The 11 Vietnamese provinces that did not merge
Out of 63 provinces, 11 were kept as they were in 2025 — including Hanoi, Huế and Quảng Ninh, home to Hạ Long Bay.
This sheet is not a travel story. It gathers what official sources say, and stops where they stop.
The 2025 reform took the country from 63 provinces and cities to 34. The mergers are what people remember. But eleven provinces were kept exactly as they were — and the opposite is often assumed.
01What changed, and what did not
Two distinct movements happened on 1 July 2025, and they are often confused.
The first: provincial mergers. They affected 52 of the 63 units. The second: the abolition of the district tier, across the WHOLE country, without exception.
A province that did not merge was therefore still reorganised inside. Its name and borders did not move; its districts did.
02The list of eleven
- Hanoi — centrally governed city
- Huế — became a central city in January 2025, before the reform
- Quảng Ninh — home to Hạ Long Bay
- Lai Châu
- Điện Biên
- Sơn La
- Lạng Sơn
- Thanh Hóa
- Nghệ An
- Hà Tĩnh
- Cao Bằng
03What it changes in practice
An address naming one of these eleven provinces is still correct at provincial level. It is the tier below — the district — that is gone.
For Hạ Long, it means the province did not change name, contrary to what hastily updated maps suggest.
04Why the distinction matters
Booking platforms and mapping applications updated their Vietnamese data unevenly. Some replaced every province name at once, including the eleven that did not change.
If a form refuses “Quảng Ninh” or offers a merged name instead, the form is wrong, not the address. These eleven names remain valid at provincial level.
05What this sheet does not say
The internal division of each of these eleven provinces. The number of the resolution reorganising Quảng Ninh in 2025 could not be found on the verification date: the only resolution identified for that province, 1199/NQ-UBTVQH15, dates from September 2024 and covers an earlier period.
Nor where to sleep, when to come, or what is worth the detour. Nobody here has been. This sheet says what can be checked, not what can be felt.