A glass of bia hoi costs 10,000-15,000 VND, about 38 to 58 US cents, on a Hanoi street corner as of mid-2026. The same glass costs 25,000-30,000 VND in Ho Chi Minh City, where it exists only because northerners moved south and brought their bars with them. On Phu Quoc it does not exist at all. And on the 36th floor of a Da Nang hotel, a 500 ml Asahi is 390,000 VND before service and tax.
That twentyfold spread is the point. Beer in Vietnam is not one price, it is four, and which one you pay is decided by the room you are standing in rather than by what is in the glass. This index records those four tiers — fresh draught per glass, a local bottle at an ordinary venue, a craft pour, and a beer in the tourist zone — for 12 cities, with every row's sources in the open dataset. It is the drinking counterpart to our Pho Index: ranges, never averages, and no row we cannot source.
The index — what a beer costs, north to south
All figures VND, as of mid-2026, at a rounded 26,000 VND to the US dollar.
| City | Fresh draught, glass | Local bottle or can | Craft pour | Tourist zone or rooftop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hanoi | 10,000-15,000 | 23,000-40,000 | 80,000-90,000 | 80,000-200,000 |
| Hai Phong | 15,000-50,000 | 15,000-33,000 | not sourced | not sourced |
| Hue | 15,000-25,000 | 25,000-45,000 | 50,000-100,000 | 25,000-100,000 |
| Da Nang | 20,000-35,000 | 15,000-28,000 | 63,000-69,000 | 25,000-390,000 |
| Hoi An | 20,000-40,000 | 40,000-60,000 | 75,000-160,000 | 50,000-160,000 |
| Quy Nhon | 20,000-40,000 | 8,000-16,000 | not sourced | not sourced |
| Nha Trang | 10,000-40,000 | 10,000-40,000 | 70,000-165,000 | 70,000-180,000 |
| Da Lat | 13,000-60,000 | 12,000-30,000 | 45,000-85,000 | 25,000-80,000 |
| Ho Chi Minh City | 25,000-30,000 | 16,000-24,000 | 105,000-210,000 | 200,000-250,000 |
| Vung Tau | 16,000-50,000 | 15,000-35,000 | not sourced | not sourced |
| Can Tho | not sourced | not sourced | 105,000-150,000 | not sourced |
| Phu Quoc | no bia hoi | 21,000-39,000 | 80,000-120,000 | 75,000-130,000 |
How to read the table
Two tourist cells quote before tax: Da Nang's range tops out at Sky36's list price, Ho Chi Minh City's at Chill Skybar's, and both add 10 percent VAT and 5 percent service, so a Chill Skybar Carlsberg is really about 230,000 and a craft pint 287,500.
The draught column is the messiest, because Vietnam does not agree on a glass. A Hanoi bia hoi glass is roughly 330 ml; a Da Nang plastic glass is 500 ml at 20,000-25,000 VND; the crowdsourced benchmark anchoring the rest is a 0.5 litre restaurant draught. Da Nang appearing at both 20,000 and 35,000 is not an error, it is two serves in two rooms.
Four rows are thin and say so: Hai Phong, Quy Nhon and Vung Tau rest on crowdsourced medians with 16, two and nine contributors, and Can Tho has one strong figure and three gaps. Rather than pad them, the dataset publishes nulls.
What bia hoi is, and where it stops
Bia hoi means fresh beer, and the name is literal. It is an unpasteurised draught lager brewed each morning, then delivered to street corners in steel kegs — often on the back of a motorbike — and poured until the keg runs out. It carries no preservatives and does not keep, so each stall sells that day's delivery and closes when the keg blows.
Four things make it street-corner cheap: rice adjunct for as much as half the grain bill, no bottle or can or label, a few kilometres of informal keg delivery instead of a national cold chain, and a deliberately weak 3 to 4 percent built for hours of slow drinking with grilled food. That is why it is routinely called the cheapest commercially brewed beer in the world. The etiquette matters more than the price: sit on the low stool, hold up fingers for glasses, order food, and let the empties accumulate, because the bill is often a count of glasses. Our Vietnam nightlife guide covers the ritual.
