The pension of civil servants is calculated separately, different from the pension calculation of private sector employees, receiving salaries decided by the employer.
General principle: The average salary used as the basis for social insurance contributions to calculate pensions and one-time allowances is stipulated in Article 72 of the Social Insurance Law 2024 and detailed in Article 15 of Decree 158/2025/ND-CP. This level is also used to calculate one-time social insurance benefits, one-time death benefits and monthly allowances for people who are not eligible for pensions.
Accordingly, the method of calculating the average salary as the basis for social insurance contributions is divided into 3 different groups.
Firstly, employees with the entire period of social insurance payment according to the salary regime decided by the employer will calculate the average salary as the basis for social insurance payment for the entire period of social insurance participation.
Second, employees subject to the salary regime prescribed by the State who have paid social insurance for the entire period under this salary regime will have their average salary calculated as the basis for social insurance contributions for the number of years of social insurance contributions before retirement, depending on the time of starting social insurance contributions.
The calculation of the average salary will be based on the number of years of final social insurance contributions before retirement, according to a specific roadmap:
- Participated in social insurance before January 1, 1995: Average of the last 05 years.
- Participated from January 1, 1995 to December 31, 2000: Average of the last 06 years.
- Participated from January 1, 2001 to December 31, 2006: Average of the last 08 years.
- Participated from January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2015: Average of the last 10 years.
- Participated from January 1, 2016 to December 31, 2019: Average of the last 15 years.
- Participating from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2024: Average of the last 20 years.
- Participating from January 1, 2025 onwards: Calculating the average of the entire social insurance payment period.
Third, if the employee has both a period of social insurance payment subject to the salary regime prescribed by the State and a period of social insurance payment according to the salary regime decided by the employer, the average salary will be calculated as the basis for the general social insurance payment of the periods, in which the period of payment according to the salary regime prescribed by the State will be calculated as the average salary used as the basis for social insurance payment according to the above regulations.
