If you have ever received an official document from a Vietnamese government agency — or had to produce one for a company — you will have noticed that they all look strikingly alike. That is not a coincidence. The format of administrative documents (văn bản hành chính) is prescribed in detail by Nghị định 30/2020/NĐ-CP, the decree on clerical work (công tác văn thư) issued on 5 March 2020. It replaced the older circulars that used to govern document format, unified the rules for paper and electronic documents in one place, and applies not only to state agencies but is also widely adopted — voluntarily or by requirement — by state-owned enterprises and private companies that deal with the administration.
The parts you always see
A compliant document carries a fixed set of components, each with its own position on the page:
- Quốc hiệu and Tiêu ngữ — “CỘNG HÒA XÃ HỘI CHỦ NGHĨA VIỆT NAM / Độc lập - Tự do - Hạnh phúc” at the top right;
- The issuing body’s name at the top left, with the document’s number and symbol (số, ký hiệu) beneath it;
- Place and date of issue, written out in words for the day and month;
- The document type and subject line (trích yếu nội dung);
- The body, the signature block (chức vụ, họ tên, and seal where required), and the recipients list (nơi nhận).
The number-and-symbol line deserves a closer look, because it encodes real information: the sequential number within the year, the abbreviation of the document type (QĐ for quyết định, CV is commonly seen for công văn traffic, TB for thông báo), and the abbreviation of the issuing body. A reader who knows the system can tell from “Số: 15/QĐ-UBND” alone that this is the fifteenth decision issued by a People’s Committee that year — before reading a single word of content.
The typography rules
The decree goes further than structure — it prescribes presentation. Documents are set on A4 paper in Times New Roman, typically 13–14pt for body text, with page margins of roughly 2–2.5 cm top and bottom, 3–3.5 cm on the left (to leave room for filing), and 1.5–2 cm on the right. Even the font sizes of individual components — the Quốc hiệu, the document number, the signature block — are specified in an appendix, along with which parts are bold, which are italic, and which are underlined. Page numbers, when used, go at the top of the page. There is very little left to taste, which is precisely the point: a quyết định from a ministry in Hà Nội and one from a district office in Cà Mau should be readable by the same reflexes.
Electronic documents count too
One reason NĐ 30 mattered when it arrived is that it treats electronic documents (văn bản điện tử) as first-class citizens: it regulates how digital signatures of the signer and of the issuing organisation appear on the document, and how electronic records move through registration and archiving. As more agencies exchange documents through electronic document-management systems rather than paper post, the formatting rules for the digital signature blocks have become just as routine a compliance question as the paper margins once were.
Why it matters in practice
For businesses, the format is not merely bureaucratic aesthetics. Documents that will be submitted to state agencies — dossiers for tax incentives, labour paperwork, official correspondence — are routinely checked for compliance, and a malformed document can bounce a whole submission. The most common failures I have seen are mundane: the wrong margin widths, a missing “Độc lập - Tự do - Hạnh phúc” line, dates written in digits where words are required, or a signature block that does not match the signer’s actual authority. None of them is hard to fix; all of them are embarrassing to have returned.
If you generate documents programmatically, encoding the NĐ 30 layout once — margins, fonts, component positions — and reusing it is well worth the initial effort. In future posts I plan to look at specific document types — decisions (quyết định), official letters (công văn) — and the common formatting mistakes that get them rejected.