Methodology
Sources
Company register: Companies Registry official open data. Licensed restaurants: Food & Environmental Hygiene Department. Liquor licences: Liquor Licensing Board (published via FEHD). Hotels & guesthouses: HAD Office of the Licensing Authority. All obtained through official DATA.GOV.HK channels.
Update cadence
Refreshed daily, automatically. New incorporations come from the Registry's weekly official lists; licence datasets sync daily with each department's latest published file.
“Data to” dates
“Data to” is the last day the Government's data actually covers, shown separately from “Last updated” (when our pipeline ran). The Registry publishes new incorporations weekly, typically one to two weeks in arrears, so the chart marks the latest month provisional until its files arrive. Licence lists refresh daily, so the current month is a running month-to-date figure.
Coverage verification
We compare our local company count with the official local count the Companies Registry publishes. The Registry publishes monthly, about a month behind, so its figure is always for an earlier month than our data. Currently: 1,629,863 local companies on this site; the Registry's official local count for September 2026 is 1,628,654 (the headline total also includes 3,184 registered non-Hong Kong companies). It is a count comparison, not row-by-row verification: until the first full register check is complete our count can still include dissolved companies, and surplus records can mask missing ones, so we do not publish a coverage percentage.
Register check
The Registry's open data has no list of dissolved companies, and its search only finds companies currently on the register. So each night we look up a batch of companies by Business Registration Number, starting with those confirmed longest ago, aiming to check every company about once every 30 days. A company is marked “no longer on the register” only after two lookups at least 7 days apart both find no record and no other source has seen it in between; it then leaves the downloads and the totals. Every batch includes companies known to be on the register as a control: if a control comes back missing, that batch is discarded and the check stops. We record only the date we checked, never a reason (such as deregistration or winding up). A company that reappears on the register is restored automatically.
Districts
The 18-district classification is derived automatically from each registered address: 98.1% of local-company addresses in the download window (Nov 2025–Nov 2026) could be classified (a match rate, measured 2026-11-14, not a verified accuracy figure). Unclassified addresses stay in the files with an empty district column.
“First seen” months
A licence's “first seen” month is the month its licence number first appears in the Government's published list, reconstructed from official archive snapshots back to January 2023.
Limitations
The register covers companies currently on the register only. Directors, shareholders, contact details and industry classification are not open data and are not offered here. Addresses appear exactly as filed.
Verification
The official record is at the Companies Registry: cr.gov.hk.