Graduate Destinations and Employment

Figures on the employment performance of The University of Hong Kong (HKU) undergraduates come mainly from the Graduate Employment Survey (GES), conducted annually by the University's Centre of Development and Resources for Students (CEDARS). The survey data is time-sensitive, and its metrics (average vs median, gross vs net pay, survey year vs graduation year) need to be read carefully; always cite CEDARS / official HKU releases^※ as the authority. Data compiled: June 2026.

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# 0. Reading guide: GES methodology

• Who runs it: Each year HKU's CEDARS – Careers and Placement surveys final-year full-time bachelor's graduates (and graduates of full-time postgraduate programmes), sharing results with the University Grants Committee (UGC), faculties, employers and the media (per the CEDARS GES page^※).
• The "employment rate" metric: The GES employment rate normally refers to the proportion of graduates who, at the time of the survey, were employed, pursuing further study, or had a known destination — it is not simply the mirror image of an unemployment rate; the denominator (number of surveyed graduates, response rate) varies by year.
• Pay: You must distinguish between the mean monthly salary and the median monthly salary — the two routinely differ by several thousand Hong Kong dollars; over the years, HKU announcements have emphasised the mean figure.
• This page covers only the aggregate figures published directly by HKU / CEDARS; course-level pay data (e.g. starting salaries for a particular business-school programme) are published on each programme's GES page and are not itemised here — for the course list, see the companion article 《本科课程目录》.

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# 1. Latest two years' aggregate data (2023 and 2024 surveys)

⚠ Mean and median are not interchangeable: in the 2023 survey, the official HKU announcement highlighted a mean monthly salary of HK$31,982 (up 3.4% year-on-year^※), while the median monthly salary cited by the media was HK$25,000 (per dotdotnews^※) — a gap of roughly HK$7,000 under different methodologies. Always specify which figure you are citing. We could not obtain a first-hand HKU figure for the 2024 median monthly salary, and will not substitute an estimate for the official statistic; third-party estimate ranges are given in Section 5.1, with their source nature flagged.

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# 2. 2023 survey details (per official HKU announcement)

Per the HKU 2023 GES announcement^※:

• Employment rate of 98.8%, described by the University as the "18th consecutive year of full employment";
• Mean monthly salary of HK$31,982, up 3.4% year-on-year, a (then) record high;
• Response rate of 85.7% among the 3,578 full-time bachelor's graduates surveyed;
• 97.1% of employed graduates had received their first job offer by end-December 2023;
• 96.8% of those employed were working in Hong Kong;
• Some 22.6% continued to further study (up marginally from 22.1% the previous year).

# 2.1 Main employment sectors (2023 survey)

Per the same announcement, HKU bachelor's graduates were distributed mainly across the following sectors:

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# 3. 2024 survey details (per official HKU announcement and CEDARS)

Per the HKU 2024 GES announcement^※ and the Horizons article^※:

• Employment rate of 98.7%; 3,792 full-time bachelor's graduates surveyed, with a response rate of approximately 83%;
• Mean monthly salary of HK$33,492, up 4.7% year-on-year, a record high, and described as again ranking "first among all universities in Hong Kong";
• 98.6% of employed graduates had been hired by end-December 2024; 95.8% were working in Hong Kong;
• The destinations of all graduates break down as: 72.6% employed, 22.2% pursuing further study, 4.2% returning to their place of origin or not seeking work in Hong Kong (per the HKU 2024 GES announcement^※) — note that this three-way split is a different denominator from the "employment rate", so comparisons across years must be made with the shift in denominator in mind.

Employer confidence: the same article cites a separate survey finding that 99.4% of surveyed employers said they would continue to hire HKU graduates (per HKU Horizons^※). This is an employer-side figure, drawn from a different sample from the graduate-side employment rate.

# 3.1 Main employment sectors (2024 survey)

Per the HKU 2024 GES announcement^※, the main employment sectors of the 2024 bachelor's cohort were:

The Civil Service sector rose for a second consecutive year (14.4% in 2023 → 16.8% in 2024), in contrast with the concurrent decline in Community, Social & Personal Services. The HKU announcement offers no interpretation of this shift; we simply present the two facts side by side and draw no causal inference.

# 3.2 Further study: a divergence between local and non-local graduates

Per the HKU 2024 GES announcement^※, among graduates who chose to continue their studies:

• The share continuing their studies in Hong Kong rose from 67.1% in 2023 to 72.9% in 2024 — that is, more of those pursuing further study stayed at local institutions;
• Among non-local graduates, the share staying in Hong Kong for further study fell from 44.8% to 41.9% (down 2.9 percentage points) — local and non-local graduates moved in opposite directions on the question of where to study. The announcement offers no interpretation; we again present the facts side by side without drawing inferences.

