At Ben Thanh Market, a Vietnamese shopper bought three pairs of shoes for 1,000,000₫. An Australian visitor at the same market, on the same kind of shoes, paid 1,200,000₫ for one pair and thought he had negotiated well. Both accounts ran in VnExpress in March 2025, and the gap between them is the single most useful thing to know before you walk into a Saigon market.
So this guide gives you an opening counter-offer for every market on it, because the right number is different at each one and getting it wrong in either direction is the mistake. Seven markets, all confirmed trading in September 2026, with current ward names. One market that used to sit on this list has closed, and there is a section at the bottom explaining what happened to it.
| Market | What it is for | Hours | Haggle? | Counter at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ben Thanh | Sightseeing, food court, dried goods | 06:00–18:00, night market from 19:00 | Hard | 20–30% |
| Binh Tay | Wholesale, heritage, night market | 07:00–18:00, night market 18:00–24:00 | Lightly | 70–80% |
| Tan Dinh | Fabric and silk | Mornings | Lightly | 70–80% |
| Ho Thi Ky | Flowers and the food alley | Flowers all day, food from 16:00 | No | Fixed |
| An Dong | Fashion wholesale, áo dài | 07:00–18:00 | On multiples | 70–80% |
| Ba Chieu | Local produce, second-hand clothes | Mornings | Gently | 60–70% |
| Ba Hoa | Central Vietnamese food | Mornings, then from 17:00 | No | Fixed |
1. Ben Thanh Market
Bounded by Lê Lợi, Phan Bội Châu, Phan Chu Trinh and Lê Thánh Tôn, Bến Thành Ward. Indoor market roughly 06:00 to 18:00. The night market sets up along Phan Bội Châu and Phan Chu Trinh from about 19:00 and runs to 22:00 or 23:00.
First, a correction you will need if you read this anywhere else: Ben Thanh did not close. It was repainted in January 2026, façade and roof and pavements, finished before Tet, and it has been trading throughout. The argument that made the news was about the shade of the paint, not a closure, and there is no relocation plan. It reopened busier than before.
What it is good for is sightseeing and eating, not bargains. The central food court is the part locals still rate: the chè stalls and the bún riêu counters. Dried goods are a fair buy, coffee and cashews and pepper, if you compare two or three stalls first. Clothing and anything branded is widely counterfeit.
Each main gate sells something different. South is fabric and dry food, east on Phan Bội Châu is cosmetics, west on Phan Chu Trinh is shoes and souvenirs, north on Lê Thánh Tôn is flowers and fruit.
Haggle hard here, harder than anywhere else on this list. Counter at 20 to 30 per cent of the first price asked and expect to settle somewhere between 30 and 50 per cent. That advice is not folklore. In 2023 a stall quoted a Japanese tourist 700,000₫ for three pairs of socks that normally cost 60,000₫, and the market’s management board suspended it for seven days, which it called the heaviest sanction its rules allow.
One genuine improvement since most guides were written: Ben Thanh is the terminus of Metro Line 1, open since December 2024, so you no longer need a taxi to get here.
For the official opening hours, the food stalls worth queuing for and what they cost, see our full guide to Ben Thanh Market.
2. Binh Tay Market
57A Tháp Mười, Bình Tây Ward (formerly Ward 2, District 6). 07:00 to 18:00 daily.
Built from 1928 with money from the Chinese merchant Quách Đàm, 2,358 stalls across 25,000 square metres, and now a city-level historical site. It closed for restoration in 2016 and reopened on 15 November 2018, so anything you read about it being shut is nearly eight years out of date.
This is a wholesale market. Buyers come from across the southern provinces for fabric, household goods, dried food and spices in quantity. For a visitor the honest answer is to come for the building and the atmosphere, buy dried goods and spices and tea, and eat in the streets around it. Head for the central courtyard with the Quách Đàm plinth and the clock tower, then the spice aisles on the ground floor.
New, and no English-language guide has it: Binh Tay has had a night market since 1 December 2025. It covers 1,500 square metres around the market and runs 18:00 to 24:00 daily, with a heritage tourism programme attached, lion dances and lantern-making among it. That turns Binh Tay from a morning errand into somewhere you can go twice.
Haggle only lightly. Wholesale pricing means the headroom is small, so ask for the sỉ price if you are buying more than one of something rather than arguing over a single item. You will see it claimed that Binh Tay is 30 to 50 per cent cheaper than Ben Thanh. We could not find a single credible source for that number, so we are not repeating it.
3. Tan Dinh Market
314 to 336 Hai Bà Trưng, Tân Định Ward. Mornings are the time to come.
