A foreign employee in China pays into five social insurance schemes. How much of that comes back depends on two numbers most English summaries get wrong: the split between the pooled fund and the personal account, and the minimum number of years before a pension is payable.
I spent a morning rebuilding the answer from primary texts instead of summaries. This is the method, the tooling, and the four places where the documents contradict the internet.
The rule is in a 2011 ministry measure, not in the Social Insurance Law
The law says one line about foreigners — article 97: they participate "by reference" to the law. The operative rules are in a Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security measure, Order No. 16 of 2011, amended by Order No. 54 in December 2024.
That amendment is a good first lesson in version control. Every English-language summary I found quotes the 2011 text. The 2024 revision renamed the employment document (the work permit), rewrote the annual survival check for pensioners living abroad after China joined the Apostille Convention, and changed the social security number format. Coverage, the five schemes, the 30-day registration window and the refund rule did not move.
If you cite article numbers, read the consolidated text, not the 2011 gazette. I used a provincial human resources bureau page that republishes the consolidated version with the amendment note in the header, and cross-checked the article numbering against the amending decision in the State Council gazette.
The split: 8% is yours, 16% is not
The personal pension account is credited only with the employee's own contribution. A 2005 State Council decision sets the account at 8% of the contribution wage and says, in as many words, that the employer's contribution is no longer credited to it. The employer's 16% — the rate a 2019 circular pushed provinces down to — goes entirely into the pooled fund that pays current retirees.
So the arithmetic is unkind but simple: two thirds of every pension contribution is not yours in any form. Leaving China before pension age lets you take the account balance (article 5 of the measure), not the pool.
EMPLOYEE_RATE = 0.08 # 2005 decision: personal account EMPLOYER_RATE = 0.16 # 2019 circular: pooled fund def split(base, years): months = years * 12 return base * EMPLOYEE_RATE * months, base * EMPLOYER_RATE * months employee, employer = split(15000, 3) assert employer / (employee + employer) == 2 / 3 # exactly two thirds The medical scheme follows the same direction, one reform later. Since the 2021 outpatient reform, the personal medical account receives only the employee's 2%, and the employer's medical contribution goes to the pool.
The bit that changed and nobody updated: 15 years is becoming 20
Article 16 of the law gives a monthly pension after 15 accumulated years. Every blog post stops there.
A Standing Committee decision of 13 September 2024, in force from 1 January 2025, raises the minimum contribution period to 20 years starting 1 January 2030, by six months a year. The same decision moves the retirement age: one month later for every four months of calendar time, taking men from 60 to 63 and women from 55 to 58, while women retiring at 50 move one month per two months.
Both tracks land in 2039. A foreigner who starts contributing in their thirties will need 20 years, not 15, and will reach pension age later than the number they read in an older guide.
I put the ramp in a function with assertions rather than in prose, because the intermediate years are where errors hide:
def min_years(year): if year < 2030: return 15.0 if year >= 2039: return 20.0 return 15.0 + 0.5 * (year - 2030 + 1) assert [min_years(y) for y in (2029, 2030, 2031, 2039)] == [15, 15.5, 16, 20] Ten notices, one table
China has 13 bilateral social insurance agreements. Eleven are in force. Each exempts a different slice: Japan pension only, Finland pension plus unemployment, Canada and Switzerland also the residents' pension, and the caps run from 3 years (Denmark, inbound) to 72 months (Canada, Spain).
There is no single table on any government page. I built one by opening each implementation notice in the ministry's foreign-worker column and pulling two paragraphs: the exempt-scheme paragraph and the duration paragraph.
Three things fell out of doing it by hand:
- The two directions are not symmetric. Denmark lets a Danish employee posted to China be exempt for at most 3 years, while a Chinese employee posted to Denmark gets 5, extendable by another 60 months. If you only read the inbound half of the notice you will quote the wrong number.
- The exemption is for categories, not nationalities. Posted employees, seafarers, aircrew, diplomats, civil servants, self-employed people moving with their work. A French or Dutch national hired locally by a Chinese company is not a posted employee and gets nothing.
- The certificate is the whole mechanism. No certificate of coverage from the home institution, no exemption — the agency is instructed to press for enrolment. Two notices add a six-month filing window: file late and the exemption starts the month after filing, not on day one.
Every notice also ends with the same paragraph: apart from the named schemes, the foreign employee joins the rest. The treaties address double pension contributions. They do not touch medical, work injury or maternity.
What the documents do not answer
- Whether a foreigner without a household registration can use the law's "transfer into the residents' pension" branch when short of the minimum years. The law offers it; the practical landing point is unclear.
- How the interest credited to personal accounts is calculated for someone who leaves mid-year.
- Whether the two oldest agreements, Germany and Korea, still read exactly as their 2002 and 2013 notices say. Their notices are not in the ministry column, so I left them out of the table rather than fill two rows from a secondary copy.
The takeaway for anyone building on Chinese regulation
Read the consolidated text, not the first gazette. Put the arithmetic in code with assertions, because the ramp years and the two-thirds ratio are exactly the claims that survive a copy-paste chain. And when a table does not exist, build it from the notices and publish the row-level sources — the gaps between the rows are usually the story.
Drafted with an AI assistant from my own reading of the primary documents; every clause number and link here was checked against the source. The full version, with the source links per row, is at notebookfield.com.
