HSK 3.0, explained
HSK 3.0 is the standard published as GF 0025-2021, in effect since 1 July 2021. It replaces HSK 2.0’s six levels with three stages of three levels each — nine in total. The first sitting of the new HSK 1–6 papers is on 13 December 2026. If you studied for HSK 2.0, the short version is that your level number does not carry over unchanged.
Which level is this word?
Type or paste a Chinese word — you get its HSK 2.0 level and its HSK 3.0 band.
Nine levels, seven bands — and that is not a typo
HSK 3.0 defines nine levels for the exam. The official vocabulary list does
not publish nine word lists: levels 1–6 each get their own, and levels 7, 8 and 9
share a single combined list of advanced vocabulary. So every table on this page has
seven rows, and every word in our data carries a band of 1–6 or the single value
7-9. Anyone promising you a 9-row word list is inventing the split.
| 3.0 band | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 1 | First contact — greetings, numbers, family, the survival set. |
| 2 | Everyday routine: time, shopping, getting around, simple past and future. |
| 3 | Opinions and comparisons; the level where sentences stop being formulaic. |
| 4 | Work, study and abstract nouns — the start of reading for content rather than practice. |
| 5 | Media and argument: enough range to follow a news item without a dictionary. |
| 6 | Nuance — near-synonyms, register, and the set phrases that make writing read as natural. |
| 7-9 | The advanced band. HSK 3.0 defines levels 7, 8 and 9 separately for the EXAM, but publishes ONE combined vocabulary list for all three, which is why it is a single row here and a single value in our data. |
Where HSK 2.0 words actually landed
The move from 2.0 to 3.0 is usually described as a shift — old level 4 becomes new band 5, and so on. On real data it is not a shift, it is a scatter. The table below is computed from our own word list every time this page is built, never typed in by hand.
| HSK 2.0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7-9 | not yet mapped | words |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HSK 1 | 142 | 8 | 3 | 1 | · | · | · | · | 154 |
| HSK 2 | 88 | 47 | 7 | 3 | 1 | 1 | · | 6 | 153 |
| HSK 3 | 64 | 144 | 51 | 28 | 8 | 1 | 1 | 9 | 306 |
| HSK 4 | 11 | 157 | 181 | 138 | 70 | 13 | 19 | 11 | 600 |
| HSK 5 | 3 | 57 | 345 | 376 | 204 | 58 | 212 | 45 | 1300 |
| HSK 6 | · | 2 | 59 | 93 | 350 | 245 | 1338 | 413 | 2500 |
Two things worth reading off it. HSK 2.0 levels 3, 4, 5 spread across every one of the seven bands — there is no single 3.0 band that “is” old level 3. And 212 words that were HSK 5 are in the advanced 7–9 band in 3.0, so a chunk of what used to be upper-intermediate is now classified advanced.
How complete this is
90.35% of our 5,013 words carry a 3.0 band. That average hides the shape: HSK 1 is fully mapped and HSK 6 is 83.5% — 413 of its words have no 3.0 band yet. Where a word has no band, the lookup box says so rather than showing you an empty slot. The gap is in the published source list, not in the join.