What a commissioned research report costs in Hong Kong.

Ask three firms what a commissioned research report costs in Hong Kong and you will get three versions of "let's scope it first". That is not evasion, exactly. It is just how the market works, and it leaves the person who has to defend the budget line with nothing to anchor against.

So here are the figures that are actually checkable. Not estimates, not industry chatter. Numbers the incumbents published about themselves, in documents anyone can open.

Everything below is quoted in US dollars because that is how it was published, with the Hong Kong equivalent in brackets at HK$7.8 to the US dollar, the middle of the peg band the HKMA maintains.

What the big firms publish about their own pricing

• Forrester: US$200,000 (about HK$1,560,000). In January 2026 Forrester published a Total Economic Impact study of its own custom thought leadership. The composite organisation in that study spent US$200,000 for one thought-leadership paper and one co-hosted webinar. Forrester wrote the study. Forrester chose the number.
• Forrester: 14 to 16 weeks. Their own methodology page describes TEI as "a 14- to 16-week process". Again, their words, not a competitor's characterisation.
• Gartner: US$153,125 (about HK$1,194,000) a year, for one seat. The State of Florida publishes its Gartner price schedule as a public contract document. An AI Leaders single licence runs US$153,125 annually, effective 1 February 2025. An entry IT Leader seat is US$50,138 (about HK$391,000). A single internal advisory session is US$25,105 (about HK$196,000).
• Gartner Consulting: US$168 to US$528 an hour (about HK$1,310 to HK$4,120). From the firm's US General Services Administration schedule, current through modification PS-0053, effective 30 January 2026. Associate consultant at the bottom, vice president at the top.

Those four figures took an afternoon to find, and every one of them sits on a government or corporate site with a date attached. That matters more than the numbers themselves, and I will come back to why.

Why nobody publishes a price

Part of it is genuine. A six-market regulatory benchmark and a one-market competitor scan are not the same product, and pretending they can share a price list would be dishonest. Scope really does drive cost here in a way it does not for, say, an audit.

The rest of it is that opacity is profitable. If you do not know the range, your first number is whatever the seller thinks your organisation can afford. Most professional-services pricing in this city works exactly that way, and the people who suffer are the ones commissioning research for the first time.

What a commissioned research report costs in Hong Kong

I publish mine, which as far as I can find makes me unusual in this market rather than clever. From HK$55,000 (about US$7,100), in a band up to HK$150,000 (about US$19,200), delivered in two to four weeks.

Set against the Forrester figure, the top of my band is under a tenth of it and the bottom is closer to a thirtieth, delivered in a quarter of the time or less. Those are large enough gaps that they need explaining rather than celebrating, so here it is honestly.

What you are not buying at that price: a global survey panel, a syndicated dataset built over years, an analyst floor of two hundred people, or a brand on the cover that carries its own authority into a board room.

If the value of the report is the logo on the cover, buy the logo. That is a real reason, and it is worth what they charge.

What you are buying instead: one senior person who reads the primary sources, dates every figure, cites where it came from, and can be asked a follow-up question on Tuesday.

The cost nobody puts in the quote

The clock. Forrester's own study quotes an interviewed director describing the in-house alternative as "upward of six months". Public procurement research across more than 6,000 RFPs puts the average at 57 days from posting to award, before a single interview happens.

Meanwhile the board date does not move. Anyone who has built a board deck against a deadline knows the paper gets written with whatever evidence exists on the Friday, not the evidence that would have been ideal. A study that lands after the decision has been taken is a filing-cabinet document, however good it is. I have watched more research budget wasted on timing than on quality, and it never shows up as a line item anywhere.

That is the whole argument for the two-to-four week window. Not that faster is better in the abstract, but that research arriving before the meeting is a different product from the same research arriving after it.

The honest caveat

Cheap and fast is not automatically right. If you need a statistically robust survey of 400 firms across eight markets, I am the wrong call and I will say so on the first conversation. That work needs a panel and a field team, and it should cost what it costs. The same logic applies further down the ladder, where the question is usually which kind of help you actually need rather than how much of it to buy.

Most board questions are not that. Most are closer to: what are our regional peers actually doing about this, what does the regulator appear to expect, and what would a defensible position look like. That is a reading and synthesis problem, and it does not need fourteen weeks.

Start with the question, not the budget

The most useful thing you can do before requesting a single quote is write down the question in one sentence. Not the topic. The question, phrased so that an answer would change what your organisation does next.

If it helps, I have put the six questions that make up a research brief on their own page, with a template that assembles itself as you type. It is free, it collects nothing, and it works just as well if you take the finished brief to somebody else.

And if you would rather just test whether the question is worth commissioning at all, send it to me and I will tell you. That conversation is free, and sometimes the honest answer is that you do not need a study at all. You need an afternoon with the right two documents.