What Renting in Hanoi Costs on Top of the Rent

Why the rent is only half the number

Two homes advertised at the same rent can cost meaningfully different amounts to live in. In most Hanoi buildings the electricity is metered and billed at a price per unit, water is either metered or charged per person, and a management or service fee covers some mixture of cleaning, water and internet that changes from building to building. None of that is visible in the headline rent, and it is normally discovered after the lease is signed.

The figures above are the ones our landlords have written down, home by home. They will not tell you your electricity bill, because that depends on how much air conditioning you run through a Hanoi summer. They will tell you the price you are being charged per unit, which is the part you can compare between two buildings before you choose.

What to ask before you sign

Ask which bills are inside the rent and which sit on top, and ask for it in writing on the lease rather than as an answer at a viewing. Ask what the service fee actually covers, because the same phrase means cleaning and internet in one building and nothing but the lift in the next. Ask what the electricity is charged at per unit, and whether it is the state tariff or a building rate.

Every listing on Nest shows the bills its landlord has itemised, on the listing itself, next to the rent. Where a landlord has not itemised them, the listing says so rather than inventing a figure, and an advisor will get the answer before anything is signed. Our renting guides cover the rest of a Hanoi lease, and the Hanoi page has every district we currently have homes in.

How this page is worked out

Every figure is a median, not an average, so one unusually expensive building cannot drag a whole group upwards. Every figure is printed with the number of homes it rests on, and no figure is published for a group of fewer than 8 homes. All amounts are in Vietnamese dong, as charged; nothing on this page is converted into another currency, because a conversion is only as good as the exchange rate behind it and a rate printed once goes stale quietly.

A metered bill has no monthly total and is never treated as though it had one: an electricity price of a few thousand dong is a price per kilowatt-hour, and adding it to a monthly figure would understate the bill by a factor of a hundred or more. Where a bill is recorded as a monthly charge but the amount is under ₫50,000, we treat the amount as not yet confirmed, leave it out of every figure, and count it in the panel above. Figures update every five minutes from our current listings.