Thirteenth Month Pay and Tet Bonus: Start the Maths in October

Two things happen in Vietnamese companies every January. Bonuses are paid, and people resign. The order is not a coincidence, and the second one is much easier to influence in October than in the week it happens.

The arithmetic first, because it is usually wrong

Thirteenth month pay and Tet bonus are often spoken about as one thing, and treated as one thing in the budget, which is where the trouble starts. One is close to contractual and predictable. The other is discretionary and varies with the year.

Separate them on paper, then answer four questions in writing before anyone asks:

• What is the base for the calculation? Contract salary alone, or including fixed allowances? Whatever you decide, it must match what people believe you decided last year.
• How is a partial year handled? Someone who joined in August is the case that generates the most bad feeling, and pro rata by month is both the fairest answer and the easiest to explain.
• Are people on probation or fixed-term contracts included, and on what basis?
• What about someone who has already resigned but works through Tet? Deciding this in advance stops it being a personal judgement about one individual.

The cash timing catches people out

The payment lands in a short window, and for a company of a hundred people it can be one of the largest single outflows of the year. If the customer payments funding it arrive in February, you have a gap.

That is a conversation with finance in October, when there are options. In January the only remaining option is to delay the payment, which costs you more in trust than the cash was worth.

What you say matters as much as what you pay

People do not compare their bonus to a benchmark. They compare it to what they expected, and expectations are formed by silence as much as by announcements. A team that hears nothing until January fills the gap themselves, usually with a number from a friend at another company.

A short message in November costs nothing and changes this. It does not need to contain amounts. Saying when the calculation will be finalised, when the payment will be made, and what the calculation is based on removes most of the uncertainty. The number itself can come later.

One thing to avoid: hinting that this year will be good when you are not certain. A bonus that lands below a hint is worse than the same bonus with no hint at all.

And the January resignations

Some are unavoidable. A person who decided in September was always leaving after the bonus, and there is nothing October can do about that.

But a meaningful share of January resignations are people who never had a conversation about next year. They received a payment for work already done, felt finished, and had nothing in front of them. Managers who hold a fifteen-minute conversation in December about what the next year looks like for that person specifically tend to lose fewer of them.

That conversation is free. It is also the only part of this that most companies skip.

TalentHR works out thirteenth month and the pro rata for part-year staff from the contract data you already keep, so the October version and the January version are the same number. Ask us for the calculation sheet if that is the part you are dreading.