What hukou is: one register, two population counts

Hukou (户口) is a household register. A Chinese citizen is entered in it at the place where he or she habitually lives, and article 6 of the Household Registration Ordinance of 1958 permits registration as a resident in one place only. Government pages still print that text: a provincial public security bureau’s copy carries the 1958 adoption and effective date (Hubei Public Security Bureau, page dated 2022-09-01, read 2026-10-12).

Two populations come out of that register, and they are counted differently. The resident population (常住人口) is where people live. The registered population (户籍人口) is where their hukou is. Two official urbanisation rates stand on those two bases, and at the end of 2023 they were 66.16% and 48.3% (National Bureau of Statistics, 2024-09-20) — 17.86 points apart, my subtraction.

The rules behind the register

Six articles carry most of what matters.

• Article 2: every citizen of the People’s Republic must be registered. Active-duty servicemen are registered by military organs under their own rules. Foreigners and stateless people lawfully in China fall under the ordinance unless another law says otherwise.
• Article 3: registration is administered by the public security organs at each level. A police station’s jurisdiction is the registration area in cities and in towns that have a police station; a township’s jurisdiction is the area in townships and in towns without one. The registration offices are the township people’s committees and the police stations.
• Article 4: the registration office keeps a register (户口登记簿), and in cities, on the water and in towns with a police station, each household is issued a household book (户口簿). Entries in the register and the book have the effect of proving a citizen’s identity.
• Article 5: the unit of registration is the household. People living together under one head form one household, with that head as 户主; a person living alone forms one with himself as 户主. The 户主 is the one who declares the registration.
• Article 6: registration as a resident happens at the place where the citizen habitually lives, and one citizen may be registered as a resident in one place only.
• Article 22: the Ministry of Public Security sets the format of the books, forms and certificates; the provincial public security organs print them.

The ordinance also sets the events. Births are declared within one month by the household head, a relative, the person raising the child or a neighbour (article 7). Deaths are declared before burial in cities and within a month in the countryside, and the registration is cancelled (article 8). Moving out is declared before the move and a migration certificate issued (article 10); moving in is declared at the destination, within three days in cities and ten in the countryside (article 13). Name changes, marital status, adoption and separation of a household are declared as changes (articles 17 to 19).

Its vocabulary is from 1958: township people’s committees (乡、镇人民委员会), and agricultural, fishing, salt, forestry, livestock and handicraft co-operatives.

What is on the register

The forms in use today were set out by the Ministry of Public Security in 公通字〔1995〕91号, dated 1995-12-19 (reproduced by a municipal public security bureau, posted 2021-11-12, read 2026-10-12). The internal record, the 常住人口登记表, is one form per person and holds 34 registered items. The household book a family keeps, the 居民户口簿, holds 28.

The two lists differ. The internal form also has 监护人 and 监护关系 (guardian and relationship to guardian), the date the birth certificate was issued, the date the identity card was issued, when and why the person moved away, when and why the hukou was cancelled, the declarant’s seal, and a remarks field; the household book instead has 户号 and a record of address changes. That comparison of the two printed lists is mine.

Since 2014 the register is meant to carry one category where it previously carried two: the State Council’s decision removed the distinction between agricultural and non-agricultural hukou and the derived blue-seal type, unifying registration as 居民户口 (State Council, 国发〔2014〕25号, 2014-07-30).

Household type survives as a field, and local rules list more of it than the 1958 text did. In Shanghai, 常住户口 covers family households, work-unit and military collective households, community public households, student collective households, post-doctoral collective households and the collective households of other provinces’ liaison offices, with the one-place rule repeated (Shanghai Public Security Bureau, modification decision of 2023-04-24, in force to 2028-04-30).

People living away from their registered place have a second document, the residence permit (居住证): a citizen who leaves the place of registration and lives in another city for six months or more with stable employment, housing or study may apply for one, and it records the address of the registered hukou beside the residence address (State Council order 663, issued 2015-11-26, in force 2016-01-01).

The two populations

The statistics bureau defines the resident population as the people who actually live in an area for six months or more. It has three parts: those living in a township or street who are registered there or whose registration is undetermined; those living there who left their registered township or street more than six months ago; and those registered there who have been away less than six months or are working or studying abroad (National Bureau of Statistics, page dated 2025-04-09). The 2020 census printed the same three-part definition as a footnote (census communiqué no. 3, 2021-05-11).

