China · East Asia
Moving to Hangzhou
Hangzhou quick facts
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Cost of living in Hangzhou
Can you move to China?
Pick your passport to see whether you can enter China — and what it takes to stay.
Entry rules come from github.com/imorte/passport-index-data, updated 17 February 2026. They change without notice — confirm with the official immigration service before booking.
Getting set up in China
Work permit, residence permit, and the 24-hour registration
The national sequence is fixed and unforgiving: your employer obtains the Notification Letter of Foreigner's Work Permit, you convert it into a Z visa abroad, you enter, you collect the physical work permit card, and you apply for a residence permit within 30 days of entry. Separately, you must register your address with the local police within 24 hours of moving into a private flat. Zhejiang province and Hangzhou municipality run their own talent classification and service arrangements on top of the national system, which large employers here use routinely and small ones often do not know about.
Read the full step-by-step guideConverting a licence, plate quotas, and a lake you cannot drive round
A foreign licence is not valid in mainland China and the International Driving Permit is not recognised. Conversion means a translation, a medical and the hundred-question written theory test, with the practical tests waived for ordinary car categories. Hangzhou then rations plates through a quota allocated by a combination of free lottery and paid auction, and applies peak-hour restrictions in the city core to both local and out-of-town plates. Around West Lake, access is restricted further still on busy days.
Read the full step-by-step guideOpening an account in the city that built Alipay
Alipay was built here and Hangzhou is about as cashless as any city on earth — small shops, market stalls and temples all expect a QR code. Foreign Visa and Mastercard now work inside Alipay and WeChat Pay up to USD 5,000 per transaction and USD 50,000 a year after verification, which covers a visit. Living here still requires a local account, and the local account requires a Chinese mobile number registered against your passport. Get the SIM first; everything else follows from it.
Read the full step-by-step guideSocial insurance, Zhejiang's hospitals, and a summer that is a health issue
Hangzhou has strong provincial medicine — the Zhejiang University affiliated hospitals are among the best in eastern China — with the usual Chinese structure of cheap Mandarin-language ordinary outpatient departments, international wings at several times the price, and a small private international sector. Social insurance enrolment is compulsory for foreign employees. The genuinely local health variable is the summer: Hangzhou sits in the Yangtze furnace belt and heat exposure is a real risk for anyone who runs, cycles or works outdoors between June and September.
Read the full step-by-step guideReal-name SIM, broadband, and the internet in a tech city
A SIM takes twenty minutes and a passport and should be your first errand, because the number gates the bank account and the payment apps — and in the most cashless city in China, that chain matters more than anywhere. The other half of the story is that a substantial part of the Western internet is unreachable from an ordinary connection, which for a software engineer working with foreign toolchains and package registries is an operational question. Ask what your employer provides before you accept.
Read the full step-by-step guideIIT, the six-year rule, and equity that is taxed as salary
Employers withhold monthly and residents reconcile annually between March and June. Two rules decide how much of your global life China taxes: the 183-day residence test, and the six-year rule on worldwide income, which resets with a single absence of more than thirty consecutive days. Foreign nationals also elect annually between the expatriate fringe-benefit exemptions and the standard itemised deductions. In a city where a large share of senior compensation arrives as equity, the treatment of share awards is the third question worth getting advice on.
Read the full step-by-step guideEach guide has verified costs, timelines, required documents, and the non-obvious gotchas — sourced from official government pages. Last verified August 2026.
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What to know before you go
Register with the police within 24 hours of moving into a flat
CriticalArticle 39 of the Exit and Entry Administration Law requires anyone staying somewhere other than a hotel to register with the local public security organ within 24 hours of arrival. Hotels file it invisibly; private landlords do not. Take passport, visa, lease and landlord to the neighbourhood station and keep the slip, because it is requested again at your residence permit application and at every renewal. The fine is up to RMB 2,000, but the real cost is being blocked at a counter later when you cannot produce it.
The residence permit is due within 30 days of entry — the Z visa is only an entry document
CriticalA Z visa gets you through the border and expires. Within 30 days of arrival you must apply to the Hangzhou Public Security Bureau's Exit–Entry Administration for a foreigner's residence permit, having first collected the physical work permit card, usually expected within about fifteen days of entry. Employers here are generally well drilled, particularly the large tech companies, but the legal deadline attaches to you rather than to HR.
Hangzhou's tech culture is software and AI, not hardware — and the working hours reflect it
ImportantShenzhen builds things; Hangzhou writes them. Alibaba, Ant Group, NetEase's games division, Hikvision and Dahua in Binjiang, and the cluster of young AI and robotics companies that emerged into national prominence in 2025 — DeepSeek, Unitree, Game Science and others — make this a genuinely different labour market from the Pearl River Delta. It also has a particular working culture: the '996' debate, twelve-hour days six days a week, was crystallised by public comments from Alibaba's founder, and while formally such schedules breach Chinese labour law and courts have said so, the informal expectation in parts of this industry has not vanished. Ask about actual hours at interview, not just about the contract.
West Lake's World Heritage status imposes real building limits, and they set the property market
ImportantWest Lake was inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 as a cultural landscape, and the protection is not decorative — it constrains building heights and development in a substantial buffer around the lake, which is why the area west of the city centre has no towers and why the skyline sits across the river in Qianjiang New City instead. The practical consequences are that housing near the lake is old, low, scarce and extremely expensive; that new-build supply is pushed outward; and that a lake view is a permanent asset rather than something the next development will block.
