Hong Kong · Residency by investment
Capital Investment Entrant Scheme (original, 2003–2015)
Closed
Last verified July 2026
Suspended with effect from 15 January 2015 and never reopened in its original form. Replaced by the New CIES from 1 March 2024, which is materially different: HKD 30m rather than HKD 10m, a mandatory government portfolio contribution, and far tighter real estate treatment.
This programme is closed. We keep the page up because agents still
advertise it and clients still ask. Nothing below is available to new applicants.
We list this because the old HKD 10m figure and, worse, the pre-2010 position that residential property qualified, still circulate in advisory material and search results. Both are dead. Anyone quoting HKD 10m for Hong Kong today is working from a decade-old brief.
Qualifying routes
10M HKD
Permissible investment assets (historic)
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 — HKD 10m at suspension
- Physical presence
- historic
- Permanent residency
- historic — 7 years
- Citizenship
- not applicable
- Language test
- not applicable
- Dual citizenship
- Not permitted — you would have to renounce
What can go wrong
- Closed since January 2015. The New CIES is triple the price and structurally different.
- Residential property was removed from the permissible asset list in October 2010 — five years before suspension — and returned only in heavily capped form in 2024.