Earn HK$7,099 a month in Hong Kong and your employer pays 5% of it into your MPF account, and you pay nothing. Earn HK$7,100 and you pay 5% as well: HK$355. One extra dollar of salary leaves you with HK$354 less in your hand — while HK$355 more goes into your own retirement account. Your total pay goes up; your pay packet goes down.
That step is the whole shape of the Mandatory Provident Fund in miniature. The employee and the employer each contribute 5% of what the law calls your relevant income — broadly, everything your employer pays you for the job: salary, wages, commission, bonuses, the 13th-month payment, cash allowances and tips your employer collects. It excludes severance and long-service payments, genuine expense reimbursements, share options and benefits in kind. There is a floor below which you contribute nothing, and a ceiling above which neither of you contributes more.
Most pages explaining this are written by payroll firms for employers. This one is for the person whose pay is being deducted, and it follows two employees through a year to show where the rules bite.
The three numbers, and what they are measured in
The Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority publishes the rule as three thresholds, and the most important thing about them is that they are monthly.
| Your relevant income | You contribute | Your employer contributes |
|---|---|---|
| Less than HK$7,100 a month | nothing | 5% of your income |
| HK$7,100 to HK$30,000 a month | 5% of your income | 5% of your income |
| More than HK$30,000 a month | HK$1,500 | HK$1,500 |
The floor of HK$7,100 has been in force since 1 November 2013 and the ceiling of HK$30,000 since 1 June 2014. At exactly HK$7,100 you do contribute: the Authority's table puts the cut-off at "less than HK$7,100". Below the floor the ordinance says you are not required to contribute — which is not the same as being barred from it, and you can choose to.
Notice the middle column never goes away. Below the floor, your employer still pays 5%. The threshold decides your half, not theirs.
Two payslips, one salary
Now the part almost nobody mentions, because the monthly table is all most pages print. The floor is not really HK$7,100 a month. It is reckoned per day — HK$280 a day at the bottom and HK$1,000 a day at the top — and a monthly figure is just that daily rate applied to a month. For someone paid weekly, the same rule works out at HK$1,960 and HK$7,000 a week.
Take two employees on the same annual pay of HK$98,800.
- Siu-ming is paid monthly: HK$8,233 a month. That is above HK$7,100, so each month he contributes 5% and so does his employer.
- Ka-yan is paid weekly: HK$1,900 a week. That is below the weekly floor of HK$1,960, so she is not required to contribute at all. Her employer still pays 5%.
Same employer cost, same annual income, opposite answer on the employee's side. That happens across a whole band of pay — from HK$85,200 a year, which is twelve months at the monthly floor, up to just under HK$101,920, which is 52 weeks at the weekly floor. The upper edge of that band depends on counting a year as 52 weeks and assuming even pay in each week; count 365 days instead and it moves to HK$102,200. The band is real; its exact top is an artefact of the calendar.
The ceiling works the same way. Above HK$30,000 a month the cap is HK$1,500 each, but for a weekly-paid employee it is HK$350 a week each — five per cent of HK$7,000 — not a pro-rated share of the monthly figure.
If you are paid weekly or daily, this is the thing to check on your own payslip. Our MPF calculator takes a monthly income and applies the monthly table; it will not give you the right answer for a weekly or daily wage, and it now says so.
The first month is not like the others
The second question Hong Kong readers ask most, and one most English pages skip, is the contribution holiday — 免供款期. When you start a new job you are not required to contribute for your first 30 days of employment. The part usually left out is that you also skip the incomplete wage period immediately following those 30 days.
The Authority's own example shows how this works. Someone who starts on 5 June contributes nothing for 5 June to 4 July. Because their 30th day falls in July, they contribute nothing for July either. The first deduction is for August, remitted by 10 September. That holiday ran 57 days, not 30.
And again the holiday is yours alone. Your employer's contributions run from your first day.
Where this sits among the region's pension schemes
If you have worked in Singapore or Malaysia, the MPF will feel familiar and oddly small. Our comparison of Malaysia's EPF and Singapore's CPF shows how differently those two handle a ceiling, and our guide to reading a payslip walks through the same salary in three systems. What sets the MPF apart is not the rate but the wage period. Nowhere else in the region does the same annual pay produce a different obligation depending on how often you are paid.
What this does not cover, and what is changing
This guide covers the mandatory contributions of an ordinary employee. It does not cover the self-employed, who contribute on their own relevant income against the same floor and ceiling reckoned over a year; casual workers in the construction and catering industries, who are on separate industry schemes with a daily table of their own; the carve-outs for people already covered by another retirement scheme; or the rules for taking money out.
Two things are moving. The Authority consulted the Labour Advisory Board on 31 March 2026 about raising the floor and ceiling to HK$10,500 and HK$40,000, which would lift the monthly maximum from HK$1,500 to HK$2,000 each. That is a proposal, not law, and the figures above apply until it is gazetted. The other change has already happened: since 1 May 2025, employers can no longer use the mandatory contributions they made after that date to offset severance or long-service payments.
Your own trustee and the Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority are the authorities on your account, and the eMPF platform now shows every scheme in one place — all 24 schemes had moved onto it by April 2026. The thresholds, the per-day rule and the worked example come from the Authority's own pages, read on 26 September 2026; we did the arithmetic on the two payslips. This is a guide to how the rules work, not advice about your situation.
