Hong Kong's 418 Rule Is Gone

For decades, Hong Kong's "418 rule" drew a hard line: work 18 hours a week for four weeks in a row, and you were on a continuous contract with the statutory benefits that come with it. Miss a week, and the clock reset. From 18 January 2026, that line moved — and it moved in your part-timers' favour.

The 418 rule is gone. In its place is the 468 rule, and it pulls more of your casual and part-time staff into continuous-contract status than the old test ever did. If you run rosters that flex week to week, some of your people qualified on 18 January whether or not anyone in HR clocked it.

What the 468 rule actually says

Under the Employment (Amendment) Bill 2025, an employee is on a continuous contract if they've been employed for four weeks or more **and** meet either of two tests:

- **The weekly test** — at least 17 hours in each of the four weeks, or - **The aggregate test** — 68 hours or more across any four-week period, even if a single week dips below 17.

That second test is the real change. Under the old 418 rule, one quiet week below the threshold broke the chain and the count started over. The aggregate option means a worker with an uneven roster — busy one week, light the next — can now still qualify on total hours. The weekly bar itself also dropped, from 18 hours to 17.

Why this lands on HR, not just payroll

Continuous-contract status isn't a technicality. It's the gate to a long list of statutory entitlements under the Employment Ordinance:

- Statutory holiday pay - Paid annual leave - Sickness allowance - Statutory maternity and paternity leave - Severance payment - Long service payment

A worker who was outside all of this under the 418 rule may be inside it under the 468 rule. That changes their leave, their pay protection, and — when the relationship ends — what you may owe them. The people most affected are exactly the ones easiest to overlook: weekend staff, relief cover, seasonal help, anyone whose hours you've never had to track against a threshold before.

The move: audit the roster before someone claims

You don't want to discover a continuous contract during a severance dispute. Do it the other way round — find them first.

- **Pull your part-time and casual roster** and lay out actual hours worked, week by week, for the last four weeks. - **Run both tests.** Flag anyone hitting 17 hours in each week, and separately anyone reaching 68 hours across the four-week window. - **List what each newly-qualified worker now unlocks** — leave, sickness allowance, and the rest — and make sure their records reflect it. - **Keep the log live.** Because the aggregate test looks across a rolling four-week period, status can change as hours shift. This isn't a one-off check.

To make that audit repeatable, our HK Continuous Contract Entitlement Tracker lets you log each worker's weekly hours and flags who now qualifies under the 468 rule, with the triggered entitlements listed against them — a roster-level view you can update each week instead of recalculating by hand.