The Parking Fee Varies by 65%: Inside the Conservative Fund League Table

Track 1: The Data Mirror | MPFA fund data as at 30 September 2026

The Core Proposition

Every MPF scheme must offer a Conservative Fund, and every one of them does materially the same job: hold short-term Hong Kong dollar deposits and bills, and aim for a return in line with the prescribed savings rate published by the Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority (MPFA). There is no stock-picking to pay for and no currency bet to underwrite. Yet the price of that parking spot is not uniform. On MPFA-published data as at 30 September 2026, the 29 Conservative Funds carry fund expense ratios (FERs) from 0.65% to 1.07%, with a median of 0.89% — the most expensive charges about 65% more than the cheapest for the same cash-like exposure. In an equity fund, a 0.42-percentage-point gap can hide inside market noise. In a fund whose long-run net return is about 1% a year, it is the story.

Data Penetration: One Job, Twenty-Nine Prices

Individual figures on this site’s fund pages, taken from each provider’s own fact sheet, show where familiar names sit inside that range — Hang Seng at 0.76782%, Manulife at 0.76790%, AIA at 0.77859%, BEA (Industry Scheme) at 0.82427%, Sun Life at 0.89723%, Principal at 0.92683%, Bank of Communications at 0.93116%, Haitong (Class A) at 0.94405% and Allianz (Class T) at 0.99646%. Fact-sheet dates differ by provider, so treat those as positions inside the MPFA range, not a same-day ranking. The range itself is the aligned figure, and it does not flatter the category: the median Conservative Fund, at 0.89%, costs more than the median Core Accumulation Fund under the Default Investment Strategy (DIS), at 0.78% on the same MPFA publication — a member pays more, at the median, to park cash than to own a globally diversified portfolio.

Two structural facts explain why the gap survives. First, the fee protection built for this fund class is dormant. Administration fees may only be deducted in a month when the fund’s return exceeds the prescribed savings rate — but the MPFA published that rate at 0.0010% a year for every month from January to September 2026, because it is the simple average of the three note-issuing banks’ Hong Kong dollar savings rates, and those banks still pay 0.001% (confirmed again on 29 October 2026, when all three left savings rates unchanged). A threshold of one-thousandth of one percent stops nothing: a normal month’s return of roughly 0.1% clears it without effort, and fees are deducted as usual. Second, the one fee cut that has reached this category moved only the administration layer. HSBC’s scheme brochure supplement of 29 April 2026 cut its Conservative Fund management fee from 0.71% to 0.63% — exactly the 8 basis points by which the eMPF platform fee fell, from 0.37% to 0.29%, on 1 April 2026. The other layers did not move. And because FER is a backward-looking figure from a fund’s financial year, even that cut will surface in published FERs only later.

The Compounding Cost: Fees Against a 1% Return

The MPFA’s own long-run ledger sets the stakes: since the MPF system began, Conservative Funds have returned an annualised net 1.0%, against annualised inflation of 1.8% over the same period. Set that beside the median FER and the arithmetic is stark — a net return of 1.0% plus fees of 0.89% implies a gross return of about 1.89%, of which fees consumed roughly 47 cents in every Hong Kong dollar earned. At the most expensive fund’s 1.07%, the fee share rises above half. The gross return is largely set by Hong Kong dollar short rates, which no trustee controls; the fee is the one variable in the member’s hands.

Translate the 0.42-point spread into money, on an illustrative HK$250,000 parked balance earning 2.5% a year before fees:

• Per year: the spread costs about HK$1,050 on HK$250,000 — about HK$1,390 on the average member balance of about HK$330,861 (MPF Ratings, final October 2026 figures).
• 10 years: the cheapest fund ends near HK$300,300, the most expensive near HK$288,100 — a gap of about HK$12,200.
• 20 years: about HK$360,700 against HK$332,100 — a gap of about HK$28,600.
• 30 years: about HK$433,300 against HK$382,800 — a gap of about HK$50,500.

The fee gap then compounds on top of a real-return gap the member cannot fee-shop away. At the category’s long-run arithmetic — 1.0% net against 1.8% inflation — HK$250,000 held in cash-like form retains only about HK$213,500 of purchasing power after 20 years and about HK$197,300 after 30, a silent loss of roughly HK$36,500 and HK$52,700 in today’s money. Paying the top-of-table FER does not cause that erosion, but it accelerates it, year after year, in exchange for no additional return engine.

The Way Out: The One Fund Where Moving Is Cheap

The usual reason members give for not moving money — one to two weeks out of the market during a transfer, priced under forward pricing at T+1/T+2 — barely applies here. For an equity balance, a 2% swing in transit is about HK$5,000 on HK$250,000. For a Conservative Fund balance, two weeks out of the market costs roughly two weeks of a cash-like return, a matter of tens of dollars. The transit excuse inverts: this is the lowest-risk money to move in the entire system.

Three checks, in order:

1. Find your price. Look up your own Conservative Fund’s FER on the MPFA Fund Platform and place it against the table above: 0.65% floor, 0.89% median, 1.07% ceiling. If you are above the median, you are paying a premium for a commodity.
2. Use the free moves first. Switching between funds inside the same scheme is free of charge, apart from necessary transaction costs; moving a personal account to another trustee is available at any time, and from 21 December 2026 Phase One of full portability adds the employer mandatory-contribution balance, once per calendar year, for members who joined the workforce or changed jobs on or after 1 May 2025. Compare the receiving scheme’s Conservative Fund FER before the transfer form, not after.
3. Ask how long the parking is for. A Conservative Fund is a waiting room — for a pending switch, a staged withdrawal, a balance close to being drawn. Money parked for a quarter pays a quarter’s fee and the fee table hardly matters; money parked for a decade pays the full compounding bill above, and also carries the category’s long-run shortfall against inflation. The duration of the stay, not the fund’s name, decides which problem you have.

Cash feels like the decision that needs no decision. The league table says otherwise: twenty-nine funds, one job, and a 65% difference in the price of standing still.