Forest ecosystem services provisioning and management in Vietnam is highly rated in the Vietnamese’s environmental agenda. The main rationale of private forest management is to maximise profit by timber and Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) production. From a social point of view there is an under supply of positive forest externalities (non-market ecosystem services). The paper contributes to ecosystem services economics literature by assessing the production cost structure, i.e. the cost of timber production and ecosystem services, based on a survey of private forest owners in the Hoa Binh Province. The empirical estimation of the production structure is carried out applying a stochastic cost frontier approach to analyse the trade-off between cost and forest ecosystem services performance. This is the first time such an approach is applied to estimate the costs of production relationship between timber and ecosystem services provision in Vietnam. This approach appears to be appropriate for handling the multiple joint outputs production in forests. It allows us to assess the complementarities and trade-offs between different services. The results show that there is complementarity in production of timber and non-timber market products and carbon storage service. The results are important information development of ecosystem services payment schemes in Vietnam.