Our previous version of this guide put Tan Dinh in District 3. It was never in District 3, it was in District 1, and it is now in Tân Định Ward. Apologies to anyone who went looking.
Opened on 26 July 1927 and a hundred years old this year, a French colonial building with a bell tower and a working antique roof clock, now a municipal architectural monument. Its nickname is chợ nhà giàu, the rich people’s market.
This is the fabric market a first-time visitor can actually use. Silk and dress fabric, good fresh produce, a strong food section. If you are having something tailored in Saigon, buy the cloth here. Then walk 300 metres north to Tân Định Church, the pink one, which is the most photographed building in the neighbourhood.
Counter at 70 to 80 per cent on fabric and clothing. Do not haggle the produce or the food stalls; this is a local market at local prices and the margins are not there.
4. Ho Thi Ky Flower Market
Hồ Thị Kỷ Street and the alleys off it, including hẻm 60 Hùng Vương, Vườn Lài Ward (formerly Ward 1, District 10).
The old version of this page said “open 24 hours”, which is true and useless. What matters is the rhythm. Wholesalers trade through the night and the early morning, roughly 22:00 to 04:00, and it is a genuine chợ không ngủ, a market that does not sleep. Retail runs all day. The food alley is an evening thing, busy from late afternoon until well after midnight.
Go for the food alley rather than the flowers. The neighbourhood is a long-established Khmer and Cambodian-Vietnamese community, which is why locals call it chợ Campuchia, and the city’s tourism department named it one of the few food streets in Saigon that actually works.
Flowers run 100,000₫ to 500,000₫ depending on variety, with most wrapped bouquets in the 200,000₫ to 350,000₫ band. One caveat worth stating: those figures were recorded in the run-up to 8 March, International Women’s Day, which is one of the two annual price peaks along with Tet. Everyday prices are lower.
No haggling. Flowers work on wholesale and retail tiers, so the lever is quantity: buy by the bunch rather than the stem and the per-stem price drops. The food stalls are fixed price. More on the area in our full guide to Ho Thi Ky flower market.
5. An Dong Market
34 to 36 An Dương Vương, An Đông Ward (formerly Ward 9, District 5). 07:00 to 18:00, with some stalls going to 22:00.
Note the street number, because there is a trap here. Chợ An Đông at 34 to 36 and An Đông Plaza at number 18 are two different buildings on the same street, and drivers conflate them constantly.
2,718 stalls over six floors, and the city’s biggest fashion wholesale centre. Clothing, áo dài, bags and shoes, plus dried food and the fermented fish and shrimp pastes from Châu Đốc. Come here if you want quantity, an áo dài made, or serious dried-goods shopping. It is not a market you wander around for the atmosphere. The áo dài and fabric floor is the reason to come, and the ground-floor food court is a real local lunch rather than a tourist one.
Ask for the giá sỉ, the wholesale price, when you are buying three or more. On single items there is not much room.
6. Ba Chieu Market
Bounded by Bạch Đằng, Phan Đăng Lưu, Lê Quang Định and Diên Hồng, Gia Định Ward (formerly Bình Thạnh District). Mornings.
Go with your eyes open. As of 13 September 2026, of 1,369 stalls only 831 are still trading. Another 349 are closed and 193 have been turned into storage. Management recorded 54 closures and 24 stall transfers in the first nine months of this year, and blames purchasing power that has not recovered since the pandemic, made worse by heavy rain damaging stock.
That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to go with realistic expectations and to spend something while you are there. What is still good is the produce, the second-hand clothing, and the street food that carries on outside into the evening.
Haggle gently, counter at around 60 to 70 per cent on clothing, and never on produce or food. The margins here are thin and the market is struggling.
You will see “Ba Chieu night market, 6pm to 11pm” quoted online. There is an evening food scene around the market but we could find no source establishing it as an organised night market with set hours, unlike Binh Tay’s, so we are not going to pretend otherwise.
7. Ba Hoa Market
An alley off Trần Mai Ninh, Bảy Hiền Ward (formerly Ward 11, Tân Bình District). Busy from the early hours to midday, then the food stalls run again from around 17:00. Quiet in between, so do not turn up at 14:00.
Officially it is Chợ Phường 11. Everyone calls it Bà Hoa, after the woman who started it in the 1960s. It serves the Bảy Hiền textile-working community who came from Quảng Nam, and it is a piece of Central Vietnam dropped into Saigon.
