Hong Kong relaunched its Capital Investment Entrant Scheme in March 2024, and the headline number has done most of the marketing since: HK$30 million in permissible assets buys a path to residency for the applicant, a spouse and dependent children. The number is real and the scheme is live. What the brochures glide over is the arithmetic underneath — what counts toward the thirty million, what is capped, and the one corner of the scheme that quietly turns it into family-office policy.
What the thirty million buys
The scheme offers no passport and no shortcut to one. It offers entry, an extendable stay and the right to work or establish a business without a separate visa. After seven years of ordinary residence, the entrant can apply for permanent residency on the same terms as everyone else in the city. The investment must be maintained throughout, and switches between permissible categories are allowed within the scheme's notification rules. Withdraw the money early and the residency basis goes with it.
Eligibility has its own geometry. Foreign nationals qualify, as do Chinese nationals who already hold permanent residency elsewhere, along with residents of Macao and Taiwan. Mainland residents without foreign permanent residency remain outside the door — a design that tells you the scheme is aimed at mobile international wealth, not at the neighbouring market.
The arithmetic of permissible
The HK$30 million divides into buckets with hard edges. The largest is financial assets: Hong Kong-listed equities, debt securities, eligible collective investment schemes and similar instruments, with certain lower-risk categories such as certificates of deposit subject to their own sub-caps. Non-residential real estate may count, but only up to a HK$10 million ceiling — the scheme will let you buy the office floor, it will not let the office floor do all the work. Residential property, the asset Hong Kong's wealthy historically reached for first, counts for nothing.
One slice is compulsory: HK$3 million must go into the CIES Investment Portfolio, a designated vehicle backing the city's innovation and technology ambitions. Applicants should read that slice honestly. It is less an investment than an entry fee with a prospectus attached, and pricing it as such clarifies the rest of the decision.
The family office route
The least-discussed provision is the most revealing. Assets held through an eligible family-owned investment holding vehicle — the same structure that qualifies for Hong Kong's family-office tax concession, managed by a single family office in the city — count toward the threshold. The scheme, in other words, was drafted to interlock with the government's family-office campaign: bring the holding vehicle, bring the office, bring the people.
For a family already planning a Hong Kong office, this changes the maths. The CIES money is not a separate pile set aside to buy residency; it can be the same capital the family office was going to manage anyway. For everyone else, the route is irrelevant, and advisers who pitch it as a reason to build an office around a visa application have the incentive backwards.
Who this is really for
The scheme suits a specific profile: internationally mobile principals with substantial liquid assets, an existing or intended Hong Kong connection, and a seven-year horizon. It suits them because the alternative — quality-migrant and talent routes — demands employment or scoring, and because the capital can stay invested in ordinary markets rather than in a donation or a dead asset.
It suits fewer people than the marketing implies. Thirty million Hong Kong dollars is roughly US$4 million, which prices the scheme above the Caribbean programmes and the Gulf's long-term visas, and the money must keep working in Hong Kong-approved form for years. Families comparing it with Singapore's routes will notice that Singapore sells tax treatment while Hong Kong, here, sells residency — different products that advisers too often place on the same shelf.
The paperwork rhythm
The sequence matters more than the total. Applicants must first prove they held net assets of at least HK$30 million throughout the qualifying period before applying — this is a wealth-verification exercise as much as an immigration one, and it is where disorganised applicants stall. Approval in principle follows, then a window to complete the investment, then the visa, then periodic reviews confirming the money has stayed in place. The sensible rhythm is to assemble the asset evidence before anything else; advisers report that the verification stage, not the investment stage, is where months are lost.
Expect the parameters to move. Hong Kong has adjusted the scheme before — the old version ran for over a decade, swelled on property money, then closed in 2015 — and a government competing openly for family offices will tune caps and categories as applications accumulate. The direction of travel is what to watch: if residential property ever re-enters the permissible list, the scheme stops being an investment policy and becomes a housing one, and every prior calculation changes.