# 3.3 Labour-market backdrop: JIJIS vacancies fell over the same period

The HKU 2024 GES announcement itself also cites the market context: full-time job vacancies on JIJIS (the Joint Institutions Job Information System, the eight UGC-funded universities' shared job platform) fell roughly 38% year-on-year, equivalent to a loss of more than 9,400 positions (per the HKU 2024 GES announcement^※). Placing this figure alongside the same announcement's "record-high mean salary" shows that a "salary high" and a "tightening labour market" can both be true at once — the two measure different things (the pay of those who were hired versus the breadth of hiring), and neither should be read as a proxy for the other.

That tightening has continued since. Per a follow-up SCMP report from February 2026^※, full-time graduate vacancies on the same JIJIS platform fell from more than 87,600 in 2023 to 68,728 in 2024 (down 22%), then to just 30,798 in 2025 (down a further 55% on 2024) — the 2025 figure is even below the pandemic-era low of 63,543 in 2021 and is the lowest in five years. The same report notes that the average monthly salary advertised on JIJIS rose only marginally to HK$20,961 in 2025 (up about 0.5% year-on-year, the smallest rise in recent years), and quotes human-resources consultants attributing the contraction in entry-level positions to the "widespread adoption of artificial intelligence and uncertain economic prospects".

⚠ JIJIS numbers are not CEDARS GES numbers: the huge gap between the JIJIS average monthly salary above (HK$20,961, 2025) and the HKU GES average (HK$33,492, 2024) exists because JIJIS counts the advertised salaries of entry-level positions posted on the eight-university shared platform, spanning all disciplines and all types of junior posts across Hong Kong; the GES counts what HKU's own recent graduates actually earn, drawn from a cohort with a heavy weighting of high-paying programmes such as medicine, dentistry, law and business. The numerators and denominators of the two figures are entirely different; they cannot be directly compared or converted. We present them side by side solely as market-backdrop context, each with its own direction of travel.

# 3.4 Faculty-level differences: why the HKU "average" always runs high

HKU's own announcements do not break down pay by faculty, but the UGC separately publishes an annual salary dataset aggregated across the eight universities and by "broad academic programme category" — a different statistical system from the CEDARS GES (the UGC data is annual salary covering all UGC-funded bachelor's graduates; the GES is monthly salary covering only HKU's own graduates). Per UGC data for 2022/23 (as compiled and republished by the media)^※:

The same dataset shows that HKU had the highest average salary of the eight universities in 2022/23, at roughly HK$385,000 per graduate across all faculties. Per a follow-up SCMP report (citing UGC 2024 data)^※, the average annual salary of HKU graduates passed HK$400,000 for the first time in 2024, while the average across all eight universities was HK$329,000 (up 4.8% year-on-year). Medicine, Dentistry and Health has long topped the broad-category ranking, and HKU's medical and dental faculties account for a relatively large share of its bachelor's graduates — a plausible structural reason why the HKU GES mean monthly salary has consistently outpaced CUHK's and HKUST's (see Section 5.1). But the public data does not provide a full year-by-year, university-by-university, discipline-by-discipline cross-tabulation, so we present only the figures available side by side and do not attempt a precise attribution calculation.

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# 4. Multi-year trends: from the pandemic trough to record highs (2020–2024)

Laying the official figures for the three comparable years side by side shows how HKU bachelor's employment indicators weathered the pandemic shock and the subsequent recovery:

How to read this table:

• The employment rate among job-seekers (98.7% → 98.8% → 98.7%) held essentially steady in the 98–99% band through the pandemic and after; this is the basis for HKU's repeated claim of "full employment for many consecutive years". But the share employed (whose denominator is all surveyed graduates, not those seeking work) was 75.1% in the pandemic year of 2020 and 72.6% in 2024 — different measures, not to be conflated.
• Pay still rose during the pandemic (mean up 2.9%, median up 4.1%), and the upward run continued through 2023 and 2024 (mean monthly salary up about 19.8% cumulatively from 2020 to 2024). The announcements do not provide a comparison against Hong Kong's overall median wage growth or inflation over the same period, so we do not extend the analysis here.
• A possible drift in response rates: 3,219 graduates were surveyed in 2020, rising to 3,792 in 2024 — the absolute number is up. But HKU's total graduating cohort has also grown over the years (e.g. the cap on non-local places was raised for the 2024/25 academic year, see 《本科收生》), and strict comparability of response rates would require checking the official year-by-year denominators; we do not derive cross-year percentage conversions here.