Living west near the lake and working west in Yuhang are two different decisions
ImportantAlibaba's main campuses sit in Yuhang's Future Sci-Tech City, well to the west and north-west of the historic centre, and a large part of the tech industry has followed. West Lake district is between the two, Binjiang's hardware and software cluster is south across the river, and the old downtown is east of the lake. A commute from a lakeside flat to a Yuhang campus can run over an hour; a flat in Yuhang puts you in new-build suburbia with a fifteen-minute walk to work. Most people get this trade-off wrong once.
The summer here is one of the hardest in China, and the winter has no heating
Good to knowHangzhou sits in the Yangtze delta furnace belt — long, still, extremely humid summers where 38°C with high humidity is normal for weeks. The plum rain season in June saturates everything. Winter is short but damp and hovers near freezing, and like everywhere south of the Huai river, buildings have no central heating; you will heat one room with a reverse-cycle air conditioner. Spring and autumn are genuinely beautiful and genuinely brief.
Top industries & employers
E-commerce & fintech
Alibaba, Ant Group, Taobao, Tmall, Ele.me
Alibaba's headquarters and Ant Group between them reorganised the city, pulling the economic centre of gravity west into Yuhang and creating a software labour market that did not exist here thirty years ago.
AI & robotics
DeepSeek, Unitree Robotics, Deep Robotics, BrainCo
A cluster of young AI and robotics companies based in Hangzhou came to national prominence together in 2025, which local government and media have leaned into heavily. It is genuinely the mainland's most concentrated AI startup scene outside Beijing.
Video & surveillance technology
Hikvision, Dahua Technology
Both headquartered in Binjiang, and between them a very large share of the world's video surveillance hardware and software. Note that both are subject to export restrictions in several jurisdictions, which is a real consideration for some foreign professionals.
Gaming & digital entertainment
NetEase, Game Science, Yuanqu studios
NetEase's games division is one of the largest in the world, and Game Science's Black Myth: Wukong was developed here — the studio's success in 2024 anchored a serious games development scene.
Automotive & manufacturing
Geely, Wahaha, Hangzhou Steam Turbine
Geely — owner of Volvo Cars and Lotus — is headquartered in Hangzhou, giving the city a substantial automotive engineering base alongside the software one.
Tea, tourism & hospitality
West Lake Longjing producers, Alibaba's Fliggy, major hotel groups
West Lake draws enormous domestic tourism and Longjing tea from the surrounding hills is a protected-origin product. Both support a large and genuinely skilled hospitality sector.
Where to go in Hangzhou
West Lake
Nature · Immediately west of the city centre
A UNESCO-inscribed cultural landscape of causeways, islands, pagodas and tea hills, free to enter and about fifteen kilometres to walk around.
Local tip: Everyone goes to the Su Causeway. The quiet half is the western shore around Yanggong Causeway and the hills behind it — same lake, a tenth of the people. Hangzhou removed the entrance fee in 2002 and it has stayed free ever since, which is why locals genuinely use it every day.
Longjing tea villages
Nature · The hills immediately west of the lake
Working tea villages — Longjing, Meijiawu, Manjuelong — on terraced hillsides ten minutes from the city.
Local tip: Go in late March or early April for the pre-Qingming harvest, when the price of the first picking is genuinely astonishing and the whole hillside is working. The rest of the year the walking trails between the villages are empty and beautiful.
Hefang Street & the old town
Neighborhood · Shangcheng, at the foot of Wushan hill
The restored Qing commercial street below Wushan, with traditional pharmacies, silk shops and snack stalls.
Local tip: Hefang Street itself is a tourist strip. The Hu Qingyu Tang traditional pharmacy behind it is not — it is a working Qing-dynasty medicine hall with a museum attached, and the smell of the dispensary alone is worth the visit.
Liangzhu Archaeological Site
Culture · Yuhang, north-west, near the tech campuses
A 5,000-year-old walled city with monumental water management, inscribed by UNESCO in 2019 and largely unknown outside China.
Local tip: This is the strongest archaeological case for Chinese state formation before the dynastic records, and the site museum is genuinely excellent. It is fifteen minutes from Alibaba's campus and almost nobody who works there has been.
Qianjiang New City & the riverfront
Landmark · Jianggan, on the Qiantang river
The modern CBD across the river — where Hangzhou put its towers, since West Lake's heritage protection means they cannot go near the lake.
Local tip: The river hosts the Qiantang tidal bore, one of the largest in the world, which surges upstream on high tides around the eighth lunar month. Locals check the tide tables; the best viewing is downstream at Yanguan in Haining rather than in the city.
Xiangji Temple & the Grand Canal north end
Hidden gemCulture · Gongshu, northern Hangzhou
The southern terminus of the Grand Canal, with restored warehouse districts, canal boats and a working temple beside the water.
Local tip: The Grand Canal ended here after fifteen hundred years and a millennium of grain barges, and it is now a quiet linear park you can walk or take a public canal boat along for the price of a metro ticket. Almost every visitor spends all their time at the lake and never comes north.
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