Hong Kong · Residency by investment
Capital Investment Entrant Scheme (original, 2003–2015)
Suspended with effect from 15 January 2015 and never reopened in its original form. It was replaced by the New CIES from 1 March 2024, which is materially different. The threshold is HKD 30m rather than HKD 10m, there is now a mandatory government portfolio contribution, and real estate treatment is far tighter.
We list this because the old HKD 10m figure, and worse, the outdated pre-2010 rule that residential property qualified, still turn up in advisory material and search results. Neither is current. Anyone citing HKD 10m for Hong Kong today is working from a decade-old brief.
Qualifying routes
Raised from HKD 6.5m to HKD 10m in October 2010, when residential property was simultaneously removed from the permissible asset list
The facts
- Minimum investment
- 10M HKD
- Total landed cost
- Historic figure: HKD 10m at suspension
- Route type
- Residency by investment
- Physical presence
- Historic
- Permanent residency
- Historic figure: 7 years
- Citizenship
- Not applicable
- Language test
- Not applicable
- Dual citizenship
- Not permitted. You would have to renounce.
- It has been closed since January 2015. The New CIES costs three times as much and works quite differently.
- Residential property was removed from the permissible asset list in October 2010, five years before suspension, and only returned in a heavily capped form in 2024.