Hong Kong enduring power of attorney reform explained

Hong Kong has been on the verge of replacing its enduring power of attorney regime for years. The Continuing Powers of Attorney Bill would scrap the Enduring Powers of Attorney Ordinance (Cap. 501) scheme for new instruments and put a broader one in its place, covering personal care as well as money. Solicitors have been telling clients about it since the consultation draft appeared. Plenty of donors now assume the change has already happened.

It has not. Cap. 501 remains the law, and an EPA executed and registered under it is as valid today as it was the day it was signed. What follows sets out where the Bill actually stands, what it would do to instruments already in existence, and the handful of things worth checking on your own EPA while the reform sits in the queue.

What the Continuing Powers of Attorney Bill would change

The problem the Bill addresses is narrow and long-standing. Under section 8 of Cap. 501, the powers a donor may delegate under an EPA are confined to property and financial affairs. Your attorney can operate your bank accounts and sell your flat. Your attorney cannot decide where you live, who visits you, or what you eat, and has no standing to access your health record for the purpose of arranging your care. Families discover this at precisely the wrong moment, usually after a dementia diagnosis, and end up applying to the Guardianship Board for the very decisions they assumed the EPA had covered.

The Bill would create a continuing power of attorney, a single instrument under which the donor confers authority over any or all of personal care matters and financial matters. The draft sets out a non-exhaustive list of personal care matters: where the donor lives, whom the donor lives with, daily dress and diet, education or training, work, holidays, whether to refuse a named individual contact with the donor, and matters relating to healthcare including access to the health record. Authority over personal care may be exercised only once the attorney believes on reasonable grounds that the donor is mentally incapable of deciding for himself or herself.

Certain decisions stay off limits by statute. An attorney under a continuing power could not give, refuse or withdraw life-sustaining treatment, nor make, vary or revoke an advance directive. Nor could the attorney make, vary or revoke the donor's will, exercise the donor's vote, or consent to a change in the donor's marital status.

Where the Bill stands today

This is the part that gets misreported, so it is worth being precise. The Law Reform Commission published its report on Enduring Powers of Attorney: Personal Care in July 2011, recommending the extension. The Department of Justice then convened an inter-departmental working group with the Labour and Welfare Bureau, the Food and Health Bureau and the Social Welfare Department, and published a consultation draft of the Bill on 28 December 2017. That consultation closed on 28 February 2018. You can read the Department of Justice announcement of the public consultation on the proposed continuing powers of attorney legislation for the Government's own summary of the policy.

Since then the Administration has been considering the responses received and refining the Bill. It has not been introduced into the Legislative Council. There is no gazetted commencement date, no prescribed CPA form, and no subsidiary legislation. Until the Bill is enacted and brought into operation, an EPA under Cap. 501 is the only instrument in Hong Kong that survives the donor's mental incapacity.

The law that does apply has itself been amended once. The Enduring Powers of Attorney (Amendment) Ordinance 2011 took effect on 3 July 2012 and relaxed the execution requirement so that the donor may sign before a solicitor within 28 days after signing before a registered medical practitioner, rather than in front of both at the same moment. That amendment also introduced the plainer prescribed forms now found in the Enduring Powers of Attorney (Prescribed Form) Regulation (Cap. 501A), Form 1 for a single attorney and Form 2 where more than one is appointed.

What happens to an EPA you already hold

Nothing, on the face of the draft. The Bill contains a related amendment inserting a new section into Cap. 501 to the effect that no EPA may be created on or after the commencement date of the new Ordinance. Instruments executed before that date would continue to be governed by Cap. 501 in the ordinary way. The Government's stated position, repeated in the consultation paper, is that the two regimes would run side by side, with the old one closed to new entrants and the existing population of EPAs untouched.

So an EPA signed in, say, 2019 and registered in 2024 would remain valid, remain registered, and remain enforceable against banks and other third parties. Your attorney would not need to redo anything. You would not, however, gain personal care powers by default. An old EPA stays what it always was, a financial instrument, and the only way to acquire personal care authority would be to execute a fresh continuing power once the new regime opens.

That is the real planning point for anyone holding an EPA today. The reform is not a threat to your document. It is an eventual opportunity to widen it, and one you would have to take deliberately. In the meantime, the sensible response is to make sure the EPA you have actually works: correct attorney, correct scope, correct execution, and a family that knows the instrument exists and where the original is kept.

The traps in the current regime

Three features of Cap. 501 catch donors out, and the Bill would fix all three.

