The standard view that depreciation hurts the poor and worsens the distribution of income isexamined using Vietnamese household data from 1998. Income is decomposed into 98 different sources and deflated by a price index, based on 269 items, that is constructed for each household. Regressions linking dong depreciation with the structure of domestic prices are estimated, and the results used to help simulate the effect of a 40% devaluation on incomes and prices. Adevaluation would help those at the top and bottom (but not middle) of the income distribution,but the differences are small and the effect modest. Thus macroeconomic and exchange rate policy may be pursued without worrying unduly about the distributional effects. These findings may apply to a number of other countries, especially those with similar economic structures such as China and Cambodia.