In six of the model bride-price cases China's Supreme People's Court has published with the amounts set out, the share a court ordered returned ran from nothing to all of it. A couple who never registered their marriage but lived together for three and a half years and had a child got none of ¥160,000 back. In another, the recipient left ten days after the wedding, and the full ¥200,000 had to be returned.
No law in mainland China caps a bride price. The bride price, 彩礼 or 聘金, is money or goods the groom's side gives the bride's family; the dowry, 嫁妆, is what the bride brings from her own family. The Civil Code bans "借婚姻索取财物", demanding property by way of a marriage, and two sets of court rules say when a bride price must come back: if the couple never registered and never lived together; if they registered but never actually lived together, on divorce; if paying it before the marriage left the payer in hardship, on divorce; and if it was demanded under the name of bride price to extract money. In the harder cases, a short marriage or a couple who lived together without registering, the court decides how much. This describes mainland rules and is not legal advice.
Nothing came back from ¥160,000
Registration alone does not settle a case. The court's provisions on bride-price disputes, in force since 1 February 2024, say that for a couple who lived together without registering, a court weighs how the money was used, the dowry, how long they lived together, any pregnancy or child, and who was at fault, together with local custom. The same rules say a court will generally not order a return after a registered couple has lived together, unless the time was short and the amount was too high.
In the first batch of model cases, from December 2023, an unregistered couple had lived together for about three and a half years and had a child, and nothing of ¥160,000 was returned. In another, the couple had never lived together in a stable way, and about 90% came back. The court's press notes say it deliberately set no fixed period of living together, because a set number of days could itself be unfair to one side.
The ¥188,000 that a court called too high
In the same batch, a registered couple lived together for a little over a year before divorcing. The court judged ¥188,000 too high for the payer's low-income family and ordered ¥56,400, or 30%, returned. The provisions tell a court judging whether a bride price is too high to weigh average disposable income per person where the payer lives, the paying family's own finances, and local custom.
For scale, China's statistics bureau puts 2025 disposable income per person at ¥43,377 nationally and ¥24,456 in rural areas. Our Chinese wedding bride price tool gives a mainland "Standard" range of ¥88,888 to ¥188,888, which is 2.0 to 4.4 times the national figure and 3.6 to 7.7 times the rural one. Those are illustrative bands, not survey data, and income is only one of the three factors, so none of this says any particular sum is legally too high. Until September 2026, our tool calculated a single "total budget" that combined bride price and dowry. This was misleading, as it mixed money flowing in opposite directions and sometimes double-counted funds when the bride price was returned as dowry. The tool now tracks them separately.
Car money counts as bride price too
The court's third batch of model cases, from January 2026, states that money given towards a home or a car for the sake of a marriage "具有彩礼性质", has the character of bride price, and can be handled under the same rules. An earlier case counted a ¥260,000 transfer labelled "五金", the customary five pieces of gold, as bride price alongside ¥800,000 in cash. The 2026 batch also includes the ten-day marriage that returned the full ¥200,000, and a person convicted of fraud for taking more than ¥630,000 from eight people between 2021 and 2024.
A ¥380,000 provincial average has no traceable source
Lists ranking provinces by bride price circulate widely, and they usually put Jiangxi at the top with ¥380,000. We traced the Jiangxi figure through the pages that rank for it, back to one from January 2023, and none of them cites a source; one says its text includes AI-generated content. A February 2023 Xinhua report was more specific, quoting a villager in northern Jiangxi who said the local rate had risen from ¥88,000 to ¥188,000 and ¥288,000 over more than a decade, and was now usually ¥388,000. The run of eights is its own story, which our guide to what a lucky 8 is worth on a Hong Kong plate measures elsewhere.
We found no official national or provincial series of bride-price amounts. One widely cited survey, Tencent News's 2020 poll, gathered 1,846 self-selected answers. Its most common amount was a round ¥100,000, given by 9.2% of respondents, and its national average was ¥69,095, with Zhejiang averaging over ¥180,000.
Across the Strait, an engagement gift can be reclaimed
Taiwan's rule is shorter. Its Civil Code lets either side reclaim a gift made because of an engagement if the engagement is void, dissolved or revoked, and the claim lapses after two years. In the Singapore and Malaysian marriage statutes we could search, we found nothing on 聘金. Singapore's Muslim law does define emas kahwin, but that is an obligatory payment by the husband to the wife at the marriage, a different institution from a Chinese family's bride price.
Beijing has named it in most years since 2019
China's No. 1 central document, the year's first policy statement on rural affairs, has named bride price in seven of the last eight years: in 2019, and every year from 2021. The words have changed from 天价, "sky-high", in 2019, to 高价, "high-priced", from 2021 to 2023, to 高额, "high-amount", from 2024. The 2026 document, dated 3 January, asks for rural bride prices to keep being reined in and, for the first time, for neighbouring provinces to act together: "加强省际毗邻地区联动治理".
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