The average waiting time for Hong Kong public rental housing has increased slightly to 4.8 years by the end of June, the government has announced.

Nan Shan Estate, a public housing estate in Hong Kong. File photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.

The Housing Bureau said on Thursday that the latest composite waiting time for public rental housing, which reflected the average wait in the 12 months up to this June, was up 0.1 years as compared with the last quarter.

The figure remained at a “relatively low level,” the bureau said, compared to the peak of 6.1 years before the current administration took office in 2022.

The slight increase was due to more allocations of flats in urban and extended urban areas, where the average waiting time tends to be longer than in the New Territories, according to the Housing Bureau.

A bureau spokesperson said the fluctuations in the average wait time reflected “a positive sign,” as it showed that the government was “effectively tackling the long-standing backlog of waiting cases.”

“In the long run, the average waiting time for PRH [Public Rental Housing] will clearly trend in a positive direction,” the spokesperson said in Chinese, adding that the government aimed to reduce the average wait to 4.5 years in 2026-27.

Light Public Housing scheme

The average waiting time is calculated based on applicants who were housed in PRH or Light Public Housing (LPH) in the year up until June.

In the second quarter of 2026, about 4,400 applicants were housed in PRH or LPH, according to the bureau.

The LPH scheme was introduced by Chief Executive John Lee in his maiden Policy Address in 2022 as a means to reduce the waiting times for government-subsidised public housing.

The city’s first Light Public Housing location on Yau Pok Road in Yuen Long. Photo: GovHK.

The Housing Bureau said on Thursday that the wait for LPH units was significantly shorter than that for PRH units. For example, it takes about two years for an applicant to be assigned to an LPH unit in the New Territories, compared to about six years for a PRH flat in urban areas.

The bureau urged family applicants to consider choosing LPH over PRH to cut their wait.

Meanwhile, the bureau noted that, as of the end of June, there were about 100,500 general applications for PRH, down from the peak of 156,400 in 2020.

Non-elderly one-person applicants also dropped from 143,700 to 81,000, showing that “the PRH waiting queue is being reduced,” the bureau said.

Last month, Hong Kong’s biggest public housing provider, the Housing Authority, announced a rent increase of 2.04 per cent.

The Hong Kong Housing Society, the other public housing provider in the city, followed suit this week and raised rent by 2.85 per cent.

Around 30 per cent of Hong Kong’s population live in public rental housing. Lee, the chief executive, has said that addressing the city’s housing problem is one of his priorities.

During a 2022 visit to Hong Kong, China’s Xi Jinping instructed the city’s leaders to solve the city’s housing shortage, stating that Hongkongers wanted larger apartments and a better life. He said that homes are “for living in, not for speculation.”