The Hong Kong Comeback Story: Family Office Numbers vs Reality (2025 Mid-Year View)

Originally published: 2025-04 | Last verified: 2026-05-06 Statistics in this article have been verified against InvestHK announcements, Deloitte’s 2026 Family Office Landscape Study, and SCMP / China Daily HK reporting current as of May 2026. Family office counts vary by methodology; the cited HK and SG numbers reflect the official InvestHK and MAS-linked figures respectively.

For most of 2022 through early 2024, the conventional read on Hong Kong’s family office picture was a quiet retreat. Capital outflows to Singapore were running at a level that several respected practitioners called the largest sustained reallocation of Asian private wealth in a decade. The narrative framing was: Hong Kong was structurally losing the regional family office competition, Singapore was structurally winning, and the next ten years would see the gap widen.

The 2025 numbers tell a different story, or at least they appear to. By the end of 2025, InvestHK and Deloitte’s joint Family Office Landscape Study put the Hong Kong single-family office count at over 3,380 — meaningfully ahead of Singapore’s MAS-approved figure of just over 2,000 13O/13U structures. The dedicated FamilyOfficeHK team within InvestHK assisted 50 family offices to set up or expand in Hong Kong in just the first five months of 2025, a 19% year-over-year increase. The headline narrative shifted from “Hong Kong is losing” to “Hong Kong has come back.” (Source: InvestHK announcement and Deloitte 2026 Market Study; FamilyOfficeHK quarterly updates.)

The shift in headline numbers is real. Whether it represents a structural recovery in Hong Kong’s family office competitive position — or whether it reflects a combination of methodology differences, base-rate effects, and a more aggressive promotional push — is a different question. The practitioner read I’d offer is that all three factors are at work, and the comeback narrative is partly real, partly definitional, and partly contingent on factors that could shift again.

What the numbers actually count

The first thing to surface is that the Hong Kong 3,380 and the Singapore 2,000+ figures are not measuring the same thing.

The Hong Kong figure, per InvestHK and Deloitte, is the count of single-family offices that have been identified as operating in Hong Kong through the InvestHK and FamilyOfficeHK identification methodology. This is a broad count that includes offices of various sizes and substance levels, and the methodology captures any structure that meaningfully manages family wealth out of Hong Kong, regardless of whether the structure has applied for any specific tax incentive regime.

The Singapore 2,000+ figure is the count of MAS-approved Section 13O and Section 13U funds, each of which is associated (approximately one-for-one) with a single-family office structure. This is a narrow count that captures only those structures that have applied for and received the relevant tax incentive approval.

The two numbers are therefore comparing populations defined differently. The genuine apples-to-apples comparison, if we wanted to make one, would require either:

• Adjusting the Singapore figure upward to capture the population of family offices that operate in Singapore without applying for 13O or 13U (likely several thousand additional structures by most practitioner estimates).
• Adjusting the Hong Kong figure downward to capture only those structures that have applied for the equivalent Hong Kong tax-incentive scheme (the 2023 Family-Owned Investment Holding Vehicle tax concession), which would put the comparable number at a fraction of 3,380.

Neither adjustment is being made in the headline coverage. The result is a comparison that systematically overstates the Hong Kong lead. The practitioner read on the apples-to-apples comparison is that Hong Kong probably is now ahead of Singapore on a like-for-like basis — but the lead is in the order of 5-15%, not the 60% lead the headline numbers imply.

The Hong Kong number is correct as a measure of family offices that exist in Hong Kong. The Singapore number is correct as a measure of family offices that have applied for the 13O or 13U incentive. Comparing them directly is comparing a population to a permit count.— Hong Kong-based wealth lawyer, family office practice

What’s actually pulling family offices back to Hong Kong

Even adjusting for the methodology gap, the underlying flow is genuinely positive. Three structural drivers behind the renewed Hong Kong attractiveness, ordered roughly by their weight in practitioner conversations.

Driver 1: Mainland China proximity and the policy backstop. For wealth holders with significant continuing exposure to mainland Chinese operating businesses, mainland investment portfolios, or mainland family relationships, Hong Kong’s proximity (geographically, regulatorily, and culturally) is structurally hard to substitute. The post-2023 mainland economic re-engagement narrative — even with all its caveats — restored some confidence that Hong Kong’s role as China’s offshore financial hub remains policy-supported through the central government. For wealth holders whose portfolios make Hong Kong’s proximity an asset rather than a risk, the case for Hong Kong has strengthened.