This is the one market here that gives you something none of the others can. Not a different souvenir, a different regional cuisine. Xu xoa seaweed jelly, Bình Định coconut rice paper, Đại Lộc rice papers and noodles, bánh ít lá gai, bánh tổ, and the anchovy mắm and mắm nêm that Central Vietnamese cooking runs on.
Eat mì Quảng. Then eat bánh đập with mắm nêm, a rice cracker slapped onto a wet rice sheet and dipped in fermented anchovy sauce.
Do not haggle. These are fixed-price food stalls on small margins and bargaining marks you out as someone who has misread the room.
How to haggle in a Saigon market
The advice everyone repeats is “offer half”. At Ben Thanh that is far too generous, and at Ba Hoa it is insulting. The number changes by market.
- Ben Thanh, and its night market: counter at 20 to 30 per cent. Settle at 30 to 50.
- Binh Tay, Tan Dinh, An Dong: counter at 70 to 80 per cent, and ask for the wholesale price on multiples instead of negotiating hard.
- Ba Chieu: 60 to 70 per cent on clothing. Nothing on food.
- Ho Thi Ky and Ba Hoa: do not haggle at all.
Two pieces of context that make the Ben Thanh number credible. The market’s own management board has called on its vendors to commit to selling at the publicised prices and not to fleece customers, which tells you what the default is. And Decree 87/2024 sets fines of 5,000,000₫ to 10,000,000₫ for selling above listed prices, with suspensions of up to seven days, penalties that people in the Vietnamese tourism industry have publicly argued are too light.
A useful calibration: a normal bánh mì in this city costs 16,000₫ to 20,000₫. If something at a tourist market is priced at ten times what it costs elsewhere, that is the multiple you are negotiating against.
Counterfeits, and what that means for your offer
This is live. On 22 May 2026, at Ben Thanh and Saigon Square alone, authorities handled 71 violation cases, seized 1,574 counterfeit items worth more than 431,000,000₫ and issued over 307,000,000₫ in fines. Footwear, cosmetics, clothing, motorcycle parts and phone accessories, all ordered destroyed, with traders in both venues made to sign commitments. A week earlier, raids on two downtown markets seized fake Gucci and Ray-Ban goods.
The practical point is not moral. If a branded item costs a tenth of retail it is not real, and that changes what you should be offering for it. In the VnExpress shoe story that opens this guide, the shoes were counterfeit and both buyers overpaid; one just overpaid less.
Staying safe in a crowded market
Violent crime against foreigners in Vietnam is rare. Petty theft is not. The UK Foreign Office advises that bag-snatchers operate in crowded areas and places visited by tourists, that snatching from motorcycles is common, and that you should hold bags in front of you or on the side away from traffic, and hand over valuables rather than struggle. It notes petty crime rises around Christmas and Tet. Australia’s Smartraveller adds bag slashing to the list.
That is city-wide advice, not a Ben Thanh-specific warning, and we are not going to invent one. For transport, the Foreign Office recommends pre-arranged cars or official apps such as Grab and XanhSM, and warns about people posing as them. For Ben Thanh the metro removes the question entirely.
Also worth knowing
Saigon Square, 77 to 89 Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa, Sài Gòn Ward, two minutes from Ben Thanh, is where most visitors actually end up buying clothes. It belongs on this page mainly as a warning: it has been raided repeatedly, with thousands of fake Rolex, Gucci, Hermès and Louis Vuitton items seized, and in November 2022 around 90 per cent of its vendors shut during an inspection sweep. Prices are often marked, so counter at 70 to 80 per cent.
Ben Thanh Street Food Market, 26-28-30 Thủ Khoa Huân, about 20 metres from Ben Thanh, is not a market. It is a purpose-built air-conditioned food hall aimed at visitors who are nervous about street food. Worth knowing so you do not confuse it with the night market or think you have seen a Saigon market.
Soái Kình Lâm, 465 to 473 Trần Hưng Đạo B in Chợ Lớn Ward, is the fabric market that tailors actually buy from, trading roughly 07:30 to 16:30. It is a short walk from Binh Tay, so the two make a Chợ Lớn half-day together. We have not been recently enough to write it up properly, so treat this as a pointer rather than a recommendation.
The Russian Market is not open
Chợ Nga traded for about 16 years at 328 Võ Văn Kiệt, two floors and 200-odd stalls of winter clothing, outdoor gear, matryoshka dolls, caviar and vodka. In September 2025 it announced a move to 125 Hai Bà Trưng, the telecommunications building beside the Central Post Office, with a banner promising it would open on 1 October 2025.
