Hong Kong plans to extend its newborn baby bonus for three years to 24 October 2029, with the payment for a second or later child rising from HK$20,000 to HK$30,000. The higher payment is proposed for children born from 16 September 2026, subject to approval of the required funding.
The government estimates that the extended and enhanced scheme would cost about HK$2.3 billion. It plans to ask the Legislative Council finance committee to use the scheme’s existing balance and approve an additional HK$1.6 billion commitment. This remains a funding request, rather than an approved expansion.
If the funding is approved, the government’s target is to pay 90% of eligible applicants within three weeks of receiving their documents. By the end of August 2026, 77,709 applicants had received awards totalling HK$1.554 billion, leaving about HK$732 million against the approved commitment of HK$2.286 billion.
New People’s Party legislator Dominic Lee cited Hong Kong’s total fertility rate of 0.73 births per woman in 2025 and asked how the measures’ effectiveness would be assessed. Deputy Chief Secretary Warner Cheuk said the government’s medium-term aim was to manage the decline and prevent a sharp further fall.
For working parents, the government is considering giving civil servants 10 to 12 hours of annual family-care leave from next year. A labour-sector legislator urged it to lead the way in extending the arrangement to private employers, drawing a comparison with the earlier introduction of paternity leave. The Deputy Chief Secretary said wider changes would require consultation and assessment.
Employees currently receive four-fifths of their pay during statutory maternity and paternity leave. The Secretary for Labour and Welfare said any move towards full pay would have to take account of labour protection, social and economic conditions and employers’ ability to bear the cost.
Housing support is already part of the package. The public-housing priority scheme for families with newborn babies allows eligible applicants to shorten their wait by one year. About 8,100 applications had been approved by the end of August, and about 1,700 households had moved into public housing. A proposal to shorten waits progressively for families with more children was described as attractive, but the government said intense demand meant it had no such plan for now.
The meeting also considered a much larger incentive. Chan Cho-kwong proposed working with the Jockey Club or commercial organisations on lottery-style birth prizes ranging from HK$1 million to HK$4 million. The Deputy Chief Secretary said awards of hundreds of thousands to millions of Hong Kong dollars might have some motivating effect, but warned that the financial commitment would be enormous.