Ho Chi Minh City pays women $190 for having second child as officials declare birth-rate red alert

Pham Chanh Trung, head of the Ho Chi Minh City Population Department, said at a public health campaign launch on April 17 that the city has now transferred VND5 million to each of 1,310 mothers who had a second child between Sept. 1, 2025 and the present.

The policy applies across the newly expanded metropolis, which absorbed the former provinces of Binh Duong and Ba Ria-Vung Tau in last year’s administrative merger to form a single city of 14 million.

A separate group of 7,650 women received VND3 million each for second births between Dec. 21, 2024 and Aug. 31, 2025, under an earlier resolution that applied only to the pre-merger city. Both payments sit ahead of Vietnam’s new Population Law, passed by the National Assembly last December and taking effect July 1, 2026, which formally scraps the country’s decades-old two-child limit and reorients policy from birth control to birth encouragement.

Ho Chi Minh City’s total fertility rate, meaning the average number of children a woman will bear in her lifetime, stood at 1.51 in 2025. That is up slightly from 1.43 the year before, but still far below the 2.1 replacement level and the lowest of any locality in Vietnam, whose national average has itself slipped below replacement.

“Birth rates falling too low directly threaten the city’s future labor force, accelerate population aging, and create enormous challenges for sustainable development,” said Huynh Minh Chin, deputy director of the HCMC Department of Health, who called the figure a red alert.

The aging math is already visible. More than 1.57 million HCMC residents are now aged 60 or above, or 11.4% of the population, and life expectancy has reached 76.7 years, higher than the national average of 74.7.

Across Asia and Europe, governments are spending billions on cash incentives to reverse collapsing birth rates. South Korea pays parents a 2 million won ($1,500) “First Encounter Voucher” at a first birth and 3 million won ($2,200) at a second, on top of monthly cash allowances that run for years.

Singapore’s Baby Bonus hands parents SGD11,000 ($8,300) each for the first and second child, rising to SGD13,000 from the third onward, paid in installments through age six and a half.

Hungary has gone furthest: as of October 2025, mothers raising three or more children pay no personal income tax for life, a benefit expanded from an earlier four-child threshold and still being extended in phases.

But a substantial body of demographic studies finds that one-off baby bonuses generally produce only a short-term bump in births rather than a sustained reversal. Young couples in Ho Chi Minh City, Seoul and Singapore cite the same recurring pressures: the cost of education, rising housing prices, and workplaces that still penalize parents, especially mothers.

Alongside the cash, HCMC is deploying mobile health teams across 168 wards and communes from April 15 through May 30 to provide premarital checkups, prenatal screening, and elderly medical record-keeping. The goal is to bring basic reproductive and geriatric care directly to pregnant women and disadvantaged households, who would otherwise have to travel to upper-tier hospitals.