It never properly did. The location sits in the heritage core next to Book Street, there were objections to commercialising it, and the signage came down in October 2025. On 9 October the city’s Department of Culture and Sports confirmed the venue was temporarily closed with no reopening date. In December the city was still reviewing what business types would be permitted. In January 2026 it was reported as about to open pending fire-safety paperwork. In April 2026 it was documented as closed on consecutive days, and we found nothing since.
The previous version of this page listed it as open daily 9am to 6pm. That was wrong and we have removed it. If you have walked past 125 Hai Bà Trưng recently and it is trading, please tell us.
Where to go for what
- First market in Saigon: Ben Thanh, for the food court, arriving on Metro Line 1.
- Buying fabric for tailoring: Tan Dinh, then the pink church.
- An áo dài made: An Dong, the fabric floor.
- Architecture and history: Binh Tay, and now its night market too.
- Eating rather than shopping: Ba Hoa for Central Vietnamese food, or Ho Thi Ky’s alley at night.
- A market with no tourists in it: Ba Chieu, in the morning.
- Flowers: Ho Thi Ky, bought by the bunch.
- Avoid: buying anything branded anywhere on this page.
If you are building a day around one of these, our guide to walking tours of Saigon covers the routes that take in Ben Thanh and Chợ Lớn.
How we picked these
Saigon Scene is based in Ho Chi Minh City. All seven markets above were confirmed as trading in September 2026 against Vietnamese news reporting, ward records or market management sources, and the eighth entry on the previous version of this page has been removed because it is not open.
Three addresses on the old page were wrong. Tan Dinh was placed in District 3 when it has always been District 1. Binh Tay, Ho Thi Ky and An Dong all carried ward names abolished when the district tier went on 1 July 2025. All are corrected above.
Two claims were removed rather than corrected, because we could not source them: that Binh Tay is 30 to 50 per cent cheaper than Ben Thanh, and that Ba Chieu runs a night market from 6pm to 11pm. Opening hours for Tan Dinh and Ba Hoa are given descriptively rather than as precise times, because every source we found for the exact hours traces back to travel aggregators rather than anyone who would know.
No individual stalls are named anywhere on this page. We will not invent them, and naming one properly needs a visit rather than a search.
Saigon markets: your questions answered
Is Ben Thanh Market still open in 2026?
Yes. Ben Thanh was refurbished in January 2026, its façade repainted and its roof redone in deep red, with the work finished before Tet. The market traded throughout and reopened busier than before. There is no relocation plan. The controversy that made the news at the time was about the paint colours deviating from the approved plan, not about any closure.
How much should you haggle at Saigon markets?
It depends which market. At Ben Thanh, counter at 20 to 30 per cent of the first price asked and expect to settle between 30 and 50 per cent; the markup on tourists there is the highest in the city. At Binh Tay, Tan Dinh and An Dong, counter at 70 to 80 per cent, and ask for the wholesale price on multiples instead. At Ba Chieu, 60 to 70 per cent on clothing only. At Ho Thi Ky and Ba Hoa do not haggle at all, because both are fixed-price.
What time does Ben Thanh night market start?
About 7pm, when more than 100 stalls set up along Phan Bội Châu and Phan Chu Trinh either side of the main building, running until roughly 10pm or 11pm. Many guides say 6pm, including our own previous version. Every Vietnamese source we checked says 7pm. The indoor market closes around 6pm, so there is a gap.
Which Saigon market is best for fabric?
Tan Dinh Market on Hai Bà Trưng for dress fabric and silk, which is where to buy cloth if you are having something tailored. An Dong Market is the bigger operation for áo dài and fashion wholesale. Soái Kình Lâm in Chợ Lớn is where the tailors themselves buy, and it trades roughly 07:30 to 16:30.
Are goods at Saigon markets fake?
Much of the branded merchandise is. In a single sweep on 22 May 2026 at Ben Thanh and Saigon Square, authorities seized 1,574 counterfeit items worth over 431,000,000₫ and fined traders more than 307,000,000₫, covering footwear, cosmetics, clothing and phone accessories. Treat any branded item priced at a fraction of retail as counterfeit, and price your offer accordingly. Dried goods, fabric, flowers and food are a different matter and are generally what they say they are.
What happened to the Russian Market in Saigon?
It closed. Chợ Nga left its home of 16 years at 328 Võ Văn Kiệt in late 2025 and announced it would reopen at 125 Hai Bà Trưng on 1 October 2025. It never properly opened there: the site sits beside the Central Post Office in the heritage core, objections followed, the signage was removed, and on 9 October 2025 the Department of Culture and Sports confirmed it was temporarily closed with no reopening date. It was still shut when last reported in April 2026.
