The HKSAR Government's total housing supply target for the next ten years is 420,000 units

The Zhitong Finance App learned that on September 28, the HKSAR Government's “Long-term Housing Strategy” 2026 Annual Progress Report (“Annual Progress Report”). According to the established estimation method in the “Long Term Housing Strategy” (“Long Term Policy”), the total housing demand for the next ten years is 419,300 units, so the government has set a supply target of 420,000 units.

A spokesman for the Hong Kong Housing Authority said, “Since the 2018 “Long Policy” annual update, the new supply ratio for public and private housing has been adjusted to 70:30. In order to balance the government's commitment to drastically increasing the supply of public housing to meet social demand and society's demand for private housing, the government will maintain the ratio of new public and private housing supply for the 10-year period 2027/28 to 2036/37 at 70:30. According to this, out of the total housing supply target of 420,000 units, the public housing supply target is 294,000 units, and the private housing supply target is 126,000 units.”

The spokesperson added, “In the 2024 annual progress report of the “Long Policy”, we announced that in order to further meet the public's housing needs, public housing over the next ten years will gradually move towards a ratio of 60:40 as the planning basis to build public rental housing (public rental housing) /green table tenancy plan (green housing) units and other subsidized sales units. The government will continue to move in this direction over the next ten years. Accordingly, the public housing supply target of 294,000 units will be divided into 176,000 rental public housing/green residential units and 118,000 other subsidized sales units.”

Addressing the housing issue is the focus of the current administration. Thanks to the current administration's unremitting efforts to “speed up, increase quantity, improve quality, and improve efficiency,” the number of public housing completed has laid a solid foundation and entered the harvest period to meet the housing needs of citizens at an accelerated pace. The “comprehensive waiting time for public housing” dropped from a high of 6.1 years before the current administration took office to 4.8 years. It has been at its lowest level in more than eight years for two consecutive quarters, moving towards the goal of falling to 4.5 years in 2026/27. Since the current administration took office (i.e. July 2022 to June 2026), more than 85,500 applicants have been arranged to rent public housing; at the same time, the Hong Kong Housing Authority (Housing Authority) and the Hong Kong Housing Association (HKHA) have also sold about 48,000 subsidized sales units. The figure has nearly doubled from the number of newly subsidized sales units sold during the four-year period before the current administration took office (i.e. July 2018 to June 2022). In fact, since the current administration took office (i.e. July 2022 to June 2026), more than 133,000 families have been arranged to rent public housing or buy subsidized sales units sold by the Housing Authority and the Housing Association. The figure is a sharp increase of more than 35% over the approximately 97,000 households in the four years before the current administration took office (i.e. July 2018 to June 2022).

Over the next ten years, the government has found enough land to meet the supply target of 294,000 public housing units. The Government will strive to provide an average of more than 35,000 public housing units (including renting public housing and subsidizing the sale of housing) over the next five years (i.e. 2027/28 to 2031/32), an increase of about 73% over the five-year construction volume corresponding to when the current administration took office, a new high in the past 25 years. Furthermore, compared with the five-year term when the current administration took office, the supply of home-owning scheme units increased by about twice as much as anticipated at the time. As always, the Government will continue to be flexible enough when planning the development of public housing to ensure that future public housing volumes can respond to changes in the actual situation and make corresponding adjustments in due course.

In terms of private housing supply, the target for private housing supply in the next ten years is 126,000 units. The government will have enough land to meet these goals in the next ten years. In addition to government land sales projects, other private housing land sources include railway property development projects, Urban Renewal Authority projects and private development projects. As for the short-term supply of private housing, according to the latest estimates at the end of June 2026, the first-hand private residential property market is expected to supply about 96,000 units in the next three to four years.

As the supply of public housing continues to increase, the Government has more room to further improve various housing policies to better respond to the public's housing needs. In this regard, the Housing Authority has announced four important directions for future housing policies in the “Annual Progress Report”:

(i) Further encourage the public to move up the stairs of the house;

(ii) Optimizing funding to sell units;

(iii) Ban poor quality “unfurnished houses” and promote the simple housing system in an orderly manner; and

(iv) Continuously promote the application of technology to enhance the efficiency of construction costs and ensure the smooth implementation of public housing schemes.