Between June 2025 and September 2026, Hong Kong's Transport Department put a 4444 plate up at its traditional auctions five times, and nobody bought one. Over the same thirteen auctions an 8888 was offered seven times and sold twice, once for HK$310,000. The department sells every mark "subject to a reserve price" and does not publish the reserves, so an unsold 4444 means only that nobody bid the floor. Five times running, nobody did.
In Cantonese and Mandarin, 8 (八) rhymes with 發, "to prosper", and 4 (四) has the same syllable as 死, "to die", in a different tone. The Unicode Consortium's reading tables show both as near-matches rather than exact ones: 8 and 發 differ in their first consonant, and 4 and 死 only in tone. Near-matches of sound do a lot of work in Chinese; they are also behind most Chinese typos. The belief built on them has a price, and we measured it on the Transport Department's own results. Across 2,679 plates sold at its online auctions from March 2025 to September 2026, each extra 8 went with a price about 51% to 65% higher and each extra 4 with a price about 21% to 28% lower. That is an association in prices people paid, and it says nothing about whether any number brings luck.
Perhaps only the applicants care
At the online auctions the marks on offer are ones that applicants asked for, so the sample picks itself. Of the 9,538 digits on those 2,679 plates, 15.0% are 8s and 5.1% are 4s, nearly three to one, where free choice between the two would make them equally common. Anyone who asked for a plate with a 4 in it was already less worried about the number than most.
Even inside that self-selected group, the gap in raw prices is plain. The median four-digit plate with an 8 and no 4 went for HK$6,000; with neither, HK$3,000; with a 4 and no 8, HK$2,000. Among three-digit plates the same three medians were HK$10,000, HK$6,000 and HK$4,000. We verified the data against the department's result sheets; the prices we extracted from each of the 26 sheets add up to the total proceeds printed on that sheet, to the dollar.
Perhaps it depends on the comparison
A regression of log price on how many of each digit a plate carries, with a control for three-digit plates and for any repeated digit, gives the 65% and the 21% when 0 is the digit every other is compared with. Compare against 0, 1, 2 and 3 together and the figures become 51% and 28%. The two versions disagree on the sizes, but in both an 8 is worth more than a 4 costs. The other digits fall in between, with a 6 associated with about 21% more, a 9 with about 18% more, and a 7 with a small discount of about 7% that is only borderline on this sample.
Our lucky phone number picker scores phone numbers rather than plates, but its digit weights put the ten digits in almost exactly the order this market does, with a rank correlation of 0.97 against our estimates. Its proportions are its own, and it docks a 4 slightly more than it credits an 8, where the Hong Kong market does the opposite; the page now says so.
Perhaps it has faded
The best-known earlier study, by Ng, Chong and Du of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, used the same department's records of 292 auctions from January 1997 to January 2009, in which 41,069 plates were sold. In the working-paper version of the study, which was published in 2010 in the Journal of Economic Psychology, an ordinary four-digit plate with one extra 8 sold for 63.5% more on average and one with an extra 4 for 11% less, both compared with a 7. Their comparison digit is not ours, so the figures cannot be laid side by side exactly. On either reading, the 8 premium today is of similar size and the 4 discount is at least as large.
The traditional auctions show it in repeated digits. A 44 plate was offered 20 times and sold six times, at HK$7,000 to HK$8,000. An 88 was offered ten times and sold four, at HK$51,000 to HK$53,000. For scale, 6666 was offered 22 times and sold 14, at HK$24,000 to HK$52,000.
Perhaps it is only Hong Kong
The pattern turns up in other markets too, though not in every one.
- In Malaysia, JPJ's bidding for the FF plate series in May 2023 raised RM34.3 million, the most since the online system opened in 2019, and FF8 drew the top bid of RM950,000, according to the transport minister's statement. FF9 came second at RM911,999. The statement does not say whether FF4 was offered.
- In Greater Vancouver, a study of close to 117,000 house sales found that houses with a street number ending in 4 sold at a 2.2% discount and those ending in 8 at a 2.5% premium.
- In Chengdu, second-hand flats on floors ending in 8 sold for about 235 yuan more per square metre, according to the study's abstract.
- In Auckland, ethnic Chinese buyers paid more for an 8 in 2003 to 2006, but the effect did not show up in sales from 2011 to 2015.
Hong Kong's own buildings show the belief on a larger scale. In 2010 the Buildings Department proposed accepting the omission of floor numbers 4, 13 and those ending in 4, noting it had "been adopted widely", while barring other skipped numbers. Singapore is the gap in this list. The Land Transport Authority announces plate bidding results but does not publish bid prices as a list or dataset, so there is no public data to measure an 8 premium against.
Perhaps it stops at the top
It does not. Of the ten highest prices on the Transport Department's list of record auction prices since 1973, six are single letters and four are numbers: 28 at HK$18.1 million in 2016, 18 at HK$16.5 million in 2008, 9 at HK$13 million in 1994 and 88 at HK$11.4 million in 2025, every one of them with an 8 or a 9, and none of the ten with a 4.
View author profile → · Editorial policy
