We counted every entry in the word list the new HSK exam is built on, and it holds 11,000 words. The counts are cumulative, so each level includes the ones below it: 300 words for level 1, 500 by level 2, 1,000 by level 3, 2,000 by level 4, 3,600 by level 5 and 5,400 by level 6. Levels 7 to 9 share one list of the remaining 5,600.
That list comes from the HSK examination syllabus issued in November 2025 by the Center for Language Education and Cooperation, the Chinese government body formerly known as Hanban, and in force from July 2026. The figure most sites quote, 11,092 words, belongs to a different document, the 2021 national standard the syllabus was derived from. The old six-level exam, often called HSK 2.0, asked for 150, 300, 600, 1,200 and 2,500 words at levels 1 to 5 and "over 5,000" at level 6, according to Hanban's archived English site.
A total that dates from 2010
The 2021 national standard, GF 0025-2021, set out nine levels in three bands and took effect on 1 July 2021. Its four headline counts, 1,110 syllables, 3,000 characters, 11,092 words and 572 grammar points, were described as its "four-dimensional benchmark" in an interview the ministry republished. The word total is older than the standard. A 2010 Ministry of Education bulletin on a vocabulary grading standard for teaching Chinese abroad gives "一级词汇2245个，二级词汇3211个，三级词汇4175个，三级附录词汇1461个，共计11092个".
The 2021 standard's per-level counts, which we took from a public transcription of its 51 MB scanned PDF rather than the file itself, add up band by band to exactly those 2010 totals: 2,245 for levels 1 to 3, 3,211 for levels 4 to 6, and 5,636 for levels 7 to 9, the last being the 4,175 plus the appendix of 1,461. The 2021 standard kept the 2010 bands and divided each into three levels.
A syllabus that the exam itself follows
The examination syllabus is a separate, later document. Its preface says it drew on the 2021 standard, but it has its own word list and puts many words at different levels. It is the list the exam tests. We counted 300, 200, 500, 1,000, 1,600, 1,800 and 5,600 new words at levels 1 to 6 and 7 to 9, 11,000 in all, where the standard has 11,092. The exam organiser's site says the new HSK tests listening, speaking, reading and writing, and adds translation at the advanced levels.
A notice republished by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, credited to the exam's operator, says the new HSK launches worldwide on 13 December 2026. Malaysia's HSK test centre says on its registration page that the six-level exam ends from December 2026, and it had already scheduled a new-format sitting on 20 September 2026. Singapore's test centre had published no plan that we could find, so a candidate there should ask the centre which version a given sitting uses.
Old boundaries that came back
Compared level by level, the syllabus looks more like the old exam than like the standard it came from. Of the 4,995 distinct words in the six-level lists, 50.7% sit at the same level in the syllabus, against 16.4% in the 2021 standard. By "same level" we mean exactly that, a level 4 word in the old list that is still a level 4 word, and not merely somewhere in the new list. At the standard's levels 2 and 3, 84% and 88% of words moved to a later level in the syllabus.
Our old-list figures rest on a community transcription of the 2012 lists, because the official pages are offline, and we matched words exactly, so a form such as 没事儿 against 没事 counts as different. Our HSK vocabulary lookup shows, for a sample of words, the level each one has in all three lists.
Words that an old HSK 6 does not cover
Old HSK 6 introduced 2,499 words of its own. In the syllabus, 706 of them stay at level 6 and 1,579, or 63%, have moved up to levels 7 to 9. Counting the whole old list, 63.6% of its words are in the syllabus's levels 1 to 6, 33.6% are in 7 to 9, and 2.9% are not in it at all. Conversely, the syllabus for levels 1 to 6 introduces about 2,160 words that were not on the old lists.
These figures describe the overlap between word lists only. They say nothing about whether an old certificate is still accepted, and we found no official statement on that; the university, employer or scholarship body asking for a level is the one to ask. We also found no official table linking the new levels to Singapore's O-Level Chinese, Malaysia's SPM Chinese or the European CEFR scale.
Characters that were swapped
The syllabus lists 3,088 characters to recognise, against the standard's 3,000, and a separate set of 1,200 to write by hand, every one of them also on the recognition list. The two recognition lists share 2,945 characters. Of the 55 in the 2021 standard that the syllabus's character list leaves out, nearly all are surnames and place-name abbreviations, among them 刘, 赵, 吴, 沪 and 粤; we found no separate list of proper names in the file we parsed, though one learning site says such a list exists. Our guide to how many characters cover 90% of text shows why a few thousand go a long way. The 143 characters the syllabus adds are mostly for everyday things, and several of them spell animals: the characters of 蝴蝶, the butterfly, 螃蟹, the crab, and 狐狸, the fox.
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