HKIHRM January 2022 Pay Trend Survey By the Hong Kong Institute of Human Resource Management

Key takeaways:

The HKIHRM January 2022 Pay Trend Survey indicates an overall average pay adjustment of 3.3%.
A vast majority of the surveyed companies have increased salary for employees.

Introduction

Conducted by the HKIHRM from March to July 2022, the January 2022 Pay Trend Survey received responses from 80 companies, covering a total of 57,166 full-time salaried employees.

An overview of pay adjustments

Obtaining figures from 31 companies (covering 17,842 employees in total), the survey revealed that the overall average pay adjustment in January 2022 was 3.3%. 96.8% of the responding companies reported a positive adjustment while the remaining (3.2%) implemented a pay freeze, but no pay cut was recorded.

The number of employees who had their pay frozen decreased by 47.9 percentage points this year to 1.6%, the lowest figure recorded since 2019. For the employees who received a pay rise, the most common increases (61.2%) were between 3.0% and 3.9%.

Nearly half (48.4%) of the companies stated that they had no consistent pattern of tapering, and 32.3% implemented equal pay adjustments across all staff levels. Other organisations altered the percentages based on employee levels.

Pay adjustments by employee level

Middle level staff received the smallest average adjustment of 3.1%. That said, the salary increments were similar for top, senior, and general employee levels, namely 3.3%, 3.7%, and 3.4%.

Pay adjustments by company size

Small-sized companies offered a higher average pay increase (4.0%) than large corporations (3.3%) and medium-sized companies (3.0%). As an overall trend, firms hiked pay to attract and retain workforce in the competitive job market.

Pay adjustments by company scale

Multinational companies provided an average pay increase of 3.9%, 0.6 percentage points beyond that of the local companies.

Bonus Payment Policy

Among the 79 companies that provided data on bonus payments, the majority (91.1%) had at least one bonus scheme, while over one-third of them (35.4%) had both guaranteed and non-guaranteed bonus policies.

The average bonus size of guaranteed bonus and non-guaranteed bonus were 1.24 and 1.26 months of pay respectively. In January/February 2022, top level employees received the largest non-guaranteed bonus (1.86 months of pay) while middle level employees were rewarded with the smallest (1.05 months of pay).

Among 42 companies with non-guaranteed bonus schemes only, 15 of those issued such bonuses at an average of 1.67 months’ pay to their employees.

Business and Manpower Outlook in 2022

35.0% of the responding organisations expected business to be better than 2021, but more (43.8%) predicted no change in the coming year.

Around one-third (31.3%) of the surveyed companies had plans to increase hiring, while another one-third intended to suspend recruitment of new staff. 2.5% affirmed that they would lay off employees in 2022, while the remaining 36.3% did not provide any forecast.

HKIHRM January 2022 Pay Trend Survey By the Hong Kong Institute of Human Resource Management