ranking for those searches are agencies selling something else under the name. The full version of that argument is on the Vietnam guide linked from this page.

What it means here specifically: the business-visa route arranged through a sponsoring company is more available in Saigon than anywhere else in the country, because this is where the companies are — which is why the foreign population here skews longer-term and more settled than Da Nang's. It is still not residence, and it still depends on an arrangement rather than a right.

Plan the stay you can actually hold. The routes are listed below, read live from our records rather than summarised here, because summarised visa facts are how the rest of the internet gets them wrong.

The 183-day line, and the trap that is not the day count

Vietnam treats you as tax resident at 183 days in a calendar year or in any twelve consecutive months from arrival — note the second one, because it does not reset on 1 January the way people assume.

There is a second trigger independent of the count: having a permanent residence in Vietnam, which includes a leased property held for long enough in the tax year. A long lease on a District 1 apartment can therefore matter to your tax position regardless of how many days you actually spent in the country — and long leases are more common here than in Da Nang, so this catches more people in this city.

Residents are taxed on worldwide income on a progressive scale. We are stating the triggers, not predicting your outcome — how they interact with your home country's treaty is where general guidance stops being worth anything and a local accountant starts.

What we have not sourced, and why the rows are blank

Vietnam publishes no official rental series, and Ho Chi Minh City splits harder than any other city on this site: a serviced-apartment tier quoted to foreigners in dollars, and a local tier quoted in dong through direct contact and Facebook groups, commonly a large gap apart for the same building.

Publishing one number would mean picking one of those two markets and calling it the city. That is what the cost-of-living sites do here, and they do not tell you which one they picked — it is the foreigner tier, because that is the one that gets listed.

So the rows publish at five dated resident submissions, each naming its district, and the box under the table is where they go. District is not optional here: District 3 and Thao Dien are not the same market and averaging them would produce a number true of neither.