Hong Kong has scrapped its official poverty line after 13 years — but the disappearance of the benchmark has not made poverty disappear. It has simply made it harder to see.
Official statistics show that in 2025, nearly 193,000 households in Hong Kong were living on a monthly income of less than HK$4,000, an increase of 33% compared with a decade earlier. Over the same period, the total number of households in the city grew by only 11%. In other words, the number of households living in deep poverty grew three times faster than the population itself.
Meanwhile, wage growth among Hong Kong’s lowest-paid workers has consistently lagged behind that of higher earners. Although the city has a statutory minimum wage, campaigners estimate it would need to rise by around 50% simply to provide a basic standard of living, a stark illustration of how in-work poverty has become a deeply entrenched structural problem, not a marginal one.
Against that backdrop, the government’s decision to stop measuring poverty altogether looks less like a technical adjustment and more like an abdication of responsibility.
Government abandons a decade-old poverty benchmark
Hong Kong introduced its official poverty line in 2013, defining poverty as household income below 50% of the city’s median monthly household income, and publishing annual figures showing how many people lived below that threshold. Whatever its flaws, the measure gave the public and successive governments a consistent yardstick against which to judge progress or failure.
Since John Lee became Chief Executive in 2022, the administration has shifted towards what it calls “targeted poverty alleviation”, channelling resources towards selected vulnerable groups: children in subdivided flats, single-parent families with young children, and households made up entirely of people aged over 80.
Officials have hailed these programmes as a success. Yet, unlike previous years, the government no longer publishes the city’s overall poverty figures and has now confirmed it will stop releasing poverty statistics altogether, abandoning any official definition of poverty. Ministers argue the old income-based measure overstated the scale of poverty by focusing too narrowly on income while ignoring other forms of support.
There may well be room to refine how poverty is measured. But instead of improving the methodology, the government has simply removed the measuring stick, which enable the public to hold policy accountable. A government that stops counting the poor cannot be shown to be failing them. That is precisely the problem.
Low-income households continue to grow
Income alone cannot capture the full picture of poverty. But it remains one of the clearest available indicators of hardship, and the numbers are unambiguous.
According to the Census and Statistics Department’s latest household survey, Hong Kong had 2.77 million households in 2025, up from 2.50 million in 2016, representing a rise of 11.1%.
Over the same period, households earning less than HK$4,000 a month rose from 144,600 to 192,900, an increase of a third. Among them were 4,400 four-person households surviving on such incomes, families of four living on less than many single professionals spend on rent alone.
Households earning below HK$8,000 a month also grew, from 387,500 to 432,600, slightly outpacing overall household growth.
Wage data tells the same story. Workers in the lowest-paid 10% earned a monthly wage of HK$11,000 in 2025, up from HK$9,000 in 2016, a cumulative rise of 22%, or roughly 2.3% a year. Median wages, by contrast, rose 31% over the same period — about 3% a year. At every point in the past decade, the poorest tenth of workers has fallen further behind everyone else.
Minimum wage falls far short of a living wage
Hong Kong has long faced criticism that its statutory minimum wage bears little relation to the actual cost of living. Since 2018, Oxfam Hong Kong has campaigned for a living wage – a wage sufficient for workers and their families to meet a decent basic standard of living through normal working hours, recommending this year that it be set at no less than HK$64 an hour, almost 50% higher than the current legal minimum.
Official statistics do not show precisely how many workers earn below that figure, but they show the 25th percentile hourly wage in 2025 stood at just HK$61.30. That implies at least 707,000 employees were paid below even that modest benchmark — hundreds of thousands of people working full-time yet unable to meet basic living costs.
Living expenses, meanwhile, keep rising. Government figures show average monthly household expenditure reached HK$32,472 in 2024–25, up 17.5% from a decade earlier. Average monthly spending per person rose by almost 32%, from HK$9,253 to HK$12,201. Wages for the poorest workers have simply not kept pace.
Poverty does not disappear because it is no longer measured
By abolishing the poverty line, the government relieves itself of the burden of publicly accounting for whether its anti-poverty policies are working. That is precisely why the decision is so hard to defend: it does not solve the underlying problem, it simply removes the evidence of it.
Replacing comprehensive poverty statistics with a handful of targeted programmes may let officials claim success on their own terms. But success dressed up through the absence of scrutiny is not success — it is the avoidance of it. A government that cannot be measured cannot be held to account, and a policy that cannot be judged against a benchmark cannot honestly be called effective.
Erasing the numbers does not erase the people living behind them. Nearly 200,000 households scraping by on less than HK$4,000 a month have not vanished because the statistic tracking them has. If anything, discarding the poverty line after 13 years — at precisely the moment the data shows deep poverty growing three times faster than the population — looks less like statistical housekeeping and more like a government choosing not to know what it does not want to see.