Import customs documents and procedures

An enterprise preparing to import a consignment, whether it files its own customs declaration or files through a customs broker, needs to know the sequence of procedures before the goods arrive at the border gate. This page answers three questions: which steps make up the customs procedures for an import consignment and what the time limit for each step is, until when an error on the customs declaration may be corrected by a supplementary declaration, and who must keep the customs dossier after the goods are cleared. How the HS code, the customs value and the amount of duty payable are determined, the conditions for the special preferential rate, the separate procedures for processing goods and goods in transit, and the levels of administrative penalties are outside the scope of this page.

• The customs declaration for imported goods is submitted before the date the goods arrive at the border gate or within 30 days from that date, and is valid for carrying out customs procedures for 15 days from the date of registration (Clause 1 and Clause 2, Article 25 of the Law on Customs No. 54/2014/QH13 dated 23 June 2014).
• Where goods are subject to a licence, the licence must be in place before the customs declaration is registered.
• Release of goods is not yet customs clearance. The 60-day mark for a supplementary declaration runs from the date of customs clearance; after that mark the customs declarant must still make the supplementary declaration and is handled in accordance with the law, if applicable.
• For goods undergoing customs procedures, the Law on Customs and Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC dated 25 March 2015 of the Minister of Finance, as amended and supplemented by Circular No. 39/2018/TT-BTC and Circular No. 121/2025/TT-BTC (hereinafter referred to as Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC), use two different marks to fix the time until which a supplementary declaration may be made. This page states both.
• The goods owner keeps the customs dossier for 05 years from the date of registration of the customs declaration, including where the declaration is filed through a customs broker, except where the goods owner is a foreign trader without a presence in Vietnam.

The customs procedures for an import consignment consist of six steps, from preparing the dossier to the customs clearance or release of the goods.

1. Prepare the customs dossier and the licence. Where goods are subject to a licence issued by a specialised management agency, the licence must be in place before the customs declaration is registered. If, when checking the dossier, the customs authority has sufficient grounds to determine that the consignment had no licence at the time of registration of the declaration, the consignment is handled in accordance with the law on handling of administrative violations (Clause 3, Article 25 of Decree No. 08/2015/ND-CP dated 21 January 2015 of the Government, as amended and supplemented by Decree No. 167/2025/ND-CP, hereinafter referred to as Decree No. 08/2015/ND-CP).
2. Make and submit the customs declaration. The customs declarant declares electronically and submits the declaration before the date the goods arrive at the border gate or within 30 days from that date.
3. Register the customs declaration. The customs electronic data processing system (hereinafter referred to as the System) receives declarations 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, automatically checks the conditions for registration and assigns the declaration number. Goods management policies and tax policies apply as at the time of registration of the customs declaration, unless the law on export duty and import duty provides otherwise (Clause 3, Article 29 of the Law on Customs No. 54/2014/QH13).
4. Receive the channel assignment result. The customs authority notifies the channel assignment result immediately after the System receives, checks and registers the information on the declaration.
5. Present the dossier and the goods where the declaration is subject to inspection. The customs officer completes the examination of the dossier within 02 working hours from the time the complete customs dossier is received, and completes the physical inspection of goods within 08 working hours from the time the customs declarant presents the goods in full. The time limit for physical inspection may be extended by a maximum of 02 days for a consignment that is large, has many types of goods or requires a complex inspection; where goods are subject to specialised inspection, the time limit for completing the physical inspection runs from the time the customs authority receives the specialised inspection result (Clause 2, Article 23 of the Law on Customs No. 54/2014/QH13).
6. Pay the duty and receive the decision on customs clearance or release of goods. The order in which import duty and value-added tax are calculated, and the time limit for payment, are on the page HS codes, customs value and import duty.

The customs dossier prepared in the first step consists of 12 groups of documents for imported goods, from Point a to Point m, Clause 2, Article 16 of Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC. Clauses 3 to 7 of Article 16 set out the additional documents to be submitted for goods not subject to tax, goods exempt from duty, duty reduction, non-collection of duty and goods subject to value-added tax at 5%. The data fields to cross-check between these documents are in the article The import document set: six places it drifts apart.

In the fourth step, the channel assignment result shows whether the declared information is accepted, the documents must be examined, or the goods must be physically inspected.

