Your credit record at the CIC: debt groups, the five-year rule and the 35% line

The National Credit Information Centre, the CIC, is part of the State Bank of Vietnam. Every bank and finance company reports every loan it makes to it, every month, and every bank queries it before approving a new one. For a home loan applicant, the CIC report is the first document the credit officer reads and the one the applicant is least likely to have seen.

What is on the record

The rules are in Circular 15/2023/TT-NHNN, in force since 1 January 2025. Lenders report, among other things, your identification, every loan and other form of credit, your credit cards, the collateral you have pledged, and how any bad debt was handled. That includes consumer loans, buy-now-pay-later and credit cards, not just mortgages. A credit card you no longer use but never closed is a line of credit on your record.

An amendment, Circular 46/2026/TT-NHNN, takes effect on 1 November 2026. Its main change is that sharing a borrower’s credit data with organisations outside the banking system, such as foreign credit bureaus, will require the borrower’s explicit consent, recorded in a form that can be printed or copied.

The five debt groups

Each loan is placed in one of five groups according to how overdue it is, under Circular 31/2024/TT-NHNN, which replaced Circular 11/2021 on 1 July 2024.

Groups 3 to 5 are what the system calls bad debt. In practice most banks will not grant a home loan to anyone with a bad debt on the record, and many hesitate over group 2.

One rule makes this much harsher than it looks. Each month the CIC sends every lender the highest-risk group any of its customers holds anywhere in the system, and lenders must align their own classification to it within three working days. A credit card twenty days late at one bank can move a perfectly paid mortgage at another bank into group 2.

Getting back to group 1

Paying the arrears does not by itself restore the record. For a medium or long-term loan, Circular 31/2024 requires the borrower to pay all overdue principal and interest and then pay the following instalments in full and on time for at least three months before the debt can be moved back to group 1. For a short-term loan the period is one month.

So a single instalment paid fifteen days late in March, on a home loan, typically shows as group 2 for March and then needs April, May and June paid on time before it returns to group 1. If you are planning to apply for a mortgage, the months before the application are the ones where nothing should be late, including small consumer debts.

How long it stays: five years, whatever the amount

Article 13 of Circular 15/2023 allows negative information about a borrower to be provided for at most five years from the date it ended. In an answer published on the Government portal in September 2026, the State Bank confirmed that the five years apply regardless of the amount. An earlier practice of dropping very small bad debts as soon as they were settled no longer applies; a forgotten five million dong debt is visible for as long as a large one.

The five years run from when the problem ended, not from when it started. A debt that was overdue for two years and then settled is visible for five years after the settlement.

Checking your own record

Article 18 of the circular entitles you to see your own credit information free of charge once a year. Further checks carry a small fee, which sources in 2026 put at a few tens of thousands of dong; the CIC does not publish a fee schedule we could verify. The usual channel is the CIC’s own mobile app, published under the name CIC Credit Connect. Several sources report that registration through the CIC website was suspended from April 2026 in favour of the app, so if a guide tells you to register on the website, check that the option still exists.

The report also carries a credit score. Recent sources, including the Banking Academy, describe a scale from 403 to 706 divided into ten grades, grade 1 being the best. Older bank blogs cite a scale of 150 to 750; that describes an earlier version. The exact cut-off for each grade is not published in a form we could check, so treat the grade as a rough guide and the debt group as the thing that matters.

What banks do with your income: the 35% line

There is no legal limit in Vietnam on how much of your income a mortgage may take. The lending circular requires only that the borrower has the financial capacity to repay, and each bank sets its own threshold. But there is a regulatory reason why many land around the same place.

Under the capital adequacy rules, Circular 41/2016 as amended by Circular 22/2023, a bank must hold more capital against a home loan when the borrower’s debt service exceeds 35% of income, and more again as the loan-to-value ratio rises.

A loan above 35% of income and above 80% of value costs the bank noticeably more capital than one below both lines, and pricing and approval tend to follow. A newer capital regime, Circular 14/2025, runs in parallel until it becomes mandatory in 2030 and uses a different test, but the loan-to-value bands are the same.

On the worked example used across this site, the instalment after the promotion is 31,850,000 dong a month. To keep that at 35% of income the household needs 91,000,000 dong a month. The example household earns 55,000,000, which puts it at 57.9%: inside what some banks will approve, and well outside the line the capital rules reward. How to work out what you can sustain, rather than what you will be lent, is the subject of how much can you actually borrow.

Before you apply

1. Use your free annual check and read every line, including old cards and small loans.
2. Close credit lines you do not use; an open limit counts as available debt.
3. Make sure nothing at all is late in the three months before applying.
4. If there is an error, raise it with the lender that reported it; the CIC corrects data on the basis of what lenders report.
5. Work out your post-promotion instalment as a share of income in the loan inspector and know where it sits against 35%.