About Expats HK

Expats HK is written for someone moving to Hong Kong rather than visiting it. Which district, at what rent, with what commute, near which school - and then what to do with the weekends once that is settled. A visitor asks which hotel; someone arriving for three years asks a different set of questions, and this site answers those.

The area guides are the core, and they are organised the way lettings agents group the city rather than by its eighteen administrative districts, because that is the shortlist people actually choose between. Each one leads on rent, commute and space, since those are what the decision turns on and you get two of the three.

Facts come from primary sources. Visa categories and their criteria are checked against the Immigration Department, employment and helper obligations against the Labour Department, and typhoon and rainstorm signal rules against the Observatory. Rents are given as bands with the date, because they move. Anything numeric carries the date it was checked, because a price without a date is not information. Geographic data comes from GeoNames and OpenStreetMap, photographs from Wikimedia Commons under their individual Creative Commons licences, and time zone data from the IANA database.

We do not accept payment for a placement, a ranking or a favourable review. Where a link earns a commission, the page carrying it says so. We do not claim to have tested something we have not: plan details and prices that come from a provider rather than from our own checking are labelled as such. And we do not publish a page to fill a gap in a keyword list.

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. Email ask@expats.hk with the page and what is inaccurate. Corrections to a specific fact are made on the page, and the update date on the page changes with them.