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# 5. Cross-university comparison: note that "the same table" measures different things

HKU's official GES announcements do not make inter-university comparisons — they refer only to year-on-year changes and phrases like "highest in Hong Kong". Third-party compilations, and a separate employer survey, offer two alternative vantage points for comparison, but their samples and methodologies differ from the CEDARS GES in each case, and the figures cannot simply be spliced into a single table:

# 5.1 Third-party compilation of GES figures across HK universities (studyin.hk; not first-hand from HKU)

Per studyin.hk's compilation of the eight universities' official GES figures^※:

The compilation states that HKU's median monthly salary was about 10.4% higher than CUHK's and about 12.9% higher than HKUST's, attributing the gap mainly to HKU's heavy weighting of high-paying disciplines such as medicine, dentistry and law. This is a third-party re-compilation and interpretation of scattered official figures; the 2024 column is an estimate range, not a first-hand official figure from HKU, CUHK or HKUST — flag the source nature when citing. The official aggregate dataset for all eight universities can be found at the government's data.gov.hk "Employment Situation of Graduates of Full-time UGC-funded Programmes" dataset^※, the only verifiable university-by-university official source.

# 5.2 A different kind of survey: employer-side "most wanted" rankings (not GES)

Unlike the CEDARS GES (which asks graduates about their own outcomes), the recruitment platform CTgoodjobs publishes an annual employer-side survey asking employers which university's graduates they would most like to hire. Per media coverage of the survey's 2024 results^※ (based on a sample of 435 graduate questionnaires and 235 employer questionnaires), the "most-wanted" indicator for that year was won by CUHK, with HKU and HKUST following; however, on the separate indicator of the starting salary employers were willing to pay, HKU and HKUST still ranked first and second (HKUST at HK$19,332 and HKU at HK$19,296 — very close).

⚠ This is not a GES, and the sample is far smaller: the CTgoodjobs "most wanted" measure is a subjective impression ranking by employers, based on only 235 employer questionnaires — of an entirely different character from a CEDARS GES-style official census covering thousands of recent graduates. Headline simplifications like "CUHK overtakes HKU" are not warranted — we present the two indicators as they stand, without judging the universities against one another.

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# 6. International employability rankings: third-party evidence beyond the GES

Beyond the local GES and employer surveys, two international ranking systems publish a standalone "graduate employability" indicator each year, which can be cross-referenced against the GES's "employed" and "staying in Hong Kong" measures — but they are still measuring something entirely different: the GES asks whether graduates themselves found work and what they earn, while the two rankings below ask whether global employers subjectively rate a university's graduates as good to hire.

• QS Graduate Employability Rankings: HKU ranked 9th globally in the 2020 edition (per the HKU 2020 GES announcement^※), and in the 2022 edition (QS has since discontinued this standalone ranking) ranked 10th globally and 1st in Hong Kong (per the HKU Undergraduate Admissions website^※).
• Times Higher Education Global Employability University Ranking: based on surveys of more than 13,000 multinational-company recruiters and professionals (the 2024 survey window ran June–September), HKU held 43rd place globally in 2024, while the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology rose five places to 24th globally over the same period, and PolyU slipped to 133rd globally (per the SCMP report^※). HKU's placing behind HKUST in this newer cycle does not contradict HKU's own GES claim of "highest mean salary in Hong Kong" — the former measures global employers' subjective reputational impression, the latter measures the actual median/mean pay of local graduates. The subjects, geographic scope and methodologies of the two indicators all differ.

For HKU's year-by-year positions in the general university rankings (QS, THE, ARWU, U.S. News) and their methodological differences, see the companion article 《世界综合排名》 in this section; we only take the employability-specific indicators here and do not repeat the general-rankings methodology.

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# 7. Coverage notes (unavailable / to be updated)

• 2024 survey median monthly salary: to be updated (no first-hand HKU median obtained this pass; the mean of HK$33,492 is first-hand, and third-party estimate ranges are given in Section 5.1, but they do not substitute for the official figure).
• 2025 survey: the CEDARS 2025 GES had not been fully published at the time of this round of research; to be added once officially released.
• Programme-by-programme / faculty-by-faculty starting-salary details: not itemised here; see the CEDARS programme pages and the companion 《本科课程目录》.
• Postgraduate (taught / research) GES breakdown: the CEDARS website confirms the GES covers full-time postgraduate programmes, but this round of research did not yield independently verifiable first-hand postgraduate figures (official announcements have historically disclosed mainly bachelor's data), so these are not included in the tables above; to be added once verifiable official breakdowns are available.
• Pay versus tuition and scholarships: for HKU tuition and scholarship schemes, see 《学费与奖学金》. This article does not attempt a return-on-investment (ROI) calculation, which would require introducing assumptions not supported by official methodology.

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