The most useful thing this index found is that the institution does not travel. It is a northern tradition centred on Hanoi, and going south it thins into a franchise, then into nothing. In Ho Chi Minh City the bia hoi bars exist but announce themselves — Bia Hoi Ha Noi Quang Hai on Nguyen Van Khoi, Quan 292 on Nguyen Chi Thanh, others named after Hanoi streets, largely serving northern migrants at 25,000-30,000 VND a glass, double the Hanoi rate for an imported format. Da Nang's 2026 bia hoi listicles name Bia Bat Dan and Pho Co Bia Hoi Ha Noi, both Hanoi brands, and Da Lat's top cheap-beer entry is called Bia Hoi Ha Noi Local Quan. On Phu Quoc there is none at all.
The southern equivalent is bia tuoi, draught sold by the jug at a quan nhau, and far more commonly a very cold bottle — which is why the local-bottle column matters more below Hue than the draught column.
Your beer brand is decided by latitude
Four brewers hold over 90 percent of the market — Heineken Vietnam at 43 percent, Sabeco at 33.9, Carlsberg Vietnam at 9.2 and Habeco at 7.5 as of 2023 — but the national numbers hide an almost territorial carve-up.
Bia Ha Noi and Truc Bach, both Habeco, are the northern beers, and Habeco supplies the entire Hanoi bia hoi keg trade. Huda, brewed by Carlsberg at Phu Bai in Hue, owns the north-central coast: Carlsberg bought Hue Brewery outright in 2011 and lifted its share of the provinces from Thanh Hoa to Thua Thien-Hue from 46 to 54 percent, and Huda took 7.9 percent of national volume in 2023 while barely existing elsewhere. Larue, first brewed in Da Nang in 1909 by Victor Larue and now a Heineken brand made in Quang Nam, is hard to buy outside the centre. Bia Saigon and 333, both Sabeco, run the south, where 59 percent of the country's beer is drunk against 35 percent north and 6 percent central.
Ordering "a local beer" therefore gives you a different liquid every few hundred kilometres: Huda is 15,000-20,000 VND a bottle in Da Nang and 25,000-45,000 in a Hue bar, Larue 15,000-22,000 at home, a Bia Saigon Lager 16,000 at a Tan Phu quan nhau.
The tourist gap, and where the outliers are
The tourist markup in beer is far steeper than in food. Our Pho Index found tourist zones charging 1.5 to 3 times local prices; in beer, comparing range midpoints, Da Nang runs about 9.7 times and Ho Chi Minh City about 11.3, because the top of this market is a view, and views are priced like real estate.
The extremes are both in central Vietnam, both at named addresses, 30 kilometres apart. At the top, Sky36 on floors 35 and 36 of the Novotel on Bach Dang lists a 500 ml Asahi at 390,000 VND before service and VAT — about 450,000 all-in, roughly $17, with table minimums to 8.6 million VND. At the bottom, 3 Dragons at 51 Phan Boi Chau in Hoi An's Ancient Town pours happy-hour draught Huda at 20,000 VND.
The craft tier sits between them and is steadier than either. Vietnam has 98 active breweries, mostly independent microbreweries, and their pricing barely varies by geography: Louisiane Brewhouse in Nha Trang charges 70,000 for 330 ml, East West in Can Tho 105,000, 7 Bridges in Hoi An 110,000 for a standard glass, Heart of Darkness in Saigon 145,000-210,000 a pint. The Mekong Delta's one international-standard taproom charges capital prices.
What Decree 100 and Decree 168 did
No account of Vietnamese drinking prices survives without them. Decree 100/2019 took effect on 1 January 2020 with zero blood-alcohol tolerance for every driver. Sabeco's revenue fell 27 percent that year and on-trade volume moved into homes, though the effect is genuinely tangled with COVID-19. Habeco's 2023 volume was still about 30 percent below 2019.
Decree 168/2024, in force since 1 January 2025, replaced most of that schedule, added a twelve-point licence and raised fines sharply: a motorbike rider faces 2-3 million VND at any detectable alcohol and 8-10 million plus a 22 to 24 month revocation at the top tier, a car driver 6-8 million rising to 30-40 million. Its commercial signal was cleaner — Sabeco's first-quarter 2025 revenue fell 19.1 percent and volume 14.7 percent to 274 million litres, and full-year revenue of 25,888 billion VND was the weakest since 2015.
The result is a drinking culture that has shifted rather than shrunk: more beer at home, more on-trade where people can walk or take a Grab. For a visitor it is one rule — do not ride after drinking. Our road safety research has the detail.