Driver 2: The 2023 tax incentive scheme and supporting infrastructure. Hong Kong’s Family-Owned Investment Holding Vehicle (FIHV) regime, introduced in 2023, plus the dedicated FamilyOfficeHK team, plus a series of supporting policy initiatives (talent attraction visas, supporting service-provider tax incentives, art-storage and luxury-asset infrastructure), have together built a competitive framework that Hong Kong did not have during the 2020-2022 period. The framework is now genuinely competitive on a like-for-like basis, particularly for families whose portfolio profile fits the Hong Kong infrastructure.

Driver 3: Singapore’s friction has risen. The other half of the rebalancing story is that Singapore has become harder to access. The post-2023 substance updates (Section 13O/13U tightening), the AML/CFT enhancement cycle (covered in detail in our post on the 2024-2025 MAS AML/CFT tightening), the lengthening bank account opening timelines, and the rising compensation cost for Investment Professional hires have together meaningfully raised the all-in cost and time of Singapore family office setup. Some of the wealth that would historically have defaulted to Singapore is now genuinely undecided between SG and HK, and Hong Kong’s softer friction has become a real differentiator.

What the comeback does not undo

Three things that the headline number does not change about the underlying competitive position.

The political-stability discount. For wealth holders whose primary motivation for choosing an Asian wealth hub is political-stability optionality — diversification away from any single sovereign exposure — Singapore continues to carry a meaningful premium over Hong Kong. The 2020-2022 period left a durable risk-perception gap that has narrowed but not closed. For non-China-adjacent wealth, particularly Indian, Indonesian, broader-Asian, and increasingly Latin American wealth, Singapore remains the stability default. The comeback in Hong Kong is concentrated in China-adjacent wealth flows, not in the broader cross-Asian allocation.

The infrastructure depth. Singapore’s accumulated infrastructure depth across fund administration, multi-family office services, legal counsel specialization, and ancillary services (tax advisory, art and collectibles services, executive search) remains, on practitioner consensus, ahead of Hong Kong’s. This is not a quality-of-individual-practitioner statement — both jurisdictions have excellent practitioners — but a depth-of-bench statement. For any non-trivial structuring problem, the Singapore market has more parallel sources of expertise.

The substance regime maturity. Singapore’s Section 13O/13U framework, despite the post-2023 tightening, is significantly more mature and predictable than Hong Kong’s FIHV regime. Practitioners and clients have eight years of operating experience with the Singapore regime versus three years with the Hong Kong equivalent. This maturity affects everything from advisory pricing to litigation risk to the speed of regulatory clarification.

How to read the comeback

For a wealth holder evaluating Hong Kong vs Singapore in 2026, the right framework is not “Hong Kong has won, choose Hong Kong” or “Singapore is still the answer, ignore the noise.” The right framework is: which of the three structural drivers above apply to your specific profile, and which of the three things-the-comeback-does-not-undo are deal-breakers for you.

A simplified decision overlay:

The practitioner read I keep coming back to: the Hong Kong comeback is real for the China-adjacent wealth segment and for the friction-sensitive mid-tier. It is not a comeback for the broader Asian wealth hub competition, where Singapore continues to hold structural advantages.

What might shift in the next 18 months

Three things to watch.

Singapore’s class licensing exemption rollout. MAS has committed to a unified class licensing exemption for single family offices, which would meaningfully streamline Singapore setup and reduce the friction differential that has driven some flow to Hong Kong. If this rolls out smoothly in 2026, the friction-driven portion of the Hong Kong inflow could reverse.

Hong Kong’s continued political-environment trajectory. The political-stability discount that affects non-China-adjacent wealth flow into Hong Kong is contingent on continued political environment trajectory. Any escalation of US-China tension or any specific Hong Kong governance event could re-widen the discount and reverse some of the 2025 inflow.

The China onshore wealth picture. If mainland China’s domestic wealth-management infrastructure deepens enough that Chinese UHNW holders are increasingly comfortable keeping wealth onshore rather than booking it through Hong Kong, the China-adjacent driver of Hong Kong’s comeback weakens. This is a slow shift but the directional pressure exists.

The clean summary: Hong Kong is back, but not in the way the headline numbers suggest. The actual scorecard is closer than the 3,380 vs 2,000 figures imply, the structural drivers behind the rebalancing are specific and identifiable, and the comeback is contingent on factors that could shift again. Practitioners and clients who treat the headline as the full story will end up making setup decisions based on the wrong framework.