The first is section 8(1)(b), which prevents a donor conferring on the attorney a general power over all of the donor's property and financial affairs. Everything has to be itemised. Miss an asset and the attorney has no authority over it. The Bill would replace that with a provision allowing authority over all of the donor's property and affairs, or specified parts, subject to any conditions the donor imposes.

The second is section 15(1), and it is the one that destroys documents. Where an instrument appoints more than one attorney, it cannot create an enduring power at all unless the attorneys are expressly appointed to act jointly or jointly and severally. A donor who names two children and says nothing about how they are to act has produced a document that is not an EPA. Nobody finds out until the attorney tries to register it, by which time the donor is incapable and cannot sign a replacement. Under the draft Bill, silence would default to a joint appointment.

The third is the absence of any substitution mechanism. If your sole attorney predeceases you or loses capacity, your EPA is revoked and you are back to a Guardianship Board application. The Bill would let a donor designate substitute attorneys in the instrument, with a specified order of substitution and succession. Where the incapacity risk sits inside a family business, the same question arises at company level, and a shareholders agreement dealing with the incapacity of a member is the instrument that answers it rather than the EPA.

Registration, and the paperwork nobody warns you about

An EPA is not registered when it is signed. Under section 4(2) of Cap. 501, the attorney must apply to the Registrar of the High Court as soon as practicable after forming the belief that the donor is or is becoming mentally incapable. Until registration is complete, section 4(3) bars the attorney from doing anything under the power, beyond a narrow set of holding acts to maintain the donor and prevent loss to the estate.

The application itself requires a covering letter and the original plus a certified copy of the instrument. What trips people up is an administrative requirement that appears nowhere in Cap. 501 or the Enduring Powers of Attorney (Registration) Rules (Cap. 4E): the Registrar also asks for copies of the practising certificates of both the solicitor and the registered medical practitioner who witnessed execution, valid as at the date of witnessing. In a written reply to the Legislative Council on 29 April 2026, the Government confirmed that this requirement has been in place since 2002. Where the certificate cannot be produced, the Registrar accepts a letter of certification from the Medical Council of Hong Kong for the doctor, or a reissued certificate from the Law Society for the solicitor.

One further change is already live. From 6 July 2026, applications to register an EPA at the High Court Registry must be booked in advance through the Judiciary's e-Appointment system, and walk-in applications are no longer accepted. Build that booking step into the timetable, because the attorney's hands are tied until the instrument is on the register.

Reviewing your incapacity documents

Given that the Bill has not commenced, the practical exercise is to check that your existing set holds together. Generating an enduring power of attorney in the Cap. 501A prescribed form through Captain.Legal takes you through the decisions that determine whether the instrument survives registration: whether to appoint one attorney or several, whether they act jointly or jointly and severally, whether the power commences on execution or on a specified event, and how to describe the property and financial affairs covered so that nothing material falls outside the itemised list.

The EPA is only one layer. For dealings during full capacity, such as a single conveyance handled while you are overseas, a general power of attorney executed as a deed under the Powers of Attorney Ordinance is the lighter instrument, and it lapses on incapacity by design. Every power of attorney also ends at death, which is where a Hong Kong will drafted to section 5 of the Wills Ordinance picks up. The three documents cover three different periods and none substitutes for the others.

Once the documents exist, sign them properly and tell somebody. An unregistered EPA sitting in a drawer that nobody knows about is worth exactly as much as no EPA at all.

Common mistakes with Hong Kong EPAs

The most frequent error is a witnessing failure. Under section 5 of Cap. 501, the donor must sign before a registered medical practitioner and a solicitor, and neither may be the attorney, the attorney's spouse, or a person related by blood or marriage to the donor or the attorney. Families routinely ask the doctor nephew and the solicitor daughter-in-law to help. That instrument is void, and the donor usually cannot fix it.

The second is treating the medical certification as a formality. The doctor must certify satisfaction that the donor was mentally capable at the time of signing, and that certificate is the first thing a disgruntled relative attacks. Where the donor is elderly or unwell, contemporaneous notes are worth more than a quick signature.

The third is failing to keep the witnesses' practising certificates. It costs nothing at the time and saves months later.

The fourth is the joint appointment problem already described. The fifth, and the quietest, is drift: an EPA drawn up a decade ago that itemises a securities account long since closed, names an attorney who has emigrated, and omits the flat bought since. An EPA is not a document you execute once and forget.

Frequently asked questions