The channel assignment result may change after the declaration is registered. On the basis of the information updated up to the time the goods arrive at the border gate, if the information on which the channel assignment was based has changed compared with the time of registration of the customs declaration, the System automatically processes the change and notifies the customs declarant of the change in the channel assignment result (Clause 4, Article 19 of Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC).

After the inspection step, an import consignment is in one of three states: cleared, released, or taken away for storage. The three states have different conditions and different time marks.

Goods are cleared after customs procedures have been completed (Clause 1, Article 37 of the Law on Customs No. 54/2014/QH13). Release of goods means that the customs authority permits the import where the goods are eligible for import but the official amount of duty payable has not yet been determined, and the customs declarant has paid the duty or has the amount of duty guaranteed by a credit institution on the basis of the declarant's own declaration and calculation. The time limit for determining the official amount of duty is no more than 30 days from the date of release of goods; where the goods need an expert assessment, the time limit runs from the date the assessment result is received (Article 36 of the Law on Customs No. 54/2014/QH13).

Goods subject to specialised inspection that are taken away for storage at a place meeting the conditions for customs supervision remain under the supervision of the customs authority until they are cleared (Clause 2, Article 35 of the Law on Customs No. 54/2014/QH13).

The date of customs clearance is the mark from which the time limit for a supplementary declaration in the next section runs. An enterprise needs to record the date of release of goods and the date of customs clearance of each declaration separately.

A supplementary declaration means amending or supplementing the information on the customs declaration and submitting the documents relating to the amendment or supplement. The same error has different consequences depending on when the customs declarant makes the supplementary declaration. Article 20 of Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC divides supplementary declaration into five cases.

The mark in the first row is not uniform. Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC takes as the mark the time the customs authority notifies the channel assignment result. Point a, Clause 4, Article 29 of the Law on Customs No. 54/2014/QH13 takes as the mark the time the customs authority notifies the direct examination of the customs dossier. Decree No. 169/2026/ND-CP dated 15 May 2026 of the Government on penalties for administrative violations in the customs field uses the same mark as the Law: a taxpayer who commits an incorrect declaration falling under Article 10 of that Decree is not penalised if the supplementary declaration was made before that time (Point a, Clause 2, Article 7). Both marks are stated as worded in the documents, checked on 6 October 2026; this page does not conclude which mark applies where the two fall at different times.

Two further limits are in Article 20 itself. Certain data fields on the customs declaration may not be amended by a supplementary declaration, under Section 3 of Appendix II to Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC. Point b, Clause 1 excludes content relating to export and import licences, and to specialised inspection of goods quality, health, culture, animal and plant quarantine and food safety, from the two cases of supplementary declaration after customs clearance.

In import files for materials, the wrong habit I come across is that the HS code is declared by following the previous consignment without rechecking. The regulations allow reuse, but on conditions. The customs declarant may use the analysis and classification result of a consignment that the same declarant imported and that has been cleared, to declare the name and commodity code of later consignments. The conditions are that the later consignment has the same name, composition, structure, physical and chemical properties, features, use and manufacturer, and the same criteria used as the basis for classification, within 03 years from the date of the result, unless the regulations on which the notice of the result was based have been amended, supplemented or replaced (Point g, Clause 1, Article 18 of Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC). Where the previous consignment has no analysis and classification result, its HS code does not fall within this case.

When I check the origin-criterion statement of a factory, I place the detailed report of imported goods for the customs declarations of imported materials next to the statement and cross-check the HS code, the value and the quantity before looking at any other document. The discrepancies found at this step are on declarations cleared many months earlier, which is the fourth case in the table. This cross-check is one part of the four-way cross-check.

I recommend fixing the HS code and the description of each material from the time the purchase contract is signed, as set out on the page Importing into Vietnam. The procedural reason is in the first two cases of the supplementary declaration table: the channel assignment result is notified immediately after the declaration is registered, so the period of the first row ends almost at the same moment as registration. For materials and supplies imported for processing or for the production of exports, the customs declarant must also declare, in the description-of-goods field, the material or supply code that matches the enterprise's actual management and production; this code is not the HS code (Point a, Clause 1, Article 18 of Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC). The declaration must be right before it is sent.