Methodology
How prices were gathered. Web research in August 2026, preferring a venue's own published menu, then dated 2025-2026 reporting, then a crowdsourced index with its sample size stated. Six cities — Hanoi, Hue, Da Nang, Hoi An, Nha Trang and Ho Chi Minh City — carry all four tiers from named venues; Da Lat and Phu Quoc carry three; Hai Phong, Quy Nhon, Vung Tau and Can Tho are thin, with explicit nulls and low confidence.
The cross-city backbone. Numbeo's per-city domestic draught and retail bottle lines are the only measure available on the same basis everywhere, so they anchor the draught column where menus do not exist. Depth varies 25-fold: Nha Trang has 250 entries from 26 contributors, Quy Nhon ten from two. Rows reporting near-zero contributors, or values identical to a neighbouring city — a signature of estimation — were rejected, which is why Can Tho's and Ninh Binh's do not appear.
What we excluded. Vietnamese venue listicles almost always publish a per-person bill range rather than a drink price, and every figure of that kind was dropped. Three widely republished numbers were traced to stale originals and cut: Louisiane Brewhouse's 125,000 VND tasting tray dates to 2017 against a 2026 price of 165,000; 7 Bridges' Da Nang taproom has been closed since about 2022 yet is still priced in 2026 guides; and Chill Skybar's 88,000 VND happy hour comes from a 2017 review its menu contradicts.
What we dropped. Sapa is a genuine data hole — three round-ups naming 13 bars and 12 quan nhau publish no drink price. Ninh Binh has a documented bia hoi trade, ten venues by address as of January 2026, but no per-glass price. Ha Long had zero crowdsourced entries in a year. USD uses a rounded 26,000 VND per dollar (Trading Economics had 26,124.5 on 22 August 2026).
Limitations
- The glass is not standard and neither is the pint. A Hanoi bia hoi glass is about 330 ml, a Da Nang plastic glass 500 ml, the crowdsourced benchmark a 0.5 litre restaurant pour, and taprooms here sell small, standard and stein. The draught column is directional, not exact.
- Four rows are thin. Hai Phong, Quy Nhon, Vung Tau and Can Tho rest on small samples or a single venue. They are here for geographic coverage, and their nulls are the honest part.
- Menus skew to the visible end. Bars that publish prices online are disproportionately foreign-facing, so the true bottom of every local column is probably lower than we can document, and the marketed "50 cent beer" could not be verified at any named central or southern address.
- Prices are about to move for a documented reason — the tax step on 1 January 2027 and Habeco's 5-7 percent keg increase from April 2026. Treat these as a mid-2026 baseline with upward pressure behind it, and note that a 1 to 2 percent currency move shifts every dollar figure.
- Tax-and-service quoting differs by venue. Sky36 and Chill Skybar quote before VAT and service; a quan nhau quotes what you pay. The tourist column is not perfectly like-for-like.
Annual update commitment
The index is re-priced each year, with the year in the slug so citations stay anchored. The 2027 edition will re-price all 12 cities, capture the first year of the higher tax, and add Sapa and Ninh Binh if they become sourceable.
Revision history:
| Date | Changes |
|---|---|
| 2026-09-11 | Initial publication. 12 cities on four tiers; Sapa, Ninh Binh and Ha Long dropped for lack of a sourceable beer price. |
How to cite this
Nguyen, J. (2026). The Bia Hoi Index 2026: Beer Prices in 12 Cities. Day Trips Vietnam. Retrieved from https://daytripsvietnam.com/guides/vietnam-beer-price-index-2026/
For specific figures, cite the city row and publication date — "Day Trips Vietnam's Bia Hoi Index 2026 puts a glass of bia hoi in Hanoi at 10,000-15,000 VND and 25,000-30,000 VND in Ho Chi Minh City."
Published under Creative Commons BY 4.0. Full grid, notes and sources: vietnam-beer-price-index-2026.json. Enquiries: info@daytripsvietnam.com.
Related research and reference
- Vietnam nightlife guide 2026 — the bia hoi ritual, city by city
- The Pho Index 2026 — the same method, applied to noodles
- Vietnam travel cost index 2026 — beer inside a daily budget
- Vietnam on a budget — where drinking fits in a backpacker's day
- Hoi An nightlife 2026 — the index's cheapest sourced beer
- Da Nang nightlife 2026 — and its dearest