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Abstract Copepods are the dominant marine zooplankton and perform important functions in the marine food web. However, copepod traits have not been studied in many waters. We studied the copepod community under influence of the Mekong River and the Southern Vietnamese coastal upwelling, based on their functional traits, during the southwest monsoon period in 2016. Fourteen trait categories of four key functional traits (trophic-groups, feeding-types, reproductive-strategies and diel migration) of copepod data were analyzed to investigate how environmental gradients impact on their distribution and abundance among the four defined habitats: Mekong River (MKW), upwelling (UpW), nearshore (OnSW) and offshore waters (OSW). There were seven functional groups identified in the study waters based on multiple correspondence analysis of distribution, abundance and traits of 139 copepod species. Herbivorous, current-feeding and sac-spawning copepods were dominant in all habitats with the highest abundance in OSW. Specifically, herbivorous species dominated in MKW and UpW, whereas omnivorous species dominated in OnSW and OSW. Sac-spawners dominated in all habitats, but decreased from MKW and UpW to OnSW and lowest in OSW. Cruise feeders were 2-fold higher than ambush feeders in the UpW, but the opposite was observed in the other habitats. The results suggest that impacts of Mekong River and coastal upwelling led to distinctive copepod assemblages with specific functional traits.