Finding Laundry in Vietnam: What Changed Between 2017 and 2025

My first trip to Vietnam was July 2017. Ho Chi Minh City, whole family, an Airbnb in the center of the city. Street food everywhere, motorbikes weaving through intersections, the kind of humid heat that hits you the moment you step outside the arrivals hall. The Airbnb was lovely. It had no washing machine. We packed light because we thought we knew what we were getting into. The Philippines and Vietnam are neighbors — similar latitudes, similar climates, similar humidity. What we didn't account for was that July in Vietnam is not July in Manila. Back home, July means the rainy season has either arrived or is close. In Vietnam, July is peak dry-season heat — no typhoons to break the temperature, no afternoon rains to cool things down. Just relentless humidity and sweat. We were burning through clothes faster than we had planned. **The First Time I Really Needed a Laundromat** I remember standing in the apartment on day three, looking at a growing pile of clothes, doing the math. Two more days in Ho Chi Minh City, then a flight up to Hanoi. Two options: buy new clothes — which I was already considering anyway, because I always find something I want in a new city — or find a laundromat and wash what we had. I decided I wanted to do both. Still would, honestly. But finding a laundromat turned out to be harder than expected. Google Maps in 2017 was useful for large restaurants and hotels, but thin on neighborhood service businesses — especially ones without English-language listings. I didn't know the Vietnamese word for laundry. My wife and I walked a few blocks in different directions, asked at the front desk of a nearby hotel, and came up mostly empty. We improvised. Hand-washed whatever would survive a sink and dry overnight on the balcony. Bought a few things I was going to buy anyway. Then carried slightly more dirty laundry onto the flight to Hanoi than felt reasonable. Hanoi wasn't much better — we never found a shop in time. We ended the entire trip having done exactly zero loads of proper laundry. A minor failure that became a running family joke. **Fast Forward: Hanoi, April 2025** I went back to Vietnam last year — April 2025, just Hanoi this time. The difference was immediate. Giặt sấy shops were everywhere. Not just one or two per neighborhood — sometimes two or three on the same block, competing for the same customers. Signs in Vietnamese, occasionally in English. Commercial machines visible through glass shopfronts. Staff folding clothes at counters inside. The laundry shop had become as common as the bánh mì stall. Between trips, I had picked up a few Vietnamese words specifically for this. Giặt (wash). Ủi (iron). Giặt sấy (wash and dry — the most common full-service setup). Enough to recognize a sign from across the road, walk in, point at a bag of clothes, and communicate what I needed without speaking the language. The shop I found near my hotel charged around 30,000–40,000 VND per kilogram — roughly ₱80–₱100 at current exchange rates. Clothes came back the next morning, folded and bagged. No drama, no searching, no math about hand-washing balcony drying times. **Why Vietnam's Laundry Scene Grew So Fast** It wasn't just that Google Maps improved between 2017 and 2025, though that helped. Vietnam genuinely grew into it. Rapid urbanization meant more people renting apartments without washing machines. More domestic travelers moving between cities for work. More foreign tourists packing light and needing a 24-hour turnaround. The demand was already there — the supply caught up fast. Ho Chi Minh City was ahead of this curve, being the larger, more commercially dense city. But Hanoi matched it quickly. Walk through the Old Quarter, the residential streets around Hoan Kiem Lake, or any of the newer districts outside the center and you will find giặt sấy shops that open early, charge fair prices, and serve tourists and locals alike. **Useful Vietnamese Laundry Words for Travelers** A few words go a long way when navigating a new city: Giặt — wash (pronounced roughly "zat" in the south, "yat" in the north) Ủi — iron Giặt sấy — wash and dry (full service, what you want for everyday laundry) Giặt khô — dry cleaning Giao nhận tận nhà — pickup and delivery Giá — price (useful for asking) You do not need to speak Vietnamese fluently. Knowing giặt sấy means you can spot a shop from its sign rather than walking past it. That one word would have saved us a lot of walking in 2017. **What to Expect at a Vietnamese Laundry Shop** Most giặt sấy shops operate on the same model as per-kilo laundry in the Philippines. You bring your clothes in a bag, the staff weighs them, quotes you a price, washes and dries everything, and has it back within 24 hours. Some shops do same-day service for morning drop-offs. Prices in 2025 were generally 25,000–50,000 VND per kilogram depending on location, with tourist-area shops in the Old Quarter trending higher. Shops a few blocks off the main tourist drags charged noticeably less for the same service. Most shops in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City will manage the transaction without fluent English on either side. A phone calculator to show numbers, pointing at the bag, and the word giặt sấy is usually enough. **Finding Laundry in Vietnam Today** The challenge in 2025 is no longer finding a laundry shop in Vietnam — they are everywhere. The challenge is knowing which ones are reliable: consistent pricing, proper handling of clothes, honest turnaround times, and whether they actually show up when they say they will. That is exactly why we built LaundryAtlas Vietnam. The same directory we built for the Philippines — verified listings, prices where available, and ratings from other customers — now covers Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Da Nang, Hoi An, and more. If I had this in 2017, that pile of clothes from the first trip might have had a very different ending.