If you are dealing with an error on an import customs declaration that has already been registered, you may send me the date of registration of the declaration, the date of customs clearance and the data field declared incorrectly. I will reply which case of supplementary declaration the error falls under and which documents the supplementary declaration file needs.

What I do here is origin-document and customs-procedure work under the certificates I hold, not legal advice on a case.

Contact form

The records relating to a supplementary declaration are one of the 20 groups of records that the customs declarant must keep, from Point a to Point u, Clause 1, Article 16a of Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC. This list is wider than the 12 groups of documents in Clause 2, Article 16: it also includes the contract for the sale and purchase of goods (Point đ), technical documents and catalogues (Point l), and accounting books and vouchers (Point n). The documents are kept as originals; where the original in paper form has been submitted to the customs authority, a copy is kept.

A customs declarant who is the goods owner has the obligation to keep the customs dossier for cleared goods for 05 years from the date of registration of the customs declaration, unless otherwise provided by law (Point đ, Clause 2, Article 18 of the Law on Customs No. 54/2014/QH13). Authorising a broker does not transfer this obligation. Clause 3, Article 18 lists the obligations that a customs broker performs within the scope of the authorisation, namely Points a, b, c, d, e and g of Clause 2, without Point đ on keeping the dossier. Clause 2, Article 16a of Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC is more explicit: where the customs declarant is a customs broker, the goods owner is responsible for keeping the documents in the customs dossier, unless the goods owner is a foreign trader without a presence in Vietnam exercising the right to export and import.

The period for keeping accounting books and vouchers is governed by the law on accounting, which is outside the customs scope of this page; the enterprise needs to ask its chief accountant. The service contract with the customs broker needs to state the list of documents and the time limit within which the broker hands them back to the goods owner after each declaration.

Law No. 11/2026/QH16 dated 23 August 2026 amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Law on Customs takes effect from 1 March 2027. The four changes below touch the content of this page.

• For goods undergoing customs procedures, the customs declarant may make a supplementary declaration before the time the customs authority notifies the customs inspection. The Law currently in force reads before the time of notification of the direct examination of the customs dossier; Circular No. 38/2015/TT-BTC takes the notification of the channel assignment result as the mark.
• For cleared goods, the time limit of 60 days from the date of customs clearance is kept. The customs declarant makes the supplementary declaration before the time of a decision on one of four matters: stopping the goods from passing through the customs supervision area, post-clearance inspection, inspection by the inspectorate, or examination of cleared goods.
• A supplementary declaration made at the request of the customs authority is written into the Law. That case and the case of a supplementary declaration made after the time limit are handled under the law on tax, the law on handling of administrative violations and other relevant provisions of law.
• The customs dossier is submitted or presented through the customs electronic data processing system or at the office of the customs authority. The provision on the 15-day validity of the customs declaration moves from Article 25 to Article 24.

As at 6 October 2026, the circulars cited on this page were issued under the Law on Customs before its amendment. The content of this page will be rechecked when documents guiding Law No. 11/2026/QH16 are issued.

The status of validity in the table was checked on 6 October 2026. The provisions cited on this page have been checked against the full text of the documents. Amending documents are listed in separate rows.

• Customs value and value consultation in Vietnam. The six methods for determining the customs value and the consultation sequence when the customs authority doubts the declared value.
• Checking C/O and preferential rates for imports. The proof of origin for imported goods and the time limit for its later submission.
• Rules of origin and export C/O. The place of the customs declaration for imported materials in the C/O application file for the finished product.

Hoàng Ngọc Quang (QuangLogi)

Registered customs-broker staff member assigned an identification number by Vietnam Customs under Official Letter No. 249/GSQL-TH dated 20 February 2025.
Customs declaration professional certificate No. 165/2018/KHQ-HN.
Vice Director of GIANG TO VIEN DUONG INTERNATIONAL TRANSPORT Co., Ltd. (Luchi Vietnam).
Member of the Vietnam Association for Logistics Manpower Development (VALOMA) under Admission Decision No. 1003/QD-BCH.
Trained as a lawyer in Course IX of the lawyer training programme for international integration at the Judicial Academy.
More than ten years handling documents and customs procedures on the China-Vietnam-Cambodia corridor, including C/O applications for goods exported from Vietnam and C/O files for goods imported from China.
About the author

I write from the perspective of a practitioner who directly prepares the files. Customer information in all examples is anonymised.