Editorial | Hong Kong’s re-engineered 2026 census is rightly moving with the times

The traditional population census can seem a tedious exercise in form filling and answering questions about various aspects of our lives that comes around only once every five years. That does not do it justice. A census provides governments, businesses and researchers with data on demographics such as age, sex, ethnicity, marital status and children, and socio-economics like income, education and housing.

They use it to guide policy, plan services like schools, transport and hospitals, allocate resources and understand community needs.

The census is therefore a periodically updated snapshot of the community. But it is labour-intensive and does not come cheap, requiring the hiring of 7,000 temporary field staff for the last round. It may not seem an exercise that leaves much room for economising, but that reckons without the modern engineering of data collection and analysis.

In a major break from decades of statistical tradition, Commissioner for Census and Statistics Leo Yu Chun-keung says the 2026 census has been revamped to improve workflow while saving on manpower. The department will use existing data, ranging from immigration entry permits to birth records, to calculate population benchmarks in the 2026 exercise and to replace the “short-form” questionnaire in the full census from 2031.

Detailed inquiries will be limited to a random sample of just 10 per cent of households every five years. Assistant Commissioner Sharon Ng Pun-wai says that for the new model, the department would hire just 200 non-civil-servants, keeping total expenditure at HK$550 million. The 300,000 households selected for the next census must complete a detailed survey.