Actually sounds about right. 100k a month or so including benefits.
IIRC that survey was from last year. I wonder if the recent exodus of expats (particularly from the financial sector) has affected the average income significantly.
There is definitely an undercurrent out there. Was told that one of the primary ESF schools is adding a "Non-English" speaking class at Y1 as there is significant attrition at the moment and these kids could then be mainstreamed into the regular clases as they progressed and the english speakers left HK.
(Starts a very vicious cycle that we saw during SARS / Economic crisis before that - the siblings of kids who are in the system will get priority over newcomers. This will affect the intakes when the economies improve.)
Seems quite high considering that most exapts in hong kong work as helpers, waiters etc. other lowly paid jobs. I doubt the odd banker/ceo will draw up the average to 1.3million when most expats only make like 5k per month
Depends how you classify an expat, as another poster has suggested. An expat is basically anyone leaving their country to work in another but with the intention to go back to their original country. So that should include all domestic helpers, waiters, fitness instructors and teachers. And therefore it's impossible that an average hk expat salary is over a 100k. What they mean is this is an average salary for foreign skilled workers. Bankers don't really have a skill and anyone could do it... But there you go.
Only found the news release for this survey and not the actual survey unfortunately. The news release did mention close to 22.000 respondents from 39 cities. So clearly the population is expats in the definition of skilled knowledge workers (sure, can argue about bankers ) and not FDH's, waiters etc.
I also assume that this is based on expats being asked to do an overseas assignment for a number of years, so not expats with local contracts. In any event, I actually thought the average would be much higher (excluding benefits) given the fact that close to 40% of respondents are from the financial industry.
It seems the survey organisers were very selective in how they distributed the survey!
Even if they didn't want to count FDH as "real" expats (a grossly racist and classist view, IMHO), they obviously missed the education sector and language centre workers, not to mention those in the NFP/ charitable sector.
Not earning anywhere near as much. Must be doing something wrong.
But then I'm not a b.anker. 
Then you are doing something right :-)