Certain embodiments described herein are generally directed to systems and methods for deterministic load balancing of processing encapsulated encrypted data packets at a destination tunnel endpoint. For example, certain embodiments described herein relate to configuring a destination tunnel endpoint (TEP) with an encapsulating security payload (ESP) receive side scaling (RSS) mode to assign each incoming packet, received from a certain source endpoint (EP), to a certain RSS queue based on an identifier that is encoded in an SPI value included the packet.