The registered population is the other list. The bureau defines it as citizens who have registered a permanent hukou with the public security office of the place where they habitually live, as the 1958 ordinance provides, and adds that the entry stands whether the person is away or not, and for however long (National Bureau of Statistics, page dated 2024-12-30). The two definitions quote the same ordinance and count different people.

How many people are counted in one and not the other is published only at census time. At the 2020 census, 492.76 million people lived in a township or street other than the one where their hukou was, a group the bureau calls 人户分离人口; of them 116.94 million had moved within the same city, and 375.82 million were counted as the floating population, 124.84 million of those having crossed a provincial border (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021-05-11). The bureau defines the floating population as the separated group minus those who stayed inside their own city (same page on the indicators).

The national total is not the same either: the 1,404.89 million in the 2025 communiqué covers the 31 mainland provinces and active servicemen, and excludes residents of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan and foreigners living on the mainland (2025 communiqué, footnote 5, 2026-02-28).

The two urbanisation rates

The resident-population urbanisation rate is the share of a place’s resident population living in territory defined as urban. Outside census years the bureau takes the annual change, decomposes it into urban territory expanding, natural growth in urban areas and migration from countryside to town, and applies the result to the previous year’s rate (National Bureau of Statistics, page dated 2025-02-28). The registered-population urbanisation rate, on the same page, describes the urban and rural split of the hukou entries instead of the people.

The gap between the two columns was 18.49 points in 2020 and 17.86 in 2023, my subtraction of the published figures.

The bureau’s own explanation of the gap is in the measurement page: migration of hukou from countryside to town is smaller than the movement of people, so the registered rate grows more slowly; the large group that works and lives in urban territory while its hukou stays rural counts as urban in one rate and rural in the other (same page).

The two rates keep different publication rhythms. The resident rate is in the annual communiqué: 67.89% at the end of 2025, a rise of 0.89 points on 2024, on 953.80 million urban residents (2025 communiqué, 2026-02-28). A registered rate did not appear in the 2024 or 2025 communiqué. The most recent figure I could verify is 48.3% at the end of 2023, stated twice: in the bureau’s 75-year report and by the Ministry of Public Security in May 2024, alongside 50 million people who had moved their hukou into cities since 2019 (Xinhua, 2024-05-27).

How I checked this

Every figure above carries a link and a date. I read all of them on 2026-10-12.

• Law: the 1958 ordinance read in full from a provincial public security bureau’s copy (link above), because the National Health Commission’s copy returned an anti-bot error to my requests, and checked against a second government copy in the same wording. The 1995 field lists come from a police bureau’s reproduction of 公通字〔1995〕91号 because mps.gov.cn returned a server error. The residence-permit regulation is quoted from a ministry’s reprint of State Council order 663 because the gov.cn paths I tried returned an error page.
• Statistics: the 2024 and 2025 communiqués, the pages on how the resident rate is measured and on the two population definitions, the page on interpreting population totals, the 75-year report, the 2020 census release and the census communiqué footnotes. The 2020 and 2021 columns of the rate table come from a State Council plan and a government question-and-answer page rather than the communiqués.
• Arithmetic: the 17.86-point and 18.49-point gaps and the comparison of the two field lists are mine, and each is labelled where it appears.

What I could not check

• An amendment to the 1958 ordinance. I found no official page recording one, and nothing that states there has been none. The national law database that would settle it is a JavaScript application I could not query.
• A registered-population urbanisation rate for 2024 or 2025. Neither communiqué contains one. Reports that quote a figure for those years point back to 2023.
• The national registered-population total. The rate needs a total registered population to stand on, and I could not find one for any recent year in a first-party release.
• A current national rule on household types. The 1995 notice speaks of family and collective households; the 1958 ordinance still speaks of rural co-operatives issuing household books. I did not find a later national text that reconciles the two.
• The 农业户口转为非农业户口 item. A city service portal still lists the change of agricultural hukou to non-agricultural among its registration items (Shanghai one-stop service portal, read 2026-10-12), which sits beside the 2014 unification. No page I read explains the overlap.
• An actual 常住人口登记表. The 34 items above are the list the 1995 notice sets out. I have not seen the form itself, and a reprinted list is not evidence that every register matches it.
• Anything about my own registration. Deliberately absent from this post.